The Dom-Ino Effect

May 26, 2015 7:30 AM

In 1914 Le Corbusier designed, but never built, an open-plan slab concrete house he caled Dom-Ino, combining domus and innovation. One was built to match the plans at the Vienna Biennial in 2014, but you can see the dom-ino philosophy in the skeletons of buildings all over: The Radical Le Corbusier Design That Shaped Italy

The point of the Dom-Ino—the name is “domus” and “innovation” spliced together—was to reduce a housing structure to its most skeletal form, so inhabitants could decide for themselves where walls should go and how their lives would sprawl out inside. We’re familiar with this idea today, thanks to open plan offices and airy loft apartments. But in the past, homeowners didn’t have this freedom. “Earlier architects followed conventional room arrangements,” says Mary McLeod, a professor of architecture at Columbia University. Some of those architects also dabbled with reinforced concrete, but it was Le Corbusier who created a technology that buried steel beams within concrete slabs. This “pancake scheme,” McLeod says, “allows for what he called the plan libre, or free plan, where the walls can be placed anywhere. It allows for a new aesthetic possibility: walls that don’t come to ceilings, shaped rooms, a more fluid open space.”

The design collab Space Caviar and Joseph Grima produced 99 Dom-Ino, a documentary that explores the Dom-Ino house in Italy

posted by the man of twists and turns (20 comments total)

There are plenty of examples of pre-modern buildings with open, flexible floor plans - barns and churches are two good examples. These and other buildings that lend themselves to easy repurposing by multiple generations of users (e.g. city rowhouses with central stairways, shotgun-style room arrangements, and street-level basement entrances that can be cleanly broken into separate apartments) also, over time, allow residents to dictate where at least some walls should go and how they will live in the space.

This kind of construction could be done at a domestic scale in earlier times, but small rooms that could be closed off from one another, and in which heat would not diffuse quickly were in cold climates, critical to comfort and maybe even survival. Le Corbusier's designs pre-suppose energy-intensive heating and cooling of the air, vs. the bodies of the occupants. Reinforced concrete is obviously faster and cheaper than wood framing, but this seems more about a questionable revolution in HVAC options than structural design.

Also, that flat roof is going to leak.
posted by ryanshepard at 8:02 AM on May 26, 2015 [8 favorites]

Plus, you'd forever be losing your roombas
posted by fullerine at 8:09 AM on May 26, 2015 [2 favorites]

Bear in mind that this was designed for Italy, which is a Mediterranean climate, not a cold climate. An open plan would be a lot easier to cool during the summer, especially if it had wide windows and does on the upper levels.

As for the flat roof, that's where I would put a water catchment basin. Or a rooftop garden. Or in the modern era, solar panels.

Seriously people. Try to think in terms other than assuming English and German medieval architecture is the best for every location.
posted by happyroach at 8:31 AM on May 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

Bear in mind that this was designed for Italy, which is a Mediterranean climate, not a cold climate.

Temperatures regularly get into the 30s and 40s in Rome, and it's significantly colder in other parts of the country in winter.

Seriously people. Try to think in terms other than assuming English and German medieval architecture is the best for every location.

Italians have not, historically, rejected the pitched roof. There is a reason for this - flat roofs almost inevitably leak.
posted by ryanshepard at 8:49 AM on May 26, 2015 [4 favorites]

These and other buildings that lend themselves to easy repurposing by multiple generations of users (e.g. city rowhouses with central stairways, shotgun-style room arrangements, and street-level basement entrances that can be cleanly broken into separate apartments) also, over time, allow residents to dictate where at least some walls should go and how they will live in the space.

As long as you don't mind having two walls 15' apart or so that you can never touch, yeah. And if you want to add on to it or have your own building not connected to others, all the exterior walls (at a minimum!) have to be bearing, and you'll need a bearing wall every 15' or so. Not so flexible.

Le Corbusier's designs pre-suppose energy-intensive heating and cooling of the air, vs. the bodies of the occupants.

Not necessarily. You can quite easily have a passive solar design based on the dom-ino model, and passive cooling is pretty simple. But yes, the whole dom-ino concept was bastardized to assume AC by later people more worried about initial construction cost.

Reinforced concrete is obviously faster and cheaper than wood framing,

Not in this universe. Maybe pre-cast concrete made from regular-sized pieces that can be put together like an erector set, but casting anything on site is basically the most expensive commonly used method possible to build anything in the developed world.

Italians have not, historically, rejected the pitched roof. There is a reason for this - flat roofs almost inevitably leak.

But boy howdy, the Greeks and a bunch other Mediterranean cultures sure did. Any roof will inevitably leak.

Corbusier's main deal was questioning why we were still building like we did in the ages (much like happyroach mentions), when we're now getting around using cars and planes instead of a horse and buggy. Some of his innovations led to horrific outcomes (hermetically sealed office towers, housing projects, etc.), so he's kind of the king of unintended consequences, but he made a huge leap in bringing construction technology in line with the materials available.
posted by LionIndex at 9:17 AM on May 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

You would not want to be living between those concrete pancakes supported by pencil-thin columns during an earthquake, with no seismic shear resistance built into the walls.
posted by beagle at 9:17 AM on May 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

Not in this universe.

Or at least not in a part of the world with a healthy logging industry. Elsewhere I would expect to see a lot more concrete and brick construction, which is indeed what happens.

You would not want to be living between those concrete pancakes supported by pencil-thin columns during an earthquake, with no seismic shear resistance built into the walls.

I wondered about that. Does this presume shear walls, or is there some other earthquake provision designed in? (Or is it like other elements of Corbusier's designs, where key details are left to other people to work out?)
posted by Dip Flash at 9:42 AM on May 26, 2015

I don't know much about architecture, but I would think naming your building after something that's supposed to fall down is a bad idea. Is there some other meaning to domino I'm missing?
posted by Dr Dracator at 10:47 AM on May 26, 2015 [3 favorites]

Elsewhere I would expect to see a lot more concrete and brick construction, which is indeed what happens.

Generally, that's a function of labor cost vs. material cost though. If you want to build something quick and cheap, you build it out of wood or steel (if you need the structural capacity and non-combustible materials). Concrete and masonry are expensive and time-consuming from a labor standpoint, but not so much on material.
posted by LionIndex at 10:51 AM on May 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

Villa Savoye, a concrete building designed by Corbusier with a flat roof, was infamously leaky.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 11:14 AM on May 26, 2015 [3 favorites]

>> Italians have not, historically, rejected the pitched roof. There is a reason for this - flat roofs almost inevitably leak.
>
> But boy howdy, the Greeks and a bunch other Mediterranean cultures sure did. Any roof will inevitably leak.

Not high peaks, but peaks.

Even low pitch peaked roofs like these will force rainwater to run off instead of pooling up into what roofing and paving contractors call birdbaths, which hang around until they either evaporate or leak through.
posted by jfuller at 11:17 AM on May 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

I've spent a lot of time travelling around Campania and other not-so-picturesque parts of Italy and have marveled at the vast number of these unfinished (mostly) Dom-Ino buildings. The trailer or article don't do a great job of explaining this phenomenon, but this is a start: "Other times, the naked rebar is a foil against paying property taxes, since unfinished buildings are exempt."

I love the architectural idea though of a house as just a frame or container which can be stripped and re-imagined by successive inhabitants, and seeing these bare frames standing in the landscape always suggests that potential.
posted by Flashman at 11:21 AM on May 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

"Other times, the naked rebar is a foil against paying property taxes, since unfinished buildings are exempt."

Gotta be careful on how you tax buildings, I forget where in the world the government taxed buildings on the number of windows it had - and then people quit making as many windows in their buildings.

Ugh!
posted by el io at 11:33 AM on May 26, 2015

Not sure about elsewhere but they did that in 18th c. England. You see a lot of Georgian houses with fake windows (usually set into the brickwork), to maintain their order/symmetry but to avoid paying the tax.
posted by Flashman at 11:41 AM on May 26, 2015

You would not want to be living between those concrete pancakes supported by pencil-thin columns during an earthquake, with no seismic shear resistance built into the walls.

That design is actually not dissimilar to the construction methods used in modern skyscrapers in seismically active areas.

Rather than depending on outside walls, the columns can be designed to effectively transmit forces, and the floors can be attached to the columns so they flex with the building frame. Also, a column system like that is going to be much easier to adapt to an active dampening system.
posted by happyroach at 1:18 PM on May 26, 2015

It looks like the skeleton of many university buildings I've spent time in.
posted by sourwookie at 3:36 PM on May 26, 2015

I don't know much about architecture, but I would think naming your building after something that's supposed to fall down is a bad idea. Is there some other meaning to domino I'm missing?
posted by Dr Dracator at 10:47 AM on May 26 
[1 favorite +]     [!]

What part about the explanation of this in the link description wasn't clear?
posted by stenseng at 6:16 PM on May 26, 2015

ryanshepard: Temperatures regularly get into the 30s and 40s in Rome, and it's significantly colder in other parts of the country in winter.

I guess this gets into the ambiguity of what it means to be "cold". Because while that's rather chilly, it's only the foothills of the climate landscape where the most important function of a building is to keep the precipitation off the insulation so the occupants don't literally die.

I mean, seeing how older buildings get remodeled for different uses over the generations and centuries shows the underlying concept is—well not just a good idea but an observed fact, more or less, as the first link gets in to. But if someone was going to design a building to be specifically good at being the skeleton of generations of evolutionary forms, perpetually modified by their inhabitants, the very first things I'd be thinking about would be “how do you attach the weather barrier” and “how do you secure the insulation” and “where do you route the plumbing”—I mean, are the concrete slabs marked as to where it's safe to drill through to bring water to the second floor, or do they have to be routed around the outside of the slab (and will probably freeze up in winter unless that's done very carefully)? But as far as I can tell that's all afterthought here.

And in the future when inhabitants want to install a retroencabulator, where do they attach the frissomes? It's just funny to me that most of the successful long-used long-modified buildings I've seen have been kind of the opposite of the dom-ino idea: envelopes of walls and roof that get different floors and stuff put inside them, not floors perched on columns that will get different walls and roofs put around them.
posted by traveler_ at 11:10 PM on May 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

What part about the explanation of this in the link description wasn't clear?

I get how you combine two other words to get dom-ino, it just sounds like a poor choice of name to me. A huge number of identical featureless slabs waiting to collapse one after the other just doesn't sound like a good mental association for a building, maybe this didn't apply in 1914?
posted by Dr Dracator at 2:32 AM on May 27, 2015

That may well be true. After all, dominos aren't just little oblongs of bakelite you use to set up elaborate courses and then set off a chain reaction to topple them all down. It's also a game involving elegant, mass-produced modular pieces, and in that sense the play on words of the name makes sense, particularly as it would have been understood in early 20th c. Italy. According to Wikipedia the game was invented in China and it actually was in Italy that it first appeared in the west, in the 18th century ("The name "domino" is from the resemblance to a kind of hood worn during the Venice carnival"). It wasn't until the 1970s that people started using them for large-scale toppling stunts.
posted by Flashman at 8:49 AM on May 27, 2015