Docomomo Israel-Germany

Highly Visible & Highly Valuable: Big Housing Estates of the Boom Years, Prof. Dr. Silke Langenberg
The emergence of the single-family home out of prefabrication, Dr. Regine Hess

Keynote and lecture as part of the conference «From Conventional to Experimental – Mass Housing and Prefabrication», organized by by Yael Allweil (Technion, Haifa), Inbal Ben-Asher Gitler (Sapir College/Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Beer Sheba), Tzafrir Fainholtz (Technion, Haifa), Regine Hess (ETH Zürich)
14. Juni 2022, Zoom.

Mass housing owes much of its social ideas and design to architectural prefabrication. However, it seems that the history of prefabrication and its relationship to modernist architectural concepts and their dissemination, has remained somewhat at the margins of contemporary scholarly debates. This is perhaps because most scholarly contributions discuss phenomena that do not engage canonic or iconic case studies of industrialized architecture, while other aspects of research are in the fields of engineering, rather than history.

This conference seeks to explore the connection between prefabrication and mass housing worldwide. The 17 papers and keynote propose new research that deepens our understanding of the inherent and crucial connection between the revolutionary advances in prefabrication that characterized the modern era, and their impact on design.

The conference proceedings appear in Leuven University Press in 2023.