housing came about in Britain after the Second World War, when a shortage of housing and surplus capacity in factories that had been producing military aircraft were key factors. “Prefabs” were intended to be made in these spare factories and assembled as temporary housing that would last between 10 and 15 years. Several thousand of these mainly aluminumor asbestos-cement-walled bungalows were built, and they proved popular with residents, who liked their modern fittings and pleasant, light interiors. In many cases these “prefabs” lasted several decades and a few still survive (below).
The Crystal Palace Paxton’s triumph was a design for the building to house London’s 1851 Great Exhibition—the vast, glittering glass structure that became known as the Crystal Palace. Designed at the last minute (Paxton famously did the first sketches on the blotter during a meeting), the Crystal Palace was conceived like one of Paxton’s greenhouses. And as a huge aisled building with many standard repeating elements—sashes, gutters, arches, beams, girders, panes of glass—it was an obvious building to be made by prefabrication. The use of prefabricated components was vital because the exhibition committee had left very little time for the Crystal Palace to be built. Only by manufacturing the parts off-site and transporting them to Hyde Park as they were needed could the great exhibition building be constructed quickly enough. So Paxton arranged a huge logistic exercise. Wrought-iron beams were manufactured by Fox and Henderson in Birmingham; the same firm supplied wooden components from a mill in Chelsea; two factories in Dudley, in the West Midlands, produced the cast-iron columns; glass came from Chance’s works, also in Birmingham. Dedicated trains brought the components straight to the site and they were fixed into place almost as soon as they arrived. The entire job took just nine months.
System buildings The term “system building” is used today to describe the way in which either entire buildings or large prefabricated components can be factory-made and delivered complete to the site. Buildings or parts are fully finished at the factory and need only to be connected to services to