On November 29th 2007 Sainsbury’s announced they would no longer be packaging their Premium Chopped Tomatoes in cans. Instead, they would be using Tetra Pak’s ‘Tetra Recart’ package – a small rectangular box made from paperboard. Compared to a can, a box makes 33% more efficient use of space, because when transporting a can you are also transporting the unused space surrounding its cylindrical shape.
A box – a cube or a rectangular cuboid – is capable of tessellating three-dimensional space, meaning the solid can be infinitely repeated without gaps or overlap. A Sainsbury’s lorry full of cartons of tomatoes is basically one large rectangular cuboid containing hundreds of smaller rectangular cuboids, and this minimal wasted space means the box is very spatially efficient. If box-like packaging was to replace cans on a large scale, the increase in spatial efficiency would mean fewer lorries on the road, and a smaller carbon footprint from our food.
Japan is one of the world’s most densely populated countries and efficient use of space is valued highly. Unsurprisingly, it was the Japanese who developed the square watermelon. Its shape is achieved through growing the fruit in glass boxes, and as with the Tetra Recart package, the benefits include easier shipping and storage. However, in this instance the product also becomes more functional.
Some people find [melons] a problem to store in their fridge or to cut because they roll around. These square melons will make it easier than ever to eat because they can be served in long strips rather than in the crescent shape. – Sean Poulter
So a box-like watermelon is more spatially efficient and more functional. But if the contents of a square box are not square, do we still see these improvements? A pizza is round, but a pizza box is not. As a result, there is still unused space; it’s just inside the box instead. So should we be using round pizza boxes? John Harvey, inventor of the round pizza box, believes so: ‘it’s what a pizza box should look like, and it works so much better than what’s out there now.’ The circular box arrives at stores pre-assembled, and is stronger than the traditional pizza box. The round shape makes for a snug fit and removes the risk of a pizza losing its shape. However, production is complex and expensive, and it takes up more space in transit than the square box, which ships flat.
The simplicity of the traditional pizza box has allowed it to capture the market, and the economies of scale resulting from its success have made it more competitive. But does this mean we are using an inferior product because of price? In this case it seems not. John Harvey may love it, but the round pizza box has received mostly negative feedback, including complaints that the snug fit makes access difficult and messy compared to the traditional pizza box. The square pizza box may have empty space, but the access it provides to the pizza means it is not unused.
So the box as a product and packaging can offer spatial efficiency, improved functionality, and economic benefits. But if we expand our interpretation of what the box is, do these benefits still exist? Let’s think about the buildings we live in, the places where we consume products and discard packaging. They are basically expanded boxes, so does the box-like design of our homes bring spatial efficiency, improved functionality, and economic benefits? Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus, believed it did.
It was 1920s Germany where the Bauhaus began designing mass urban housing that would modernise our expectations of the ‘home’. Their ambition went beyond simply designing the buildings, seeing their role as an opportunity to ‘educate men and women to understand the world they live in and invent and create forms symbolising that world.’
In 1923, inspired by the units within a honeycomb, the Bauhaus designed Haus am Horn. As with the box, a hexagon can be repeated infinitely without gaps or overlap, making it ideal for dense architectural development.
Built to coincide with the Bauhaus exhibition and conceived as the ideal single-family home, Haus am Horn was intended as a prototype for a large housing estate. The house was designed to have one central living unit with additional ‘living cells’ attached to its six sides, but as work progressed, the Bauhaus discovered the box, and the honeycomb design of Haus am Horn was abandoned. So how did the box end up being chosen over the hexagon? Walter Gropius, Director of the Bauhaus at the time, said Haus am Horn was built with the intention of achieving:
The greatest comfort with the greatest economy by the application of the best craftsmanship and the best distribution of space in form, size and articulation.
Gropius was a man motivated by efficiency, and he believed machine-led construction would enable him to create a home that fulfilled the above brief. He supported the hexagonal Haus am Horn but as development progressed, it became clear the design brought complications. Fitting the intended eight additional living units around a six-sided central room proved too complex, and achieving this with machinery just added to the complexity. For the sake of a more simple construction for both humans and machines, Gropius decided to reduce the number of walls to four and Haus am Horn was completed.
It was never mass-produced as intended, but it marked the beginning of the Bauhaus’ obsession with the box in architecture.
In 1926, when the Bauhaus were commissioned to plan and build the Törten Housing Estate, Gropius felt it was the ideal opportunity to demonstrate Henry Ford’s principals of mass-production applied to architecture. By combining the speed of the assembly line with simple tasks that used standard, interchangeable parts, Ford had revolutionised the manufacturing world. Showing that an item with the complexity of an automobile could be mass-produced inspired Gropius. There was a housing shortage in Germany at the time, so the design for Törten needed to be both spatially efficient and capable of construction by these principles of mass-production.
The Bauhaus’ initial plan for the estate consisted of 314 two-storey single-family houses. The simple box-like design used pre-fabricated parts, which allowed construction by crane, the most efficient method available at the time. Inspired by the box’s ability to tessellate a three-dimensional space, the design was repeated on small plots of land to build as many houses as possible. As a result, they were cheap to buy and rent.
Unfortunately, this density meant insufficient space was allocated for amenities and Törten suffered from having no real town centre. The rigid, repetitive layout also meant some homes were badly positioned for sunlight. But ignoring these external failings, the box worked as a functional home and showed its inhabitants that modern buildings could more accurately reflect their lifestyles.
In 1930, four years after its initial construction, The Bauhaus were asked to design and build five new housing blocks on the Törten Housing Estate. Phase Two of its development was to be overseen by Hannes Meyer, recently appointed Director of the Bauhaus, and he was determined to avoid a repeat of the mixed reaction received by phase one. Ludwig Hilberseimer was asked to design the project, and it gave him the opportunity to put his recent studies into practice. He had calculated that a two bedroom flat needed 48 square meters of floor space, and believed an L-shaped floor plan was the most efficient way of achieving this.
The Bauhaus believed in ‘living economically’ and as a result Hilberseimer designed the flats with one living space compared to numerous living rooms often seen in older homes. Like Le Corbusier, Meyer believed that houses were ‘machinery for living’ and that by having one multi-functional living space it would require less maintenance, leaving more time for family activities. Hilberseimer designed the blocks with three-storeys, and built them on an east-west axis to avoid the sunlight issues that troubled Törten’s initial development. Access was by balcony as it meant only one staircase was needed for the 18 units in each block, another example of the importance of efficiency in Hilberseimer’s design. After their completion, the L-shaped blocks were met with acclaim from residents and critics, and are still inhabited today.
But despite moving away from a traditional box shape, the Bauhaus still believed in the potential of the box in architecture. With the design of phase two they had simply reinterpreted what a box was. After all, an L-shaped home is just one box with another box on the end. But what if we expand this interpretation even further? Do houses get better the less box-like they become?
Like the Bauhaus, Buckminster Fuller – a self-proclaimed ‘comprehensive anticipatory design scientist’ – thought mass-production principles could be applied to housing, believing design should ‘yield the greatest possible efficiency in terms of the available technology’. However, unlike the Bauhaus, he did not believe the box was integral to achieving this.
In the late 1920s, he designed the Dymaxion Dwelling Machine, a building that offered maximum use of space with minimum use of materials. The round outer shell was made from lightweight aluminium, and hung from a central mast. This simple design could be easily assembled and disassembled by one person, meaning the inhabitant could theoretically move the location of their home as they pleased. Fuller believed the immovability of traditional housing limited the opportunities available to people, and his Dymaxion Dwelling Machine was designed to free them from this.
The house was intended for intense mass-production, and due to its circular shape, many of the pieces required for construction were identical. Water was re-circulated where possible, as the building was designed to function without piped in water to further enhance its moveability. This, combined with the simple construction and removal of the home led Fuller to claim that he was ‘making possible world citizenry.’ He believed that freeing people from the perceived negativities of traditional housing could make the world a better place. However, this did not materialise.
The Dymaxion Dwelling Machine took over twenty years to leave the planning stage, and was never mass-produced. But this didn’t surprise Fuller, who had predicted failure during the design process:
I could see that it would be a minimum of 25 years before the gamut of industrial capabilities and evolutionary education of man would permit the emergence of the necessary physical paraphernalia of this comprehensive anticipatory design science undertaking.
However, this is not necessarily the reason for the failure of his Dymaxion Dwelling Machine. Impermanence in a building intended for use as a home is difficult to market. Designing a home suitable for mass-production with features the majority of people would not appreciate is a contradiction that likely contributed to its failure.
Housing began as a form of shelter, something all animals seek instinctively. We would have originally used features of the landscape for shelter, but as we evolved, we began building our own. A wall built on an east-west axis can provide a shaded area to its north, and a sunny area protected from wind to its south. Over time, a roof, additional walls, and a door for access would have been added, creating the first box-like home.
From an economic point of view, the larger a house becomes the more expensive it is to build. As a result buildings tend to be as small as they can be without sacrificing comfort. The maximisation of space offered by the box is ideal for this.
Boxes are made of vertical and horizontal straight lines. A straight line can get from one point to another with minimum distance. The law of gravity tells us that objects of mass will always attract each other; therefore a vertical wall uses minimum materials and has more strength as it supports itself. A horizontal floor is easier to walk on and ceilings tend to be horizontal as they are attached to the floor above. Vertical and horizontal lines also complement human behaviour. We spend a third of our time asleep, horizontally, and the other two-thirds awake, vertically.
When Buckminster Fuller designed the Dymaxion Dwelling Machine, he improved efficiency using a combination of vertical and curved lines that provided maximum use of space with minimum use of materials. However, despite being efficient individually, its round shape could never be as spatially efficient as one with box-like buildings.
And it is the accommodation of its surroundings that gives us the definitive explanation of the box in architecture. As we saw with the initial design of Haus am Horn, repeating hexagonal prisms to form a building is complex. Just placing two side by side gives you a building with eight exterior walls. The reason for the ubiquity of the box in architecture is evident when you place two side by side. You simply end up with a larger box. Using the box as a template for a room means you can easily insert more rooms around it in every direction to create a house, effectively one large box containing many smaller boxes.
If we expand upon this theory, using the box as a template for a house means you can insert more houses around it to create a street. You can then fit more streets around that to create a city. Based on this logic, it seems that the box is ideal for the provision of mass accommodation.
After the demise of the Bauhaus in 1930s Nazi Germany, many of its professors moved to America where it became evident that the future of Bauhaus design was in the city. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Director of the Bauhaus when it closed in 1933, relocated to Chicago. It was here that the box got bigger, and the modern city was born.
The steel frame had revolutionised architecture. Exterior walls no longer needed to be load bearing, resulting in the birth of the skyscraper. Like many American cities, Chicago was built on a grid plan, and the square plots were ideal for box-like architecture.
In Chicago, Mies van der Rohe realised the Bauhaus belief in the box for housing on a much larger scale, with the Lake Shore Drive Apartments, one of his earliest projects. It was a simple modernist design, inspired by his view that ‘less is more’, that went on to be a template for glass and steel skyscrapers around the world. By building twenty-six stories high, Mies van der Rohe had created mass housing capable of accommodating over 400 people. Considering the relatively small plot, this building was more spatially efficient than anything the Bauhaus had achieved in the past, and a perfect example of literally expanding the concept of box-like design.
However, we can expand the box even further by looking at the grid plan found in Chicago, New York and numerous other cities. Like the box, it is formed by a repetition of squares or rectangles. Mathematically, a box is a cuboid. Unfold a cuboid and you are left with its two-dimensional net, consisting of six squares or rectangles. Therefore, the grid plan is effectively the net of a box, repeated.
The simplicity and rigidity of the grid plan was intended to encourage prosperity after the chaotic, undisciplined growth of early American cities, but was met with criticism. The third American President Thomas Jefferson, concerned about the predicted growth of New York, said: ‘When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe’. Whilst surveying the land that was to become New York’s grid plan, John Randall was pelted, attacked by dogs, and even arrested. Later urban planners simply stated that the grid was inorganic and unimaginative.
In 2006 we became an urban world. For the first time, the majority of the world’s population were living in cities, and by 2050, it is predicted this majority will increase to 75%. According to the United Nations, the world population is likely to be 9.2 billion in 2050, meaning our cities will be home to 6.9 billion people. The future of the box, and the provision of mass accommodation, is the city.
Biologists Joseph Wright and Hellene Muller-Landau consider this mass urbanisation a positive thing. At a symposium held in Washington DC in early 2009, they reasoned that due to the migration of population towards cities in tropical regions, there has been less pressure to cut down rainforests, allowing regrowth on land previously used for logging. If populations continue to migrate towards our cities, the resulting regrowth of the rainforest could not only minimise the global extinction crisis, but could also begin to reverse the global warming phenomenon.
As the world population increases we can accommodate it either horizontally or vertically. The densely populated city associated with vertical growth is not without its controversies. Transporting the many people who exist within a city results in pollution worse than non-urban areas. Economic and social pressure can result in homelessness and the formation of ghettos. However, the urban sprawl associated with horizontal growth is equally controversial. It increases our reliance on fossil fuels as it encourages dependence on automobiles, which also indirectly contributes to the growing obesity problem. Infrastructure costs are also increased. Provision of roads, water, sewers and electricity is more expensive per household in areas with a lower population density.
Despite this, American suburbs are experiencing greater growth than American cities, but as they continue to grow they are beginning to function more like urban areas. In the past, immigrants to America would traditionally settle in cities, but they now make up over 25% of the suburban population. Shopping malls are being re-developed to function like city centres, and developers are building more densely, simply because it makes financial sense. The evolution of the American suburb hit a key point in 2005, when, for the first time, more people were living below the poverty line in suburbia than in city centres.
Architecturally, we can’t build infinitely high, but the modern skyscraper is constantly stretching these limits, repeating the box in an upward direction. Cass Gilbert, architect of New York’s Woolworth Building, described the skyscraper as a device to ‘make the land pay’, a deliberately ambiguous expression. Only a tall building could offer a financial return on the significant cost of a plot in New York, and Gilbert was no doubt referring to this. However, he was also suggesting the large, imposing structure of the skyscraper was a symbol of victory over the land.
However, the opposite of this is also true. Despite having a similar economy and population to London, New York occupies half the amount of land. Restricted by its geography, it has been forced to build upwards, creating the densest city in America, and one of the world’s most environmentally efficient. As the planet urbanises, vertically dense, box-like architecture will become an increasingly common site, and as shown by the environmental efficiency of New York, the skyscraper is not necessarily a victory over the land, but a victory for both man and nature.
