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The world of prefab and modular homes. |
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| http://www.flatpakhouse.com/ |
A FlatPak designed by architect Charlie Lazor has just come on the market in California.
See more pictures via the real estate listing and interactive brochure.
Hat tip: Contemporist on June 23, 2009.
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| www.flickr.com/photos/flatpakhouse/2202532508/in/set-72157601570849354/ |
A blog named Denver Modern Homes points out this great Flickr photoset of a 
Flatpak house in Aspen.
We covered many informative websites on prefab and modular homes last year. A few of our favorite posts:
In May, we found the
LV Series Yahoo! Group, a great resource on Rocio Romero's LV Series homes
We wrote about
Nashville Modern Prefab in June. The plan: to build a Hive Modular home. Sadly, it looks like work has stalled.
- Shedworking entered our radar at the end of June. The blog is a great source of information on small prefab homes.
We love
A Prefab Project, which tracks the progress of a Resolution: 4 Architecture home in West Virginia. In July, we watched the home being delivered.
Also in July:
Hive Modular started a blog.
Sears Homes were some of the earliest prefabs. We were excited when we found a great resource on the homes: the
Sears Archives.
I'd forgotten about this one: we covered a great Flickr set of a
Flatpack House going up. Now the home is much more complete.
In December, we came across
ModularHomeChoice.com. It offers some useful information about building a modular home.
And we saw
Secret Fortress Hideout, a blog all about the construction of an LVL Home.
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| amygoodwin.typepad.com/ |
Like the Flickr photo set we wrote about, Amy Goodwin's blog shows off some photos of her FlatPak House in Massachusetts.
MocoLoco fills in the blanks:
"Amy's is the first production model, which took almost two years since kinks had to be worked out as the manufacturing process went along. Despite being the guinea pigs for the Flatpak experience, the final product is all that Goodwin hoped for and more."
Jetson Green took a look:
"I really like how the house is tucked into the enveloping landscape, almost camouflaged from the entry way."
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One year ago, Kiplinger's Personal Finance featured an article on Fabulous Prefabs.
The article details homeowners Scott and Lisa McGlasson's decision to purchase an Alchemy Architects' weeHouse as a summer home for a lot they own in Minnesota:
The McGlassons' hideaway -- with two bedrooms, one bathroom and tons of personality -- is a prefabricated home. The components were assembled in a factory, trucked to their lot and put together....
Scott and Lisa paid $95,000 for their second home. They chose the layout of the first story from a half-dozen of Alchemy Architects' plans and added a second story to the blueprints, expanding the size to 780 square feet. The firm hired a Wisconsin factory to manufacture the house's components, a process that took about six weeks. The components were trucked from the factory on a flatbed, and a crane helped assemble them (delivery and crane costs ran $6,000). The McGlassons hired contractors to connect the house's wiring to the electrical grid, dig a well and do other finishing work. The final tally was about $160,000, including fixtures and appliances."
The flexibility of a panelized house makes it superior for building on mountain, beach and lakefront locations, which tend to have more quirks than the typical suburban lot....
The major limitation of modular houses is size: Modular units must be able to travel down highways. 'We have to do a lot of thinking within the box,' jokes Joseph Tanney, a partner at Resolution: 4 Architecture, a New York firm that builds prefab homes using modular and other methods. What's more, modular houses often need thicker-than-usual interior walls to ensure that they will withstand the stress of being lifted onto your lot by a crane. (Panelized homes don't face this problem.) These thicker walls reduce the number of floor plans because there are only so many ways the fatter walls can be disguised."
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Empyrean•
Alchemy Architects•
OMD•
CleverHomes•
Lazor Office•
EcoSteel (aka EcoContempo)•
Taalman Koch•
Resolution: 4 Architecture•
MKD•
Rocio Romero.
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| flickr.com/photos/rwtb/ |
Check out these cool photos of a Flatpak House being built.
(I'm assuming it's a Lazor Office FlatPak though I've not been able to verify.)
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| walkerart.org |
The Some Assembly Required exhibit by the Walker Art Center will be opening at the Virginia Center for Architecture on June 15. (Hat tip: a post on Richmond Magazine's blog).
Tour locations to date:
Walker Art Center
Minneapolis, Minnesota
December 8, 2005-March 26, 2006
Vancouver Art Gallery
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
April 29- September 4, 2006
Yale School of Architecture
New Haven, Connecticut
October 27, 2006- February 2, 2007
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Pacific Design Center
Los Angeles, California
February 28- May 20, 2007
(our coverage links to a video report)
Marmol Radziner, FlatPak by Lazor Office, LV Series Homes by Rocio Romero, Mountain Retreat by Resolution 4: Architecture, Sunset Breezehouse by Michelle Kaufmann Designs, Turbulence House by Stephen Holl, and the weeHouse by Alchemy Architects
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| www.thedwellhomesbyempyrean.com |
Lazor Office had been experimenting with prefabricated housing techniques for a year before the Dwell Homes competition. While the firm didn't participate in the competition, it was building a prototype of the FlatPak House at the same time. In an exhibit about prefab architecture at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the FlatPak project is explained:
"Charlie Lazor, principal of Minneapolis-based Lazor Office, began his exploration of prefabrication in 2002 through the creation of a home for his family. The resulting prototype — a two-story, three-bedroom, three-bath house with a separate study and guest room — was completed in 2004 and launched the FlatPak series. As the name suggests, the system evokes a do-it-yourself attitude by offering owners a wide range of choices and a hand in the layout of their spaces."
Lazor Office FlatPak also provides three designs for the Dwell Homes. Each sports a stucco/concrete look combined with wood and glass.
All models feature:
primary materials: stucco, wood siding, wood windows, wood decking
Articles and blog posts about the homes from Lazor Office: The Walker Art Center's catalogue of their "Some Assembly Required" show shares info on Lazor Office. CubeMe offers some pictures and hints on where to see a FlatPak house. Jetson Green shows off Flickr photos of the FlatPak Houses.
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| www.dwell.com |
Dwell Magazine deserves much credit for the rise of modernist prefab in the past few years. Many of the designers and homes featured on this site first appeared in its pages.
In the manifesto published in the first issue in October 2000, editor Kerrie Jacobs explained the magazine's vision:
"At Dwell, we're staging a minor revolution. We think that it's possible to live in a house or apartment by a bold modern architect, to own furniture and products that are exceptionally well designed, and still be a regular human being. We think that good design is an integral part of real life. And that real life has been conspicuous by its absence in most design and architecture magazines."
In 2003 "Dwell introduced the Dwell Home Design Invitational, a competition for a modern prefab prototype home designed for mass production." A subsequent competition was held for the more environmentally conscious Dwell Home II, but that home's prototype has yet to clear permitting hurdles.
The winner of the original competition, Resolution 4: Architecture, and a second company, Lazor Office, were chosen to design modernist prefab homes to be built by Empyrean. Empyrean has been building homes with prefab methods since 1959; its own designers contributed two designs to the Dwell Homes.
Dwell's (now former) Editor-in-Chief Allison Arieff explained the advantages of such a partnership between designer and manufacturer:
"One of the major obstacles prefab has faced has been effective collaboration among designers, manufacturers, and clients. This exciting partnership brings together experienced parties across that spectrum, all of whom are passionate about and committed to prefab's potential."
We'll cover the designs of the Dwell Homes, and the progress of the greener Dwell Home II, over the next few days.
Some features common to all of the Dwell Homes:
