War, Design, and Weapons of Mass Construction
The last hundred years have seen increasing amounts of time, energy, and money dedicated to war and defense. While much of this effort has been directed toward the development of new weapons and equipment, it has also radically influenced the design of bu
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of Mass Construction Brian Carter
The last hundred years have seen increasing amounts of time, energy, and money dedicated to war and defense. While much of this effort has been directed toward the development of new weapons and equipment, it has also radically influenced the design of buildings. The criteria for the design of buildings for war differ significantly from those that are traditionally associated with architecture; preoccupations with “firmness, commoditie and delighte”1 are set aside in favor of the pragmatic—the development of strategic defensive systems and facilities that can be improvised quickly. Governments, politicians, and military leaders, prompted by these unusual circumstances, have frequently commissioned massive site-specific installations, extensive defenses and constructions embedded in the landscape. At the same time, other structures were built to fulfill immediate needs for equipment that could be mass produced, easily transported over long distances, designed to respond to rapidly changing needs, and deployed in numerous different settings. Presented with these urgent challenges, teams of soldiers, architects, industrialists, and engineers worked together to develop a range of designs that have created unique and experimental structures. The outbreak of World War I and the advent of mechanized warfare saw the assembly and movement of larger and more elaborately equipped armies than ever before. With more than 3.7 million German and English troops mobilized on the Western Front by 1917, the demand for shelter was critical. The Nissen Bow Hut quickly became
the building that was most widely used by the allied forces, and its sudden appearance prompted one observer to note: At about the same time that the tanks made their memorable debut on the battlefield another creature, almost equally primeval of aspect, began to appear in the conquered areas. No one ever saw it on the roads; it just appeared. Overnight you would see a blank space of ground, in the morning it would be occupied by an immense creature . . . in a week or two you would find a valley covered with them . . . the name of this creature is
R. Buckminster Fuller,
the Nissen hut. It is the solution of
Dymaxion Deployment Unit,
one of the many problems that
ca. 1940
every war presents. The problem here was to devise a cheap, portable dwelling place wherein men could live warm and dry; cheap enough to be purchasable by the thousands; portable enough to be carried on any road; big enough to house two dozen men; simple enough to be erected by anybody and on any ground; and weather proof enough to give adequate protection from summer heat and winter cold. All these conditions are fulfilled by the Nissen hut.2
Although in shape and form it recalled the primitive huts of indigenous peoples, the Nissen hut was a structure that made use of contemporary materials and the latest industrial technologies. Designed on a six-foot-nine-inch grid and with a T-section iron frame, the simple semicircular form of the hut consisted
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