The highs and hellish lows of superstructuralism

Amid the thick of the Crimean war, Florence Nightingale dispatched a plea to the Times deploring the lethal conditions of British military field hospitals. Ten times more soldiers were dying from diseases like cholera and dysentery than from battle wounds. Shocked, the War Office commissioned 49-year-old Isambard Kingdom Brunel to design the world’s first prefabricated hospital.

Components were manufactured to Brunel’s specifications in Gloucestershire then rushed to Turkey for erection. He took the commission on 16 February 1855 and fewer than five months later, the new Renkioi Hospital could accept 300 patients (2,200 by March 1856). Infection rates collapsed. Nightingale called it ‘magnificent’. The new architecture of prefab had triumphed.

Renkioi doesn’t appear in Superstructures, a new exhibition of techno joy-infused architecture at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, though its essence is shared with the buildings which do: off-site fabrication, large volumes enclosed by lightweight materials, a love of engineering, technological innovation — all supporting a social mission.