Essay for the book Combinatorial Imperative
[forthcoming with TU Delft 2024].
From EAHN 2022 paper contribution.
[forthcoming with TU Delft 2024].
From EAHN 2022 paper contribution.
While modularity has been at the core of modern architecture, most experiments with modular elements remain one-off ventures that are impossible to replicate. When modular projects are scaled to industrial dimensions, architects lose interest quickly, deterred by pragmatic considerations of profitability and cost. Most industrial modular systems have been developed by engineers or technicians familiar with materials, machinery, and production rather than architects. Thus, broad applications of modularity remain overlooked mainly in conventional architectural historiography. This essay corrects this shortcoming through a case study of an industrial modular building system developed by a Norwegian timber prefabrication company, Moelven Brug. Although little known in Norwegian historiography, from the late 1950s, the company implemented a modular system of prefabricated components to construct kindergartens, schools, offices, housing, and public buildings across the country. First developed as a pragmatic economic instrument to satisfy the demand for quick-fix construction, the system was adapted over time to provide more agency to architectural users.
This essay is particularly interested in the ambiguous place of Moelven modularity, situated at the overlap between the pragmatism of scaled industrial production and counter-cultural movements of the late 1960s, which sought to empower dwellers with new participatory design practices. By tracing a genealogy of the Moelven modular system, the essay explores the social role of modularity, mobilised as a political tool to mediate between the individual and collective within the pragmatic apparatus of the post-war welfare state.