Frank Gehry Peter Cook Le Corbusier Richard Joseph Neutra John Paxton Douglas Gauthier Guggenheim Goes to Abu Dhabi Museums in the 21st Century: Concepts, Projects, Buildings

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In 1850, Joseph Paxton, a horticulturalist and sometime designer, entered a contest held by London arts reformers Henry Cole and Prince Albert to design a structure that could contain an enormous international exposition of goods with more than 13,000 separate exhibits. Paxton proposed a greenhouse, which the competition jury rejected out of hand because, being all prefabricated metal and precut glass, it looked nothing like a proper building. But Paxton himself had no doubts about his idea and touted his proposal in the London Illustrated News, publishing not only the plans but also claiming that it could be built rapidly, then disassembled, and finally sold off in pieces for a profit once the exposition was over. The masses were interested, and Albert and Cole relented. Structured only by thin iron elements and covered entirely with glass, it was quickly dubbed the Crystal Palace and attracted droves of curiosity seekers, who paid admission before it even opened just to see the thing get built. The Palace featured a grand central cross vault that leaped over several beloved and venerable elms, which — warmed by the glass roof — blossomed prematurely that spring, as if Nature herself approved of mankind’s advances in building practice.

In the 20th century, as a self-conscious modernist attitude arose, premised on exploiting new industrially produced materials and mechanized methods of construction, the Crystal Palace became a landmark in the development of modern architecture. Mass production and prefabrication were what drew émigré architect Richard Neutra to the United States in 1923. He often referred to his 1927 book Wie Baut Amerika? (How America Builds) as a love poem to Sweets, an off-the-shelf-building-products catalogue. A great blossoming of ideas regarding prefabrication occurred in the early 1960s with the Archigram group, a loose organization of students and recent graduates from London’s Architectural Association. In 1962, Peter Cook, a founder of the group, designed a Plug-in City comprising infrastructural cores into which could be plugged a great variety of elements. Inspired by these experiments, English architects Richard and Sue Rogers later designed the Zip Up House, a self-supporting enclosure created from pieces that snapped together. On the inside, partitions slid along tracks and were locked into place with inflatable tubes, which, of course, were easily deinflated when, for example, the homeowners had a party to throw. Manufacturers, however, did not think the public was ready, and no commercial versions were ever produced.

In recent decades, however, several factors have come together to revolutionize the design and production of buildings as fundamentally as Paxton’s Crystal Palace did. Tools such as parametric programming — in which designers manipulate algorithms rather than specific shapes — and CNC (computerized numeric control) manufacturing, which unites initial design, manufacturing, and on-site assembly within a single flow of data, have allowed "mass customization" to replace the standardized mass production of the past two centuries. An oxymoron normalized, mass customization was first called "agile manufacturing" and became a mantra of the electronics industry in the 1990s, most famously in Dell Computer’s mix-and-match approach to production. Other tools, such as multiple and flexible extrusion heads or novel welding techniques, facilitate ever more variable design. And, with computer intelligence built directly into the process, manufacturing can self-regulate — that is, machines can automatically make adjustments for changes in, say, ambient temperature variations at the manufacturing site or changes in the specific properties of a new batch of raw materials being introduced into the production stream. Design, in short, has shifted from being an initial and static set of instructions handed from designer to maker to become an iterative reevaluation of its own parameters. Design is now another continuous thread in the flow of information and decision making in the creation of things, buildings among them.