Industrial building in 2020 is far muddier and more complex than expected. This catalogue is a study and mapping of contemporary structural systems in Sweden right now. Mapping actors in the building industry, including developers, factories, architects, organizations and companies, displays a motley array of methods and processes for building millions of homes for Sweden’s growing population. But do they provide good housing for the masses? Studying the material compositions of structural systems as well as recent building permits in the Stockholm region over the past couple of years reveals a taxonomy of how mass housing has implemented industrial building methods, but not always as expected.

Is it time again to collaborate more and share the knowledge of structural building systems in order to have a more efficient production apparatus? Former KTH researcher and engineer Peter Adler speculated on the fourth generation of industrialized building, a conceptual understanding of efficient building production in which sharing of platforms, concepts and processes would advance. This, in turn, would encourage and support an adaptability to diversity in terms of living conditions as well as changes in local and regional conditions for development. 

We wanted to grasp this potential in industrialized building by continuing the trajectory of understanding tectonics with regards to materials (concrete, wood, steel, and composites) and scales of elements (from small-scale such as beam and lintel construction to a middle-scale of prefabricated elements and large-scale in prefabricated volume elements). Therefore, we developed a categorization loosely based on Constructing Architecture, Material Processes Structures: A Handbook (Andrea Deplazes, Ed.) and the writings of Kenneth Frampton, although the historical tracing of this study has a deeper and more explicit ambition to map structural systems.