Docomomo International is pleased to announce that the issue 162 of Rassegna di Architettura e Urbanistica – Housing in a Box – has just been printed: the main core of the different essays converges into that considerable body of experiments aimed to explore and encourage the efforts of architects, engineers and manufacturers in promoting a widespread knowledge and use of a Meccano-like house, no more a static object but a demountable, assembled and mass-produced shelter.
This world of (apparently) humble things is therefore the central point of convergence of all the essays in which our readers will find the emerging lines of a deep interest in processes more than in glamorous forms: engineers, architects, designers, entrepreneurs and manufacturers are the characters playing on the scene the tale of Laugier’s petite cabane: a cabane not made out of tree trunks but of mechanical parts, brilliant copyrights, prefabricated beams or panels.
Our goal was not to write a history of prefabrication: trough different case studies – from the north to the south of Italy – we aimed to reproduce, as in a play, energies embedded in any single experiment or manufact: impulses, ambitions, desires and even failures that, in their whole, give us the flavor of the changing ideal of the ‘second machine age’.
For more details about this issue, go to: Rassegna di Architettura.