Il tempo e il nodo.Breve cronaca della prefabbricazione nella storia

The issue is a brief overview on prefabrication in architecture, not intended to pursue the completeness that the wide literature on this topic satisfies. The episodes and the proposed combinations attempt to walk through the solutions that this specific field has provided over the last two centuries. The dual essence of these kind of architectures, within objects and projects, allows a unique type of study. The narrow timeline between the expression of the need and the response of production, turns into a sequence of frames on the formal and technological choices, on the correspondence between the ways of visualizing and consuming the architectures and the links among the historical contingency and design thinking. Paraphrasing Walter Benjamin, it seems useful in this scenario to weave a chronicle aimed to highlight the social upheavals expressed by the innovative ways of producing and thinking architecture. The World Expositions will constitute the key points of the issue. At both ends, the architecture for botany in 1851 and an architecture, inherently botanic, in 2015

The issue is a brief overview on prefabrication in architecture, not intended to pursue the completeness that the wide literature on this topic satisfies. The episodes and the proposed combinations attempt to walk through the solutions that this specific field has provided over the last two centuries. The dual essence of these kind of architectures, within objects and projects, allows a unique type of study. The narrow timeline between the expression of the need and the response of production, turns into a sequence of frames on the formal and technological choices, on the correspondence between the ways of visualizing and consuming the architectures and the links among the historical contingency and design thinking. Paraphrasing Walter Benjamin,40 it seems useful in this scenario to weave a chronicle aimed to highlight the social upheavals expressed by the innovative ways of producing and thinking architecture. The World Expositions will constitute the key points of the issue. At both ends, the architecture for botany in 1851 and an architecture, inherently botanic, in 2015.