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Entries
tagged as 'school'
GOOD Magazine recently highlighted the design company Project FROG. They are creating modular units as alternatives to the trailers now in use at public schools in California. According to Adam Tibbs, president of Project Frog:
There are currently around 85,000 trailers throughout the state.
Read the entire article for more details. Title: LOOK: FROG Schools
Author: Adam Starr
Publication: GOOD Magazine
Section: Art & Design, Education
Length: 297 words
Date: June 8, 2009
We don't usually cover non-residential prefabs, but a quick blurb published in the The Times (UK) caught my eye last month:
Manchester's Evening News provided a little more info and the above video:
Other advantages:
Last year we covered a house in the San Francisco area that used a similar system made by Thoma Holz in Austria. title: School comes flat packed
publication: The Manchester Evening News
length: 600 words
publication date: May 30, 2008
Inhabitat's Prefab Friday reported on a London prefab:
Treehugger's Lloyd Alter discussed a visit to the offices of Resolution: 4 Architecture. The Chicago Tribune reprinted the interview with Alison Arieff that we covered back in March. Arieff herself blogged at the NY Times about a prefab school by OMD that we've covered in the past. Jetson Green covered an award for the Abōd:
Off Beat Homes enjoys the Flatpak House. Arch Daily took a look at a home in Ecuador that uses a unique prefabricated concrete block system. G Living examined student housing made of containers. Equity Green discussed Hybrid Seattle, a prefab company building homes from shipping containers. They also showed off the ATC cabin, a prefab concept from Canada. A blog simply called "House" covered the Empyrean NextHouse blog, we've talked about before. Preston at Jetson Green showed off the Ideabox Prefab: "Ideabox offers a pretty cool product in the modern, prefabricated housing industry. Ideabox emphasizes good design, not square footage, and they make it easy to do."He also wrote about the JoT House. The author at ColumbusING tried to spark debate about prefab: "Can it be a viable solution? Over the past 10 years the country and for that matter Columbus has been inundated with the "cookie cutter" type of residential building, which has paved the way for convenient and affordable living for some and in the mind of others, has created a perception of architectural character digust. So where does that put Prefab houses?" A New Zealand blog, Sneak, discovered the WIRED Living Home. PrairieMod mentioned the blog at A Prefab Project: "It's an interesting mix of photos, thoughts and information that anyone who dreams of going prefab will find very enlightening." The Good Human's Prefab Wednesday wrote about the PLACE Houses, a new prefab concept. We'll cover those in more depth soon. Inhabitat's Prefab Friday examined a student housing project made from containers. Like the Prefabrication Laboratory and Studio 804, the MiSo* House is a university-based prefab project. Michigan Solar House (MiSo*) "is an interdisciplinary endeavor at the University of Michigan incorporating students, faculty and staff from" a number of the different departments. "The architecture of MiSo* reinterprets the single family dwelling to reflect a changing balance of ecological and technological choices that strive to integrate sustainable design within a contemporary lifestyle. The entry to the 2005 Solar Energy Decathlon functions as a working prototype of a portable, modular, and sustainable, solar powered dwelling and its design and construction are considered with future mass production in mind....
The University of Michigan page for the house features additional photos of the construction.
The MiSo product line can cater towards any size family. Therefore, reproducible parts are essential to the success of MiSo. The house on the mall will be built of five modules, three interior and two end, all pre-assembled and simply connected on site. The modular design of the house components within the MiSo* system provide a vast set of combinations that can effectively assemble a house of any size from 400 sq ft upwards." (Hat tip: Green Options) The Prefabrication Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin has been investigating prefab methods since 2002: "The Prefabrication Laboratory is a research group...focused on integration of factory production techniques and architecture. Offsite fabrication offers many benefits for building: higher quality, economies of scale, and more efficient use of resources. Prefabrication takes many forms and is evolving rapidly: modularization, pre-assembly, 'off-the-shelf' components....Our research investigates these changing processes looking for points of entry for architects....We look at fabrication in the larger context, how it has been used in the past, successfully or not, and how it affects local environments, cultures, economies." The lab is similar to Studio 804 at the University of Kansas School of Architecture. Inhabitat's Prefab Friday covered a prefab school project in progress by Jennifer Siegel's OMD: "...We're thrilled to see prefab systems being applied to more public and educational contexts!) While the construction isn't quite finished, we think this is a great opportunity to show the process and progress of an exceptional prefab project- and one of the best (and first) prefab schools we've seen integrate so many green technologies...
Treehugger covers a prefab concept in the UK by architect Richard Rogers. The post includes over a dozen photos, and quotes a recent Financial Times article (subscription required) with a hat tip to Urbanity.
We find this project particularly interesting as it is an addition to an existing structure, which provides not only site-specific but aesthetic and programmatic context." The San Jose Mercury News ran an article about prefab and price: "Manufactured homes are no longer the boxy firetraps owned by the poor and elderly. Instead they are increasingly becoming the smartly-designed homes of the young, wealthy and educated.
Materialicious (a blog all about building materials) points out that the Structural Insulated Panel Association offers useful information, "including a Green Building section".
About 1.4 million people in California live in manufactured homes, and the typical profile of an owner has become younger, more educated and more affluent... ...standard site-built homes cost about $250 a square foot whereas manufactured housing can be as low as $120 a square foot, a big savings for people used to paying top dollar in the Bay Area." |