"A new epoch has begun..."

“A new epoch has begun . . .
We must create the mass-produced spirit.
The spirit of living in mass-construction homes.
The spirit of conceiving mass-produced homes.”
Le Corbusier, 1923

In the 1940s, Walter Gropius and Konrad Wachsmann developed a factory based on mass-production system, to manufacture highly customizable homes – the Packaged House. Gropius wrote, “It is by the provision of interchangeable parts that (we) can meet the public’s desire for individuality and offer the client the pleasure of personal choice and initiative without jettisoning aesthetic unity.” The effort failed spectacularly. The aim was to produce 10,000 houses per year, but by the time the company was closed, less than 200 had been manufactured.[1]
Now, more than a half century later, digital technologies make it possible to replace both inefficient labor-intensive site production as well as inflexible mass-production with agile mass-customization, enabling formal and technological possibilities.
Greg Lynn’s Embryological House Project (2000), is one of the contemporary projects that mark the intercept of architecture and mass-customization.
“The Embryologic Houses can be described as a strategy for the invention of domestic space that engages contemporary issues of brand identity and variation, customization and continuity, flexible manufacturing and assembly and, most importantly, an unapologetic investment in the contemporary beauty and voluptuous aesthetics of undulating surfaces rendered vividly in iridescent and opalescent colours. They employ a rigorous system of geometrical limits that liberate models of endless variations. Addressing brand identity and variation allows “recognition and novelty” and “design innovation and experimentation”[2]
To both design innovation and experimentation, many of the variations in the Embryologic houses come from an adaptation to contingencies of lifestyle, site, climate, construction methods, materials, spatial effects, functional needs and special aesthetic affects.[5]
The biologic borrowings shape a certain mode of contemporary architecture as a more naturalistic mode of production, and introduce a new internal history of architecture. “There is no ideal or original Embryologic house. Everyone is perfect in its mutations.”[3] The variation occurs in the relationship between the generic envelope and a fixed collection of elements, “marking a shift from a modernist, mechanical technique to a more vital, evolving, biological model of embryological design and construction”[4,6]
[1] http://www.architectureweek.com/2004/0818/building_2-2.html
[2,3,4]Lynn, Greg. “Greg Lynn: Embryological Houses,” AD “Contemporary Processes
in Architecture”, London: John Wiley & Son, 2000: 26-35.
[5,6] http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/dspace/bitstream/2100/467/1/Burns_Greg+Lynn.pdf