DEVELOPMENTS IN CONCRETE PREFABRICATION. LESSONS FROM THE PAST AND ADVANCES FOR THE FUTURE

All... must be built with due reference to durability, convenience, and beauty. Durability will be assured when foundations are carried down to the solid ground and materials wisely and liberally selected; convenience, when the arrangement of the apartments is faultless and presents no hindrance to use, and when each class of building is assigned to its suitable and appropriate exposure; and beauty, when the appearance of the work is pleasing and in good taste, and when its members are in due proportion according to correct principles of symmetry. Vitruvius Industrialised construction The origin of prefabrication, i.e., the application of industrial processes to construction, can be traced back to the early eighteenth century. The Industrial Revolution, with the advent of new materials such as steel and glass, had a huge impact on architecture and prefabrication. In some cases, architectural design underwent fundamental change, giving rise to new styles solidly rooted in industrial processes. Wire mesh-reinforced concrete was invented in the second half of the nineteenth century by Lambot, who introduced its use in small boats and Monier, with his flower pots. In ۱۸۹۱ Coignet, a company working out of Paris, manufactured precast reinforced concrete beams to build the casino at Biarritz. By ۱۹۰۰, the first large-scale reinforced concrete deck slabs, just ۵ cm thick, were being precast in the United States. The high social demand for housing in the early twentieth century, primarily in industrialised countries such as England and the US, generated a need for construction projects based on industrial processes, such as concrete prefabrication. Grosvenor Atterbury developed a closed housing system with large lightweight precast concrete panels as early as ۱۹۰۷. In ۱۹۰۸, Thomas Edison invented and patented a system for two- and three-story buildings in which concrete was cast continuously into steel moulds and the resulting members were positioned on site with the aid of conveyor belts. Many prefabricated construction systems consisting essentially of non-structural façade units were developed during the first third of the twentieth century. In ۱۹۲۸, Eugène Freyssinet presented the first patent for prestressed concrete. While this breakthrough brought in-depth change to construction as a whole, it absolutely revolutionised concrete construction. Until that time, concrete had been an inert, passive material whose scant tensile strength inevitably induced cracking, the source of