Modular architecture: 15 works between utopia, sculpture and industrialization

Designed for the exhibition Italy: the New Domestic Landscape, held at MoMA in 1972, the module by architects Zanuso and Sapper proposed a flexible and mobile housing module. Although proposed as a single unit, it was conceived as potentially repeatable and extendable as it was based on the aggregation and combination of sub-units, extendable as needed.
Intended to respond to potential emergency situations, for use for up to one year, elevated on a platform and easy to carry and disassemble, this unit made modularity a constructive pivot between ethics and design.

Built to showcase the achievements of the prefabrication industry for the 1967 World's Fair in Montreal, Habitat67 aimed to rethink residential settlements as pieces of the city. Even more visionary than what finally came to fruition, the initial proposal called for circular ramps for wheeled travel, a public transportation line, and a set of pedestrian streets that ran diagonally through the project, intertwining the residences.
Only a portion of the envisioned dwellings have been built. These are spread over 12 staggered floors, where 158 residential unit are clustered. Modularity drives the composition of the space freely, allowing the generation of private and shared environments, in the continuous composition of 365 prefabricated modules.

In the early 1970s, Metabolist architect Kishō Kurokawa developed a design consisting of two towers, where each dwelling composing the architecture was synthesized into a cabin of about 10 square meters. Conceived as modular, the architecture features two load-bearing concrete bodies, on which individual pods – simple cells, white parallelepipeds with a single circular opening to the outside – are hooked. The interior of the module displays space optimization through custom-made furniture and equipped walls.
The result obtained from the composition of the individual modules is an architecture that could grow or decrease indefinitely. Despite its great importance as one of the most celebrated works of the Metabolist movement, its demolition began in 2022 due to the gradual abandonment and deterioration of the capsules.

Designed by Dutch architect Piet Blom, the Cube Houses project involves a succession of several residences composed of a basement element providing access to the house above, which takes the form of a sloping cube. Initially realized in Helmond, where the architect imagined each module as the geometrization of a tree, the project was later repurposed in Rotterdam.
Here, the cubic houses take on the characteristic yellow color, forming a complex of 39 buildings, where each rotated cube is juxtaposed with the next to create an architectural transposition of the forest, so evocative that it has been named Blaak Bos, or Blaak Forest.

Built in New Haven due to a housing shortage, the project offers 148 prefabricated units composed by 333 modules. The dwellings consist mainly of two stacked blocks overlooking a private courtyard. The first block, on the ground floor, houses the living area and kitchen. In contrast, the second block accommodates the bedrooms and toilets. The modules were completed by a vaulted roof, dilating the interior space and connoting the intervention.
The project, which could be described as a forerunner of more recent architectural experiments by inhabiting regenerated containers, was nonetheless strongly criticized, and the intervention was later demolished in 1981.

The result of a residential development, Carrières Centrales stands as one of the most important examples of modernism in the Maghreb area. Built beginning in 1952 on the outskirts of Casablanca to accommodate the growing population of workers arriving in the city, the project defines a grid that arranges a series of buildings, an inhabited matrix, between solids and voids, tracing a modularity at the urban scale.
The idea behind the project shares with Le Corbusier's coeval Unité d'Habitation a perspective of social life and the combination of closed and open spaces, visible as much in the horizontal buildings as in the four taller ones.

In the late 1950s, Aldo Van Eyck designed a home for orphans conceived as the fabric of a city. Located on the outskirts of Amsterdam, the building appears to expand as if it were a small urban agglomeration that spreads out across the land: an internal street, the building's common space, thus connects the various rooms and functional spaces, which work instead as modules that blend into the fabric of connective spaces.
Counted among the manifesto projects of Dutch structuralism, the complex is developed through a grid that identifies the generative matrix of the project, revealing itself in the roof, where a series of vault/domes emphasizes its presence.

Dutch structuralism gave rise to numerous experiments where the modularity of architecture was enhanced through its structural complexity and rigour. One example is the Centraal Beheer office building.
The work is composed of several cubic volumes, which on the outside show a closed and compact character, contrasted in the interior by an open structure where common spaces, courtyards, and circulation spaces merge, while light penetrates through the juxtaposition of skylights and the emptying of the corners. The result is an architecture that echoes some medieval suggestions, where the various floors interface with each other, and modularity is perceived through the experience of the architecture itself.

The University College Residence, designed by Giancarlo De Carlo in Urbino, is an experimentation on the theme of housing cells that interacts with the steep morphology of the Apennine territory.
Built over two decades, De Carlo's project is divided into a series of different complexes, displacing more than 1,000 dwellings across the Urbino territory: the varied composition defines a polycentric structure for the college, where, however, modularity manages to define a rule. Using brick and concrete, the forms become embedded in the ground, ensuring that the modules never provide any sense of a standardized service.

Casa evolutiva (Evolutionary Housing) is among Renzo Piano's youth projects that show how his interest in technique, from his earliest experiments, was linked to the possibility of providing innovative responses to different contexts.
Built in Corciano between 1978 and 1982, starting with prefabricated C-shaped reinforced concrete elements, the architect configured a potentially increasable house capable of generating an urban system during emergencies. This concept of an evolutionary house, which gives its name to the project itself, thus allows the house's spaces to be adapted to various needs. It is no coincidence that this project is, in fact, a repurposing of a prototype designed by Renzo Piano and Peter Rice following the earthquake that struck the Italian region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia in 1976.

Part of the "Elemental" experimentation carried out by the Chilean architect, Quinta Monroy housing uses the theme of modularity to increase living space over time.
The architectural research is based on giving an opportunity for transformation to those who live inside these residences: thus, different basic modular structures are juxtaposed in series, low volumes, sometimes perforated, for the ground floor, topped by volumes that develop in height.
Among the voids created in the sequence, each dwelling can be transformed, expanded and customized: modularity guarantees a principle of composition and the possibility of democratic access to housing.

Aires Mateus designed a residence for older people, configured as an in-line building twisting its way through the site, in which individual rooms are recognized as minimal architecture units. Recognizable in plan, the project then transposes the modularity to the façade. Here, a succession of opaque and transparent walls, solids and voids, punctuates the architecture, clarifying the modularity on which the project is based. However, the rigidity of the grid used in the layout of the rooms produces great dynamism as it blends with the zigzagging course of the building body.
Finally, the material simplicity, typical of the Portuguese firm, makes the aggregation of units recognizable and transforms geometry into an expressive value.

The psychiatric rehabilitation center realized in 2006 by Sou Fujimoto is conceived as a series of modules freely arranged on the site, creating a heterogeneous agglomeration.  Each parallelepiped is autonomous in space, rotating and accommodating all the necessary functions for the center's operation and generating a small-city environment. The juxtaposition of these bodies, acting as modules constituting the space, thus leaves the possibility of having a continuous connective space available for the children. The final result is highly dynamic, never appearing the same, and each interior glimpse is different and unique.

One of the most celebrated projects of Danish architect Bjarke Ingels, the Mountain combines 80 apartments into an 11-story cluster, operating a modular breakdown of the individual units. Built in 2008 in the southern area of Copenhagen, the building echoes the shape of an artificial mountain. Here, a segmented diagonal slope characterizes the intervention and identifies the different housing units. The relationship between built volume and outdoor space shows the staggering of modules floor by floor, leaving room for roof gardens and constructing the architecture's primary identity. On the other hand, the continuous basement houses a large parking lot that also visually elevates the inhabited blocks. This makes the modularity of the residences observable in every part of the project.

In the urban mosaic of Singapore, the Dutch studio led by Rem Koolhaas completed a 1040-apartment system in 2013. Here the theme of modularity does not refer to the individual apartment, which is instead a component of larger volumes: these parallelepipeds are stacked and juxtaposed to form a series of hexagons, occupying 8 hectares of land. The architecture accommodates dwellings, swimming pools, gyms, and other recreational functions.
31 exceptionally large blocks are stacked, 70.5 x 22 x 16.5 meters each, as if they were outsized bricks. The repetitiveness of the individual elements is vaguely reminiscent of the Bijlmermeer complex in Amsterdam, but taken to the scale of a megastructure that, like a mountain of tiles, built a piece of the city.