Nonsuch House was a four-storey house on London Bridge, completed in 1579. It is the earliest documented prefabricated building. [1] Originally constructed in the Netherlands, it was taken apart and shipped to London in pieces in 1578, where it was reassembled, with each timber being marked so that it could be reconstructed correctly. It was assembled in the manner later typical of an American barn or modern prefab housing. [2] The name Nonsuch may have referred to Henry VIII's now vanished Nonsuch Palace outside London; it meant there was "none such" anywhere else, that it was an unequalled paragon of its kind.
All houses on London Bridge were pulled down in 1757. [3]
Nonsuch House was reconstructed on the bridge using joiners' techniques alone, without any carpenter's nails, mason's mortar, or smith's iron. Only wooden pegs were used in the construction. [4] Its archway straddled the bridge. The house was in the centre of the bridge with its principal front facing towards the Southwark end, the principal approach to the city of London from the south. Occupying the place of an entrance to the city, it was elaborately carved with ornate decorations on its east and west Dutch stepped gables, which protruded beyond the sides of the bridge. The house was about 27 feet (8.2 m) wide with a usable floor space of 20 feet (6.1 m) in the middle. [5]
Nonsuch House had two fronts to the River Thames with large columns, windows, and outside carvings. The square towers at each of its four corners were crowned with onion domes. The gilded vanes on top of these domes could be seen from all parts of the city, as they stood clear above the surrounding structures of the bridge. The house had two sundials on top on the south side. On one of them was painted the adage: Time and tide stay for no man. [5]
London Bridge, like many large medieval bridges, bore houses and shops along both sides of its length. London Bridge was a great attraction for London, and the Nonsuch House was a notable feature from the sixteenth century until it was torn down in the eighteenth century. Nonsuch House was partially attached to many of the other smaller wooden buildings adjacent on the bridge. The southern front was not connected to any other buildings and it was open for about fifty-six feet in front. The front was ornamented with many transom casement windows. [5]
A geodesic dome is a hemispherical thin-shell structure (lattice-shell) based on a geodesic polyhedron. The triangular elements of the dome are structurally rigid and distribute the structural stress throughout the structure, making geodesic domes able to withstand very heavy loads for their size.
Several bridges named London Bridge have spanned the River Thames between the City of London and Southwark, in central London. The current crossing, which opened to traffic in 1973, is a box girder bridge built from concrete and steel. It replaced a 19th-century stone-arched bridge, which in turn superseded a 600-year-old stone-built medieval structure. This was preceded by a succession of timber bridges, the first of which was built by the Roman founders of London.
St Paul's Cathedral is an Anglican cathedral in London, United Kingdom, which, as the cathedral of the Bishop of London, serves as the mother church of the Diocese of London. It sits on Ludgate Hill at the highest point of the City of London and is a Grade I listed building. Its dedication to Paul the Apostle dates back to the original church on this site, founded in AD 604. The present cathedral, dating from the late 17th century, was designed in the English Baroque style by Sir Christopher Wren. Its construction, completed in Wren's lifetime, was part of a major rebuilding programme in the City after the Great Fire of London. The earlier Gothic cathedral, largely destroyed in the Great Fire, was a central focus for medieval and early modern London, including Paul's walk and St Paul's Churchyard being the site of St Paul's Cross.
A Nissen hut is a prefabricated steel structure for military use, especially as barracks, made from a half-cylindrical skin of corrugated iron. Designed during the First World War by the American-born, Canadian-British engineer and inventor Major Peter Norman Nissen, it was used also extensively during the Second World War and adapted to the similar Quonset hut in the United States.
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Nonsuch Palace was a Tudor royal palace, built by Henry VIII in Surrey, England; it stood from 1538 to 1682–83. Its site lies in what is now Nonsuch Park on the boundaries of the borough of Epsom and Ewell in Surrey and the London Borough of Sutton.
Prefabrication is the practice of assembling components of a structure in a factory or other manufacturing site, and transporting complete assemblies or sub-assemblies to the construction site where the structure is to be located. The term is used to distinguish this process from the more conventional construction practice of transporting the basic materials to the construction site where all assembly is carried out.
St Stephen Walbrook is a church in the City of London, part of the Church of England's Diocese of London. The present domed building was erected to the designs of Sir Christopher Wren following the destruction of its medieval predecessor in the Great Fire of London in 1666. It is located in Walbrook, next to the Mansion House, and near to Bank and Monument Underground stations.
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St Peter le Poer was a parish church on the west side of Broad Street in the City of London. Of medieval origin, it was rebuilt in 1540, and again in 1792 to a design by Jesse Gibson with a circular nave. It was demolished in 1907.
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