We began with this question then steadily feel down the rabbit hole of academic cross-examination landing on its opposite: what, if anything, is NOT modular design?
Isn’t design a process of modularization? We imagine a product, a space, a city, then conceive of the parts needed to make this new creation whole. Designers draw the parts, detail their connections and then, if all goes well, roll up their sleeves to assembles the pieces into completion.
Architecture has always been a discipline that compartmentalizes the world, then optimizes materials to erect structures. We do it at small scales with plastic latches and steel angles and at large scales with room assemblies, bathroom pods or curtain walls. We employ a plethora of materials and have created myriad modular types from the flat-packed to the volumetric.
Architecture’s modular gene defines its methodology. We take a problem, break it down into pieces to be studied, and then recombine the pieces into a new whole. We think of buildings in terms of discrete individual elements such as the beams and structure that add up to make a complete building. Alberti’s canonical theory of architectural beauty presents the architect as a virtuoso composer of parts to make a whole.
From the pyramids at Giza, the Parthenon in Athens, Emperor Zhu Di’s Forbidden City, and all the way to the seemingly weightless Steve Job’s Auditorium on the Apple Campus in Cupertino, modular design has been at hand. Every one of these projects consisted of modules fabricated off-site, transported, and lifted into place, magically resulting in a building.
Mathematics has been a frequent colleague to architecture. Geometric shapes, both 2-dimensional like squares and circles or 3-dimensoaonl like cubes, spheres and cylinders are the basis of all architectural grammar. Buildings speak by riffing on geometry. Every building is a recombination of some preexisting mathematical function.
Modular design depends on a system of division and measurement. Mods are defined by their scale within a mathematical hierarchy. The aggregation of mods into built architectural form is more than a summation of the parts. Modular thinking assumes that any project can be broken down into its constitutive parts. Yet, what if buildings are not equal to the sum of its parts but greater. Modular intelligence might then be grounded on the functional increase in relations between the whole and its parts.
Modular design casts a magical dust over a human-made object. It embodies the ingenuity of the planner, the designer, the engineer, the architects and even the builders. For Gustave Eiffel, it enabled bridges to be transported to far way French colonies endowing him the princely fortune of perhaps the first modular-made tycoon. Paris’ iconic tower becomes even more wonderous when we are told that it was built in few days and could be unbuilt in the same about of time.
The particulars of geography, scale and time are different in every modular project and yet the commonalities seem to matter more. The repeatability of a process across time exudes expertise. We like modular because it invites fluency into a complex system. And yet the Eiffel tower is distinct from Safdie’s Montreal 67: the latter consists of modules that are intentionally made to look like they could be take apart, while the former is coy about the story of its fabrication,
Both projects are awesome accomplishments of modular thinking. One prefers mystery the other information. Modular design is, in this sense, participatory. It allows onlookers to become acquainted with how humans built their environment. Its form is a heuristic device with didactic functions. When we view these structures, we often wonder how they were hoisted into place, how many pieces they have, how long it took to assemble…?
The attention implored by modular design represents an opportunity to actively engage with our built environment. The factory introduced the ability to distort both speed and distance. Building materials could be made faster and at a greater distance from the site. Industrialization disrupted the way in which buildings were conceived and yet modular design persists as a kind of interpretive salvo: we look to decode.
And yet, the closer one gets to the history of modular design the more chimeras appear. Canonical projects turn out to be exceptional mirrors onto the technological dreams and nightmares of its creators. The stories behind almost each emblematic modular design case reveals less about the how and more about the who and why.
From the Khrushchevkas blown to pieces throughout Ukraine out by the very soviet artillery meant to protect them, to the iconic Nakagin tower in Tokyo that served as perfect poster boy for Japanese plan of postwar economic imperialism through to the hyper-tall B2 Dean St. tower that helped bankrupt its developer resulting in a flood of lawsuits.
As we get to know modular design, we are left to wonder if modular design is less a symbol of innovation than a technology to avoid the chaos and complexity of the world? Walter Gropius remarked in 1923 that “thanks to refined manufacturing methods, in the future the individual will be able to order from the warehouse the housing that is right for him (her.)”
Queen Elizabeth’s crowning glory of empire and botany, The Crystal Palace, made from standardized elements of steel and glass embodied the transition from artisanal to manufactured. The details exude a naturalistic flare of casual flimsy, while the scale of the volume enclosed and repetition of structural elements confirms its kinship with a factory.
The future was bright because manufacturing would solve our problems. Architecture has always been enamored with problem-solving. Proper planning, speedy logistics, the compartmentalization of matter and the optimization of time ushers in a better process of making. Process is the eternal fount of modular design intelligence.
Economist, management consultants, policy wonks publish reports on the miraculous potential of modular design to transform the building industry. Graphs comparing construction with other manufacturing industries expose the glaring inefficacies. Calls for speed, affordability and technological vanguardism nurture the problem-solving dream.
Modular firms, factories and institutes continue to proliferate. Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing recommended modular construction as part of the solution to the US affordability crisis since 2020. The UN and world bank routinely recommend modular architecture as the fail-safe solution to disaster-stricken communities. The modular design arms race produced a cemetery of failed cases but also revealed a compelling need to rethink the parameters of modular design intelligence.
Perhaps we don’t need to know what modular design is? Perhaps we should be looking at how modular design can be reinterpreted. We started wanting to know the what but then realized that instead we should be searching for the how. Our research had to become less of a theoretical treatise and more of a field guide on the limits of modular design because as one pinpoints failures in a technology one finds upwellings of invention.
This book is therefore not a survey, nor a manual, nor a textbook. This is a book that speculates on what the world might look like if modular design fulfills all our dreams. this book attempts to describe what modular can be if it vaults and clears our wildest aspiration. This is book filled with ghosts and fairies. It is haunted by realities of failures and the glorious floating images of visions. Our angel of history, Walter Benjamin’s is compelled to be looking back to the past as it is propelled forward.
Buildings demarcate boundaries, these boundaries are not only physical borders but social ones that at a given time embody the aspiration and fears of their creators. Buildings age and as they grow old, they maintained, renovated, and demolished. Other people come into care of these structures and change their form, even ending their lives.
Architecture is a practice of rigor, rules and procedures meant to establish a balance between competing forces such as outside/inside, hot/cold, chaos/stability. The physicality of an architectural structure gains meaning and significance in how it performs as a homeostatic interface. We control and manage our environment through architecture which in turn means we control and manage ourselves through this medium.
The lesson is not to confuse the liquid for the container as Heidegger legendary once said, architecture’s function is in not to embody a preassigned functional program or to materialize an individual’s vision. Architecture is bigger than us. Buildings are homeostatic interfaces because they serve as platforms for both interaction and characterization. In other words, things and people not only move through buildings but are understood by the how they do so. The temporal processes that work on agents also affect buildings so that death, decay, and perhaps even recreation happens to our built environments just like it does the organic material that flows through it.
This information rich, process-driven model of reality is the new interpretive paradigm for modular thinking we hope to inaugurate. Seen from this perspective modular design appear to be both a building project and a thought experiment. One that might offer ways to think through the wicked design problem of place-based, human-driven specificity.
Modular design will evolve as it comes to terms with its contradictory truths. It is true that modular thinking is innately human. We want to control the world. And yet it is also true that our best inventions are those that help us adapt to the uncontrollable aspects of this planet: Climate, geography, plants, animals, and other people …Modular design in the future might outperform its predecessors because we start designing for moments outside of our dominion—we start thinking of modular design as way of inventing limits.
The idea of a limit informs our research into the future of modular design. To demarcate a boundary and then see this limit as a frontier with characteristics to be nurtured and transgressed. This book is organized around four limits on modular design: the user, the digital, the environmental and our imaginary. Each limit is a changing line with specific qualities that affects how modular design might evolve.
Chapter One (LIGHTNESS & FLEXILIBTY) explores the ways in which the structural needs of users in a globalized postmodernity requires new specifications for lightness. Buildings must be wider, taller, longer, and therefore weigh less. Advances in material science and the analysis of stresses using dynamic calculation introduces the possibility of structures that reach ultra-lightness and super-flexibility. Can modular design adapt to these pressures?
Chapter Two (THE HARD & SOFT) studies the integration of software into the hard science of modular construction to automate, erect marvelous structures and boost profit margins. computational power breakthroughs unleased the era of infinite bits onto a landscape of fixed mods. What hybrid projects emerge out of the self-regulating hyper connected network of digital worlds?
Chapter Three (FLUX / FLOW) is about the Anthropocene and the paradigm shift taking place with efforts to accurately measure the carbon footprint of buildings. Metabolic analysis through stock-flow model presents a comprehensive time-based understanding of the relationship between buildings and their environment. We see how buildings transform matte into must re-write the way we understand through a metabolic framework of flows.
Chapter Four (CRISIS IN UTOPIA) is a journey through the cabinet of imaginary curiosities surrounding modular projects. Modularity is sought for its redemptive quality. It can heal fast, solve smartly, and deliver affordably. With the weight of a salvation technology, modular design stumbles from failure to fiasco. Perhaps utopia’s non-place presents too much latitude without enough limits…
Modular design draws us in because we all desire the change it offers. Like moths to a flame, we desire a brighter world. this book hopes to offer embers for further discussion, a warmth that can keeps us committed to the challenge of modular design in a manner that seeks limits and boundaries we cannot see.
