ABSTRACT
In this paper, we attempt to clarify what a structuralist understanding of the built form may bring to the idea of prefabrication. Following an anthropological trend, structuralism reached architecture primarily through the observation of vernacular built forms, in a period when modernism was beginning to be revised. Prefabrication, which is often regarded as a cut-ting-edge mode, seems to be on the opposite side of an evolutionary perspective, as implied through the vernacular, and where customization has somewhat replaced the idea of place. It thus makes sense to recover the notion of structuralism as a wider frame of thought, relativizing the notion of prefabrication as a miraculous solution for the quality and economy in construction, and helping to understand how an architectural stand may work as a positive mediator with the information, production or business spheres that will shape the historical vernacular of the future, where certainly prefabrication is included.
