tor may be in trouble. This is a risk he is understandably reluctant to take, particularly since he has nothing to gain.

New building products also produce uncertainty for the buyer, and thereby create a problem for the vendor. A buyer may be intrigued by a new material, a new kind of window, or even a new kind of house, but unless he has codes or standards to go by he doesn't know whether it will do what it is supposed to do, or how long it will last. Promises are no help, for he has heard promises before. Not until the product has been on the market a long time will the cautious buyer feel confident that it is a safe buy.

This creates a really sticky problem. We need new materials, new components, new designs, new houses built by new methods, but cautious buyers make it difficult for the innovator to get his product accepted. It would be wonderful if we had a place where complete homes could be built, lived in, and evaluated by a neutral prestigious agency. It would reduce the uncertainty, and make life easier for the inventor, the builder, the inspector, and the customer.

Uncertainty is a hidden, but important factor in the high and rising cost of housing. I was quite intrigued with the experiences that Neil Mitchell had in Detroit when he had a chance to try out his system in a housing project, and found that the costs associated with the subcontractors bids were badly out of line. But we cannot blame the subcontractors, for they were being asked to quote a fixed price on unfamiliar installations. They had no experience to go on, so it would have been bad business for them if they had not made their estimates large enough to allow for a margin of error.

Something is badly out of kilter with our system of contracting for housing. Under the present system, oftentimes the architect is consulted after the land has been bought. He then proposes a structural design, we pay him, and turn his blueprints over to a contractor or builder and ask him to bid on the job. If his bid is near enough to the architect's estimate, we tell him to go ahead.

When the contractor first looks over the blueprints he may have some ideas as to how the building might be erected more economically, but he probably keeps his ideas to himself, for if he tells you about them, you will simply negotiate the price downward. We don't have a practical way to use the cleverness of the contractor to develop a cost-sharing technique whereby he and the owner can mutually benefit.

At the subcontractor level it is even worse. The various subcontractors may see several cost-reducing changes that could be made without reducing the beauty or value or sturdiness of the building; but they certainly are in no position to go over the contractor to the architect or the owner and suggest a different material or method of construction. As a matter of fact, the architect responsible for the design often may not see the house while it is being built, (some do, many do not) or afterward for that matter, so he never has a chance to profit from the lessons the subcontractors could teach him. As for the subcontractor, him

self, the best thing he can do under this system is to do exactly what he is told, get through with the job as quickly as he can, and move on to the next one. All he gets is trouble if he plays the role of the fellow with new ideas who disrupts the job schedule.

It is the owner or the tenant who finally learns what is wrong with the building. The architect rarely learns: the builder may know but he isn't telling; the subcontractors mind their own business-so the same mistakes and the same wasteful practices tend to be repeated, and the opportunities for creative thinking and the development of cost-saving methods tend to be ignored.

The important thing is that, under this system, we can't blame anybody, for each man is doing his job the only way he can if he wants to make a living. We must find ways to change the building process so that it is to every man's advantage to do the total job better.

This is beginning to happen today. The concept of building teams is opening up new opportunities for cooperation among architects, engineers, contractors. city planners, and ordinary citizens, all working together and learning from experience.

This is one approach to getting the most out of the housing dollar. Good planning and intelligent cooperation lead to reduced costs and increased value.

But just increasing the efficiency of old methods is not enough. Two related approaches to industrialized housing offer the promise of great savings without the necessity for so much detailed planning for each individual project. I refer to prefabrication, and precoordination of modular components-or, as the Europeans prefer, "catalog building". The first refers to the preassembly of large components for onsite erection; the latter refers to the use of modular components which are dimensionally and functionally precoordinated for onsite assembly, permitting great flexibility of design.

Last year I had the opportunity to review with six builders from Europe their experiences with industrialized housing. I was particularly struck by the comments of Vladimir Cervenka of Czechoslovakia who told me about the housing program in his country. He concluded by saying: "But what you have to be careful of is monotony. I think that when the Americans finally decide to build industrialized housing they will show us all how to do it." He felt that modular precoordination was the most promising method for us.

I am interested in seeing the development of both approaches to industrialized housing, particularly since precoordination can play an important role in prefabrication. But it seems to me that for Americans, with our great love for individuality and variety, the use of a fully developed system for precoordinated modular components for onsite assembly is particularly attractive. If we can make every building lot a smallscale Willow Run-rapid assembly of buildings in a wide variety of styles from mass-produced, high-quality, precision-made, off-the-shelf components readily

available through local suppliers, we can bring to housing the technological miracle that has brought down the cost of such luxury items as television and the family car and made them basic parts of our living standard. And we can do it without paying the price of monotony.

Industrialized housing can benefit everybody. For the buyer, industrialized housing will mean better value at a cheaper price. For the builder it will mean less uncertainty as to costs, and a broader, more dependable market. For the labor force in the housing industry it will offer more stable year-round employment, and an opportunity to bring in large numbers of semiskilled and unskilled workers without unsettling the job market. If we add a million units of construction to the current annual rate-the minimum if we are to meet the Nation's needs-we will need these new workers to get the job done. We will still need all of the skilled craftsmen and professional men we can muster, but we will have thousands of jobs which can be filled by men with less skill and experience. This will go far toward providing a solution to the present tumoil in the labor force, and will tend to stabilize the entire industry. It will also tend to reduce tensions in our troubled society.

In recent discussions with people here in the Bureau of Standards, and with industry people, I have been pleased to discover that we have made and are making definite progress toward industrialized housing; in particular, that we are coming closer to the goal of precoordination. "Modular" is now considered a

nice word by practically everybody; "dimensional coordination" is "in"; and "functional coordination" is just around the corner. And it is about time. We can't achieve the efficiency we need until we have modular components whose dimensions, tolerances, joining devices, and functions permit them to be coordinated rapidly and efficiently into a finished end product.

To sum up: To achieve our housing goals we need better management of the building process. This means large scale; and if we are to take full advantage of large scale we must utilize improved technology. If we utilize technology in an optimum way we must turn to industrialized building; and if we are to avoid the monotony of some early prefab construction we must develop a sophisticated system of off-the-shelf modular precoordination, whether assembly is completely onsite, or partially in the factory.

I think we can congratulate ourselves on the progress we have made toward this goal, but we should consider our present momentum as merely a running start for the big race which is yet to come-when the logjam breaks, and a national housing program begins to gain real momentum.

The economic and social indicators are flashing across the land. To me, they are signalling "URGENT! FULL SPEED AHEAD!" I hope I am right in sensing that this feeling of urgency is shared by the people who are active in this special committee of ANSI-A62 and that their actions will help to trigger a nationwide response to the housing need.

02138

1. INTRODUCTION

The February 1969 Status Report of the A62 tandards Committee, which could be said to be the troductory statement for this conference, in its foreord said:

The culture of the United States is dynamic with significant rowth and changes occurring almost daily ***. Buildings e constructed as static solutions to the requirements of a namic society.

The forword then proceeds to outline three possible trategies for coping with this dilemma.

(1) Replace static systems periodically to match change.

(2) Remodel static systems periodically.

(3) Develop dynamic systems that have inbuilt capacity to change.

It is this third strategy which is the subject of oday's session. Yesterday's session concerned dimenional precoordination-today's is supposedly a new ocus on functional precoordination. I submit that this s an artifical split. I believe that the core of functional recoordination is still dimensional. It is the implicaions of precoordination extended to include the fourth limension-time.

Before elaborating on this point, it is necessary to explore trends in the current building process which appear as salient dynamic features.

Over the past 5 years I have had occasion to eximine a number of building programs and to endeavor o breakdown the programs or the individual buildings nto subsystems' costs, and, as far as the record will allow, to determine the ratio of subsystem implementation which stands on an onsite/offsite cost of operation. In 1965 we did some analysis on the military construction program and in the course of this, compared our analysis to comparable civilian buildings in the society at large. Figure 1 illustrates our findings. On the left, is a diagram referring to a three-story walk-up reinforced concrete frame barrack building, a fairly standard middle-of-the-range size building. Our data was taken from an analysis of the bids which were made by the Corps of Engineers. We grouped this data into the five major elements of the building. One was site operation; two was structure;

three was the exterior envelope or cladding; four was interior components (finishes, partitions, doors, wall finishes, etc.); and, five was mechanical systems in which we grouped all the more dynamic service systems such as heating, ventilating, plumbing, electrical, etc. The salient feature derived from this analysis was that structure and exterior, (the major carcass of the building) accounted for only about 40 percent of total cost and this is with a building type (integral floor slabs and frame) where the frame is performing more than solely a major support function.

We had expected, at that time, to have these two elements account for a much higher proportion of the total building cost. On the basis of this, we went to other source material for other building types (shown in the bar charts on the right of fig. 1); offices, schools and apartments, hospitals, shopping centers, and dormitories. We found that this proportion of subsystem costs was relatively consistent in all types of contemporary building; i.e., that the dynamic mechanical support systems and interior fixtures and finishes, account for from 60 to 75 percent of the total construction cost of the building. As an extreme, one can see in the hospital that mechanical accounts for 50 percent, the interior elements or subsystems for another 20 percent-plus and that the structure and enclosure of the building, the basic carcass, is 25 to 30 percent of the initial construction costs of the facility.

We also took a look at the subsystems in relation to what percentage of cost was onsite as opposed to offsite. This is shown, in wedges of black and white, in the center circle of the diagram on the left of figure 1. One can see that there is no fundamentally different profile for any one subsystem over another. Our original thought was that mechanical subsystems would involve many industrialized components, resulting in a smaller amount for onsite costs, but in general the 40 to 50 percent split of onsite-offsite seemed to apply pretty much to every one of the major elements or subsystems of the building. The major conclusion we reached from this study was that in developing a comprehensive building system, there is little economic basis in the traditional fix in the industry on

structure and cladding (the frame and enclosure of the building) as the generator of the dimensional framework for the total building system. In fact, it appears that if one chooses to take as a basis for decision the amount of money involved in each of the subsystems, it is more logical to make the structure fit the optimum mechanical dimension.

Being surprised at the proportion of the dollar going into the mechanical system, we then looked to see how recent a phenomenon this was. The general picture of progression over the past few years is shown in figure 2. It was somewhat difficult to get data in this regard going back as far as we did, to 1925, but over these particular four types of buildings-hospitals, offices, dormitories, factories-we managed to find enough material to generate these particular curves. We can see that back in 1925, the mechanical systems were about 20 perecnt of the cost of construction of the building and these have grown steadily throughout the years, with remarkable consistency throughout different building types. There has not been a trend say, for hospitals to increase their proportionate cost of mechanical and other services and other types of buildings not to do so. The rates of increase appears constant implying an overall upgrading of performance requirements of each type of building. So, in 1965, the average for all types was around 30