Aurubis   The firm Aurubis sells prefabricated facade panels made of copper, excellent from an environmental point of view. They can be installed with the material’s natural finish or in a different texture, as well as pre-patinated.

Hsü Rudolphy   Chile   This residential building made of shipping containers, meant for young users, is a 1,400-square-meter, 4-floor construction raised with 6 prefabricated blocks of stairs and 70 recycled containers, which dynamically alternate to form little balconies.

Andrade Morettin Arquitetos   Brazil   Located on the north coast of São Paulo, this 240-square-meter summer house stands a few meters from the sea, hidden amid a lush forest. The neutral volume opens to the outdoors with sliding doors, and lets daylight in through panels of polycarbonate

Ignacio Rojas Hirigoyen The Andes House    Chile   Designed by the architect Ignacio Rojas Hirigoyen with The Andes House, this project seeks to provide an affordable solution to the problem of scarce decent housing that afflicts Chile and Latin America at large, through a modular building system tha

E2A   Switzerland   The left bank of Lake Zurich is characterized by a series of individual spatial compartments. The location of the water police at Mythenquai lies precisely on the perimeter of two such compartments: the promontory occupied by the Zurich Rowing Club a

Totem Arquitectos Asociados (TAAs)   Spain   The Carabanchel district is the location of this project of the Municipal Housing and Land Company (EMVS), an agency under Madrid’s City Hall. Close to huge urban voids like the Cuatro Vientos airport, which counteract the city’s heat island effect i

Materia   Mexico   The Montes Molina country house in Mérida, capital of the Mexican state of Yucatán, was built in 1906. A century later it opened to the public as a house-museum. In 2015 the firm Materia – founded by Gustavo Carmona and Lisa Beltrán – raised an adjac

Nendo   Japan   Established in 2005 by Oki Sato, the multidisciplinary studio Nendo designed an archive in which to store its collection of products, furniture, and artworks, with a guesthouse attached. Using elongated box-shaped concrete structures that commonly go

Summary   Portugal   In a remote spot of the Portuguese village of Paradinha (Alvarenga), in Aveiro District, eleven cabins are carefully arranged around existing trees, following the natural topography. The place being hard to reach warranted simplifying the building pr

Zaga arquitectura   Spain   Amid farming fields bordered by trees and paths, with Mount Canigou as backdrop, stands this dwelling built by Zaga arquitectura (Nicolás Markuerkiaga, Mariana Plana, Maribel González), a 110-square-meter bungalow broken up into two volumes clad in w

Fenwick Iribarren Architects   Qatar   Since their invention and standardization in the mid-20th century, metallic containers have optimized shipping transportation, ushering in a new era of global logistics and commercial exchange. Later on, new approaches to architectural seriation and

Studio Muoto   Belgium   The new concert venue reflects the post-industrial identity of the neighborhood. Evoking warehouse architecture, it is designed as a large meccano of prefabricated structures that can be assembled, taken apart, altered, and extended...

BIG Bjarke Ingels Group   United States   Lennar, the homebuilding giant, and Icon, wose specialty is large-scale 3D printing, have together announced that a project for a hundred single-familiy houses in Austin, Texas, designed in collaboration with BIG, the firm of the Danish architect Bja

estudioHerreros   Spain   Located in the far eastern part of Alcudia Bay, Colonia de Sant Pere is a spot which does not go by the usual standards of beauty, picturesqueness, and quality demanded by the elite tourists who visit the island of Mallorca. Nevertheless, as much its

Bernardo Bader Architekten   Austria   The Bregenz-based practice of Bernardo Bader raised a wooden wing for a school in Lustenau, a town of the Dornbirn district, in northern Austria. The exterior surfaces of the window and door frames are painted red, visually connecting with the existi

Josep Ferrando Architecture Pedro García Hernández Mar Puig de la Bellacasa Manel Casellas   Spain   The town of Moià, some 60 kilometers north of Barcelona, needed to urgently renew its fire station, so in 2016 it called a competition which asked for an industrialized structure that could be built faster. The winning project proposed a light struct

Abraham Castro Neira Carlos Alberto Pita Abad   Spain   The football stadium of A Gandareira sits at the edge of the urban center of Villa de Bandeira, in the municipality of Silleda, facing the rural landscape. Serving a local sports club and its school, the facility is designed to take in usual traffic,

delavegacanolasso   Spain   Up to 17 May, World Recycling Day, Plaza Juan Goytisolo in Madrid – in front of the Reina Sofía Museum – hosts a pavilion made of prefabricated plastic elements that will later be entirely reused and recycled. A work of the Madrid practice of Ignacio

Boano Prišmontas   United Kingdom   Since regulations did not allow to fix cladding onto the vaults, the digitally fabricated structural system consists of CNC-cut plywood boxes and beams placed using dry-joint techniques to support the insulating lining and the facade polycarbonate...

LOT-EK   South Africa   Part of a large-scale urban transformation project, this intervention is a response to the post-apartheid generation’s desire to introduce and adopt new models for living. Rising on a triangular plot of land, the building is formed by 140 shipping co

Sanden + Hodnekvam   Norway   The Norwegian practice of John Sanden and Ingvild Hodnekvam has designed this residence, located in the city of Lillehammer, as a simple building kit of concrete pieces. It can be easily reconfigured to meet new needs, the inner walls being independe

straddle3 Yaiza Terré Eulia Arkitektura   Spain   The aprop program for provisional housing launched by the City of Barcelona is designed to offer a swift, efficient, and pragmatic response to emergency situations caused by shortage of housing, keeping neighbors from having to leave gentrified distr

Ruizesquiroz Arquitectos   Spain   Ever since the first cargo ship carrying intermodal containers docked in Bremen in 1966, their growth and development in international trade has been spectacular. Shipping containers are icons of our globalized society. Almost everything we buy trave

Summary   Portugal   The completely modular, prefabricated structure of reinforced concrete made it possible to comply with the proprietors’ flexibility requirements and execution time frames. The structural modules were prefabricated with elements of reinforced concrete

AD   Katherine McLaughlin   Just 35 minutes from Manhattan, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Socrates Zaferiou House sits on 2.5 private acres within Clausland Mountain Park in Blauvelt, New York. “It’s a complete escape from our New York City life, so it’s meant to be a decompression,” Sa

Icon 3d prints the first simulated Mars surface habitat for NASA, designed by Big-Bjarke Ingels Group. Mars Dune Alpha, the 3D-printed habitat located at Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, will aid in long-duration science missions. ICON, deve

Francisco Mangado   At a time when the term ‘industrialization,’ applied to architecture, is used over and over without regard for the times it is our lot to live, we have to try to take this specification into account. We can look at industrialization from different an

One of the main obsessions of modernity was the idea of aligning architecture with the factory. Standardization, serialization, modularization, prefabrication, and the recourse to pieces prepared in the workshop were some of the strategies applied in

For the headquarters of the sports equipment and accessories manufacturer Amaya Sport in Noain (Navarre), the architect Josean Ruiz Esquiroz – who works from offices in Madrid and Gorraiz – reused ten shipping containers as structural pieces while st

grimshaw.global   Grimshaw announces the D-Tec suite of prefabricated health facilities created in partnership with SG Blocks and Osang Healthcare for on-site immediate Covid-19 testing...

One of the visual premonitions of the coronavirus crisis now hitting us with such rage was the construction in Wuhan of two huge hospitals in little more than fifteen days. With its good points – astonishing speed, logistical mobilization – as well a

After a protracted process, a period of eight years, that has not been spared its dose of controversy (in 2015 it was announced that the building’s real cost would exceed the initially budgeted amount of 50 million euros by a good 70%), Scotland’s ow

David Mencías   Modular architecture is still one of the most fascinating themes for architects from the perspective of rational thought. It evokes the childhood construction games that are so fondly remembered. The kit of parts offered endless combinations, but ins

The prefab shelter has been one of the obsessions of modern architecture, but the fruits of this obsession have been meager in terms of social and economic impact. As a matter of fact, prefabricated dwellings – except in their most profitable and ban

Oliver Wainwright   Packaged in boxes of 2.5 x 2 meters, the shelter designed by Ikea for refugee camps weights 169 kilograms and can be assembled in just four hours. 

Ramón Araujo   The fundamental innovation in the initial spurt of modern architecture were the building systems that replaced the 19th-century ones, which were based on traditional materials and mural construction. Materials and techniques now involved a production

Fernando Valderrama   It is taken for granted that China’s competitive edge is partly due to its lack of concern for safety at work and for the environment. But building in Shanghai requires 25% prefabrication, replacing traditional methods, and is aiming for 50% in the m

During the late 1980s, the German architect Hans Kollhoff designed and carried out works of great material force, among them Piraeus – a vast flexing brick apartment block located in one of the dockland sites of Amsterdam – and the ascetic mass housi

Industrialized construction has many advantages: it enhances building quality, improves work conditions, reduces building time and, in theory, also costs. All this without giving up typological freedom and achieving a good energy efficiency. These as

Designed by the Murcia-based architecture studio Adhoc msl, the Prefab Home draws inspiration from the typical cottages found on the Spanish Mediterranean coast, which are quite successful at addressing the basic dwelling requirements. This system ai

Designed by Miguel de Guzmán and the studio Veidimanna Protum, the single-family house is located in El Espinar, a small town in the mountains north of Madrid. The plot has a privileged location, on the boundary of the town next to the Natural Park o

The prefabricated, light and transportable module has deserved a lot of attention and research in modern architecture, but today its presence is rather modest, not to say scarce. The account of this elementary type could perhaps begin with Charlotte

Ramón Araujo   Recent times have been closely bound to cement production and cheap energy sources, but only industrialization will enable us to meet the environmental challenges of today.

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Architecture needs industry, but industry does not ask for architects too often. More than a century after the Werkbund’s foundation, the necessary cross fertilization between art and industry is, in many geographical areas, a purpose rather than a p

The most unique characteristic of this residential complex comprising twelve social housing units in La Alberca de la Záncara (Cuenca) is its low-cost – but very efficient – building system. These dwellings combine concrete blocks forming three-meter

One of the main challenges of building with earth today is that of transforming its artisanal character, and begin using it in industrialized building processes. Such was the goal pursued, for instance, in the design and construction of the Gugler P

Luis Machuca   Espacios para vivir, prefabricados

Marianne Burkhalter Christian Sumi   Zurich  2018  
Park Books   - 152 Pages