After months of research into why prefabrication has not been the glowing
success everyone claimed it would be, we developed our answer: mix
prefabrication with the current trend of mobile food trucks. We built the first
prototype, Rapid Type: A Mobile Coffee platform, in the Fall of 2010 as part of
a studio I offered with Andre Caradec (S/tudio U/nder M/anufacture) at
California College of the Arts.
We were given a generous donation of Alpolic, a unique aluminum composite
material manufactured by Mitsubishi Plastics, Inc. To explore the full potential
of the material, we decided to co-teach an experimental design studio with one
goal: push the material as far as possible within the limits of currently
available CNC fabrication technology.
Though Rapid Type targets the slow drip coffee movement, the larger agenda of
the studio was to explore the gap between highly-designed prefabricated
buildings and under-designed food trucks. Prefabrication remains a buzz word in
the field of architecture, but has failed to deliver a reliable and cost-saving
economic model for building construction. In fact, the only prefabricated
structures that have performed consistently well are not buildings at all. The
appearance of food trucks has exploded in the past few years and their
visibility is only continuing to grow. The studio decided to latch on to this
growing trend by offering a new and unique design using proven methods of mass
manufacturing. Rapid Type is a full-service mobile sales platform that offers
high-design, ease of assembly, and full mobility. The project combines the best
of prefabricated building construction mixed with the financial vitality of the
food truck movement. The prototype is designed to accommodate a variety of
consumer markets.
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