Kit of Parts

Definition

The kit of parts names building and interior production as the assembly of manufactured standard components — a system in which design migrates from the drawing of wholes to the specification and combination of parts. In this wiki the term names three registers. (1) The historical kit house: the Sears, Roebuck and Company mail-order kit houses of the early twentieth century, whose "interior lining that was essentially an early form of gypsum… reduced construction time of the kit-based house" — "an optional choice for the home buyer" that "could replace internal partitions made of traditional lath and plaster" (Schneiderman). (2) The corporate interior's kit: Marc Manack's "suspended ceilings, raised floors, demountable partitions, and flexible, reconfigurable office furniture systems (the kit of parts of the modern corporate interior)," which "operate with an impermanence and literal detachment from the architectural envelope" — the skyscraper interior's decoupling apparatus, through whose "technological decoupling" the interior field "invent[ed] the disciplinary logic of interiority." (3) The prefab module: the Furniture House's furniture-sized manufactured units and su11's dimensioned add-ons (one unit for a toilet, four for a bathtub) — the interior element standardized as the building's part. The kit's economic logic is standardization for assembly: "reduced site construction time, reduced leftover materials that require removal from the site, and a reduced amount of labor" (Schneiderman on the Furniture House; the Sears lining "reduced construction time of the kit-based house"). Its failure mode is the closed system: the Lustron House, where "the elements and components of the structural system, including everything from windows to bathtubs, were designed specifically for the house" — nothing interchangeable with other homes, and an idiosyncratically dimensioned bathtub that made cost-effective manufacture impossible. The kit's contemporary upgrade is mass customization: when digitally fabricated components are "customizable, non-identical elements… serially mass produced" (Manack), the part no longer needs to be identical to retain the kit's economics.

Key Thinkers

• Deborah Schneiderman — the interior-kit historian: the Sears interior lining as "an early prefab innovation," the Furniture House's module economics, and the closed system as the kit's fatal counter-case.
• Marc Manack — the corporate kit's theorist: the skyscraper interior's suspended ceilings, raised floors, demountable partitions, and reconfigurable furniture systems as the decoupling kit that emancipated the interior discipline.
• Sears, Roebuck and Company — the kit-house industry: mail-order houses with optional prefabricated interior lining (not yet paged — see log).

Related Concepts

• Prefab Interior — the kit's interior register: the interior element (lining, built-in, module, add-on) as the kit's characteristic part.
• Skyscraper Interior — the corporate kit's scene: the decoupled tower interior whose demountable layers made the interior profession independent of the envelope.
• Flexible Interior — the kit's boundary element: the demountable partition and the reconfigurable furniture system as the movable screen's industrial descendants.
• Mass Customization — the kit's economics superseded: from identical interchangeable parts to "customizable, non-identical elements… serially mass produced"; the variable mold as the kit part that generates variants.
• Fabrication — the manufacture sense the kit executes: the interior fabricated as detachable manufactured elements "with an impermanence and literal detachment from the architectural envelope."
• Discrete — the ontological cousin: Claypool's "discrete turn" describes architecture's re-ontology as an assemblage of discrete, countable parts — the design-theoretical form of the kit of parts.
• Authorship — the kit's distributed authorship: the part-specifier, the factory, and the assembler share the work the single author once held.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Inside the prefab house (Schneiderman 2018) — the historical kit: Sears's optional early-gypsum interior lining reducing "construction time of the kit-based house"; the Furniture House's module economies (site time, leftover materials, labor); and the Lustron House's closed system — "structural elements meant for other homes could not be used for the Lustron House, nor could elements of the Lustron House be used in other homes" — as the kit's negative case.
• Fabricating interiority (Manack 2018) — the corporate kit of parts: "Suspended ceilings, raised floors, demountable partitions, and flexible, reconfigurable office furniture systems (the kit of parts of the modern corporate interior) all operate with an impermanence and literal detachment from the architectural envelope within which they are housed"; the decoupling that "emancipates the field to invent the disciplinary logic of interiority." See skyscraper-interior.
• Transforming Interior Volumes (Anderson & Lovell-Anderson 2018) — the computational kit: "aggregates or modular component-based systems" whose parts "can be independently created and used in different systems" (Hensel/Menges/Weinstock, via note 11) — the kit generalized from interchangeable hardware to self-generating modules: "a collection of small components to ultimately compose one larger surface" (the-gyroid), assembled by tiling "in the mathematical logic of self-organization" rather than by the keyed assembly of SHoP's numbered parts. The kit's parts here are generated by "shape grammar[s] and assembly of cellular gyroid units," not manufactured to a catalogue. See autogenic-design, emergence, discrete.

Open Questions

• Is the kit of parts a production method or a design ontology? Claypool's "discrete turn" (discrete) and the kit's logic converge on architecture as countable, interchangeable parts — but the kit predates the digital: does the discrete turn name the kit's conceptualization or its digitization?
• The kit's identity economics (identical parts amortizing tooling) is what mass customization defeats — yet the kit's assembly logic (numbering, keying, plugging in) is exactly what makes SHoP's thousands of unique components buildable. Is mass customization the kit's child or its replacement?
• The Lustron House folded partly because its closed system could not interchange parts with anything, itself included ("structural elements meant for other homes could not be used for the Lustron House, nor could elements of the Lustron House be used in other homes"). Is interoperability the hidden design law of prefab — and why does total-design integration (the architect's dream) keep producing it?
• Manack's kit "operate[s] with an impermanence and literal detachment from the architectural envelope"; Schneiderman's structural furniture is load-bearing. Can a kit of parts be structural — and does the structural kit (Furniture House 2's furniture carrying floors) mark the kit's second industrial stage, from infill to frame?