Grosvenor Atterbury

Grosvenor Atterbury (born July 7, 1869 in Detroit , † October 18, 1956 in Southampton (New York) ) was an American architect , city ​​planner and writer. After attending Yale University , traveling to Europe and studying architecture at Columbia University in New York , he worked for the architecture firm McKim, Mead & White . Much of his early work consisted of weekend homes for wealthy industrialists. From 1902, Atterbury dealt with methods of rationalizing housing construction.

Around 1910 (according to other sources not until 1918) he was commissioned to build Forest Hills Gardens in the New York borough of Queens , a garden city project supported by the Russell Sage Foundation since 1909 , which followed the ideas of Ebenezer Howard . For this building project, he developed a method of prefabrication from large-format to room-high construction elements, which is considered the beginning of the panel construction method . Each house was built from around 170 standardized concrete elements that were industrially prefabricated and assembled with the help of cranes after delivery.

The concrete slabs were produced in reusable formwork forms and already contained cavities as thermal insulation . The finished concrete elements then only had to be moved twice: in the factory from the casting mold to the truck, and from the truck by crane for assembly on the construction site.

The process became known in Europe as the Atterbury system and was adapted from 1923-25 ​​in Betondorp , the Netherlands , in a pilot project in the Amsterdam district of Oost / Watergraafsmeer . From 1926 onwards, the Kriegerheimstättensiedlung in Berlin-Friedrichsfelde (today's name: Splanemann-Siedlung ) was the first German prefabricated housing estate based on this production principle.

Sources and web links

• On the history of industrial construction
• Grosvenor Atterbury: Model Towns in America. (1912) - (engl.)