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ANNEX 4: TRACKING THE IDEA OF HYBRID MODULARITY IN THE EVOLUTION OF THE BUILDING INDUSTRY
ANNEX 4: SHORT HISTORICAL OVERVIEW TRACKING THE IDEA OF HYBRID MODULARITY IN THE EVOLUTION OF THE BUILDING INDUSTRY
Fig.61. Mobile Home (1929). (source: internet, The history of mobile homes https://mobilehomeliving.org/ the-history-of-mobile-homes/)
All the attempts to industrialize the construction process borrowed the main criteria and methods from the other industrial sectors, which had already been successfully industrialized. The main reference was the automobiles industry. The first step was to synthetize and standardize the client’s requirements, reducing them to the essential minimum. This allowed the designing of a prototype considering the minimum number of possible configurations, and the minimum number of parts and components in order to obtain the maximum efficiency of the supply chain production organization. Just like the car industry, the promise of industrialized building companies was to provide more technologically advanced houses for a lower price that could make the purchasing of a house affordable for a larger number of potential clients. In an early stage of attempts at building industrialization, the immediate transposition of the business and production models from the car industries, together with the widely diffuse preference for extra urban dwelling, lead to the conception and design of “single object” products