Foreword

Abstract

The conference “Conventional to Experimental—Mass Housing and Prefabrication” on which this volume is based was hosted by the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, DOCOMOMO Israel, DOCOMOMO Germany, and the EU COST-Action Middle Class Mass Housing (MCMH-EU) and held online on June 14 and 15, 2021. Mass housing and prefabrication are both recurring themes in architectural academic research and discourse, as well as prominent subjects in the daily debates on housing shortages and possible solutions for providing affordable and quality lodging in the near term. Today, the connection between prefabrication—a field of engineering— and mass housing worldwide is as real as it was in the early days of the modern movement in the interwar period. As early as in the 1920s, prefabrication was one of the solutions proposed by modern architects to answer the housing shortage and to provide affordable homes in Europe after World War I.