From the husband and wife team at Taalman Koch Architecture comes news of a small development of 3 iT houses: Three Junipers.

Situated on 5 acres of pristine high desert landscape, each house offers an uninterrupted view of Pipes Canyon and the Pioneertown sawtooth peaks...

The iT house utilizes a "light touch" installation approach, minimizing the construction footprint through use of smaller scale, modular elements and minimal packaging material.

model: iT House

designer: Taalman Koch Architecture

price/sf: $150 - $220

size: 1,600 sf

bedrooms: 3

bathrooms: 2

In tandem with that announcement, a new itHouse website has been launched with:

• iT house configuration options
• details on the framing system
• explanation of the on-site assembly

Also worth a look: an informative blog following the construction of the first iT house.

(Hat tip: Jetson Green)

Last month, the New York Times covered a new prefab home in Culver City, CA designed by Sander Architects:

Inspired by the house that Charles and Ray Eames created in 1949 from a prefabricated steel frame and doors, windows and the like ordered from a catalog, the architects took the project on the condition that they could pursue a novel strategy. Besides using acrylic, Panelite, recycled steel and Styrofoam, they would try unusual ingredients like sunflower husks for wall panels and bookshelves, and blue jeans (for insulation).

Some facts about the house:

• 4,200 square feet
• 30 feet high (due to zoning)
• took 3 years to plan and construct the entire project

Final construction cost:

$528,000, only about a third of the going rate for architect-designed houses of this size in the Los Angeles area.

That comes out to about $125/sf. Not bad.

Check out a slideshow of the house (13 pictures). Read the entire article for more details.

Good Morning America's weather anchor, Sam Champion, recently reported from the Smart Home: Green and Wired exhibit at Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry. Check out their video and pictures. Though not mentioned there, the Smart Home is the mkSolaire by Michelle Kaufmann Designs.

The exhibit runs through January 4, 2009. (See our earlier post for more info.)

Back in March, Swedish designer Kjellgren Kaminsky Architecture and developer Emrahus presented six prefabricated "passive" homes at the Hem & Villa housing fair in Malmö, Sweden, with a second presentation last month.

Here's a paraphrase from Google's translation of the Emrahus home page:

The reason that we no longer need a heat source is that the house has well insulated walls and ceiling ... which retains the heat generated by household appliances, lights, TV set, and people who live in the house.

The houses:

Blog coverage:

• Dezeen on March 19th, 2008.

• CubeMe on March 26, 2008

• Best Houses and Home Design on March 30, 2008

• Jetson Green on October 7, 2008

• Inhabitat's Prefab Friday on October 17, 2008

In Italy, Giacomo Guidotti e Riccarda Guidotti Studio di Architettura designed a home that uses prefabricated concrete wall panels as the exterior cladding. That's common in commercial and industrial buildings but rarely seen in residential construction.

One advantage of this method: the concrete forms both the exterior and interior wall surfaces, reducing time spent on finishes.

(Hat tip: materialicious)

The Swiss Architecture Museum included the home in an exhibition last year:

The Casa Grossi in Monte Carasso (2000-04) is particularly interesting. It is a narrow, rectangular building, a dwelling on the fringe of the building zone. This minimalist structure, clad with prefabricated concrete elements, conveys an impression of being hermetically sealed to the outside world, but surprises us with an atrium inside - serving as both a stairwell and an access core - lit from a roof light on the 2nd floor.

Here's some background information on prefabricated concrete wall panels from an excellent reference site called the Whole Building Design Guide.

Paul E. Gaudette explains:

Architectural precast concrete has been used since the early twentieth century and came into wide use in the 1960s. The exterior surface of precast concrete can vary from an exposed aggregate finish that is highly ornamental to a form face finish.... Some precast panels act as column covers while others extend over several floors in height and incorporate window openings...

In general, prefabricated concrete wall panels can serve one of two purposes:

Precast cladding or curtain walls are the most common use of precast concrete for building envelopes. These types of precast concrete panels do not transfer vertical loads but simply enclose the space. They are only designed to resist wind, seismic forces generated by their own weight, and forces required to transfer the weight of the panel to the support....

Load-bearing wall units resist and transfer loads from other elements and cannot be removed without affecting the strength or stability of the building.

It's not clear whether the Casa Grossi wall panels are load bearing.

materialicious covers a different sort of prefab product that's been around for a while. From the company site:

The Igloo Satellite Cabin is designed to provide safe, reliable accommodation in remote areas. It has been used for over 25 years in conditions ranging from the tropics to polar icecaps. Units can be flown by helicopter fully assembled, and often fully equipped, to locations inaccessible by road transport. Igloos are ideal short-term accommodation for exploration and research, as well as an attractive alternative for eco-tourism.

Igloos can be lengthened to six or more metres by adding sets of extension panels, or interlinked by tunnels to provide a complete weatherproof base.

The Australian Antarctic Division has a bit more info on the history of the cabins:

2007 marked the 25th year since the first fibreglass Igloo Satellite Cabin was designed and manufactured in Tasmania. As at January 2008, 159 Igloos had been purchased by 45 institutes and individuals in 18 countries, with the majority for use in Antarctica.

More details:

• designed by the late Malcolm Wallhead
• now manufactured under license by Penguin Composites
• nicknamed “apples”

Clayton homes is holding a showcase of homes this Friday, Saturday & Sunday in Knoxville:

This is your opportunity ... to tour dozens of new homes without wasting gas or walking too much. Examine the amenities and style available in today's housing.

Whether you are looking to buy or just looking, it will be the one time this year to see so many houses in one place.

See our earlier post for more details on the company and their previous showcase.

According to their website, the following homes will be on display in Knoxville:

One thing we couldn't tell from their site: which are "modular" (built to local codes) vs. "manufactured" (HUD code).

event: Showcase of Homes by Clayton Homes

We recently received an email from Blu Homes.

According to their website:

Our first homes are under development in Utah and Massachusetts, and are expected to be completed in Winter 2008.

All of their modular homes are fully finished, with a fabrication time of 4-6 weeks and installation time of less than 10 days. They offer several models:

They also offer "Flex" spaces to enlarge an existing home.

From their site:

• Co-founder and President, Bill Haney, shares (video, 2:35) their philosophy.
• Follow their blog.

Preston at Jetson Green has covered the company:

• Blu Homes Launches Convenient, Green, Affordable Abodes
• Blu Homes Moving Forward with Modern, Green, and Affordable Homes

As did Andrew Stone of Active Rain.

Michelle Kaufmann Designs recently sent us an email announcing the launch of their latest home design, the mkHearth.

Inspired by the natural beauty found in rural structures in the american landscapes, the mkHearth™ home is a sustainable approach to the modern farmhouse. With flowing spaces that organically open to one another, the mkHearth™ home revolves around the center hearth space, a fireplace/cabinetry that circulates up the 3 stories.

model: mkHearth

designer: Michelle Kaufmann Designs

size: 2,820 sf

beds: 4 + loft

price: $789,500

price/sf: $279

notes: Prices equal total estimated hard and soft costs.

Links:

• Images
• Videos
• Floorplans
• “Test drive” it on your property using Google Earth.

Recent coverage:

Preston at Jetson Green loves it.

Stephanie at Apartment Therapy Re-Nest says:

Kaufmann's signature touches are evident in the clean, modern lines, and the way each room seamlessly flows into the next.

The one thing we always love about each of Kaufmann's designs is that they look like the perfect place to throw a party. The kitchen always opens to the dining room, to the living room, to outdoor space. The mkHearth is no exception.

Bridgette Steffen covered the house for Inhabitat's Prefab Friday:

We always love seeing hot designers come out with their next hit– and Michelle Kaufmann’s new mkHearth is likely to be the new hot prefab design.

A real estate agent and a mortgage broker are co-hosting a seminar on modernist prefab next month in the San Francisco Bay Area:

This unique engagement will bring together leading professionals and experts in the field of building, design, real estate, and finance. Anyone who is contemplating the possibility of building a modernist prefab or custom home in Marin County should try to attend this event. Attendance is extremely limited and attendees will be selected on a first registered, first accepted basis.

speaker: Justin Brown of Michelle Kaufmann Designs

speaker: Renee Adelmann of Marin Modern Real Estate

(Hat tip: Live Modern)

Last month, the San Francisco Chronicle published an article on West Coast Green's showhome, the Harbinger House from SG Blocks LLC:

What makes this year's showcase home different from the prefab modular model seen last year [MKD's mkLotus] in San Francisco is not all the green bells and whistles ... it's the actual framework of the house that is truly innovative. This year's showstopper is made from five 40-foot-long shipping containers that once roamed the high seas

The article repeated a comment we've seen a few times:

a layman can't tell that, underneath its sleek lines, Harbinger was once a collection of lowly shipping crates

The advantages of shipping containers?

They're made of heavy-gauge steel, which holds up nicely in a hurricane or earthquake, but is usually too expensive to use in construction. [SG Blocks] gets the containers cheap - $500 to $2,000 a pop - because the fuel costs to ship them back empty to China or other places overseas are prohibitive. Because of the United States' huge trade imbalance, there are many empty containers lying around.

Harbinger details:

• made from 5 shipping containers
• 2 stories
• 1,700 square feet
• about 5% less expensive than building in wood or other conventional materials
• can be built 40% faster

SG Blocks facts:

• founder: David Cross
• location: St. Louis
• has built 6 single-family homes in the US (designed by Lawrence Group)
• 400-unit elder-care facility in Oceanside, CA will be unveiled soon

If you are planning to attend A Clean Break in Philadelphia this weekend, don't miss their presentations being held across the street from the exhibit. Here's one:

speaker: Geoff Warner, AIA of Alchemy Architects

speaker: Dan Rockhill, JL Constant Distinguished Professor of Architecture and director of Studio 804 at the University of Kansas, and principal of Rockhill & Associates

notes: Q&A led by PeiLin Chen of Diamond & Associates

Each will discuss their unique modular programs and successes with this chosen method of construction, particularly as an affordable and environmentally-friendly solution to land vacancy and community revitalization.

Design blog Dezeen reports on the Mini House, which takes advantage of new zoning laws in Sweden:

Since January 1st 2008 Swedish property owners are allowed to build a 15 sqm house on their land without a building permit.

The details:

• indoor space: 15 square meters (161.5 sf)
• outdoor space: 15 square meters (161.5 sf)
• 2 people can assemble in 1-2 days
• built with SIPS (panels made of plywood and styrofoam)
• 8 components per house (assembly process shown on the Nordic Marine site)
• requires site preparation of a foundation e.g. concrete slab
• won the Innovation Award 2008 from the Swedish Chamber of Commerce in the UK

More about the concept:

Mini house is a “friggebod” concept which brings some fun and excitement to a dull and conservative market. The concept means prefabrication, flat-pack delivery and weekend-long build-up! Building a house should be fun and easy. Kind of like putting together an Ikea cabinet!

(As best we can tell, friggebod means garden hut or shed.)

See the original post for 11 pictures and more details.

model: Mini house

designer: Jonas Wagell Design & Architecture

manufacturer: Nordic Marine Living AB

available: Europe

size: 161.5 sf

price: €12,200 - €17,700 ($16,500 - $24,000)

br: 1

(Hat tip: Treehugger)

Tonight (Oct. 16) from 7:00-10:00 pm is opening night for A Clean Break: "An exhibition of modern prefab architecture and high-design, low-waste innovations for the urban environment."

The full exhibition runs from Oct. 17-30. Their description:

... a pop-up neighborhood of modern and sustainable design with an emphasis on modular and prefabricated homes. The outdoor exhibition offers full-scale homes to tour, installations by architects, urban farming, transportation, environmentally-friendly furniture, public art and other high-design, low-waste products.

See our Oct. 1 post (linked below) for more details.

Worth noting: pictures of the weeHouse arriving.

If you are considering a modular home and live near Boston, MA or Providence, RI:

who: Realty Development Associates

• Learn What A Full Service Builder Does For You.
• Discover The Benefits Of Modular Construction.
• Understand The True Cost Of "Drop Ship" Homes.
• Permitting Process
• Tear Downs & Rebuilds
• Popularity of in-law-additions
• Free Mortgage & Financial Information.

A little more info on the company:

RDA Inc. offers full real estate, permitting, financing and construction services to handle the new home building process from concept through completion.

Interesting to note, they build only Westchester Modular Homes.

Their site offers additional information:

• homes offered
• "All In One Day" - photos of installing the modules by crane
• an overview of modular construction
• company background

(Hat tip: Patriot Ledger, Quincy, MA)

Update: fixed the city in the title.

Last week, Michelle Kaufmann Designs released a white paper on "nutrition labels for homes":

Green homes are in demand. Buying a green home, however, can be a mystifying, exasperating process. With all the various green home labels and certifications available, buyers want for a way to compare the sustainability of one for-sale home to another. Applying a universal sustainability label to homes, just as we apply nutrition labels to food, would answer this need and further encourage the growth of the green housing market...

By coincidence, we just read an article in Green Building Elements that suggests France already has a good start. The article covers the EvolutiV house by designer Olgga Architectes:

The media in France AND the architecture firm who designed the house feel compelled to advertise efficiency in terms of a single number that is easy to understand and can be used to compare this home to others one might choose. I’ve rarely if ever seen that in discussion of US prefab options (or other green homes) - outside of a LEED rating, we’re often left to guess exactly how eco-friendly that home is. We’d love to see this become more widespread in the US - information is power, and simple, objective numbers like this can help us separate the truly eco-friendly from innovative designs that are green in name (or advertising) only.

On the New York Times' Freakonomics blog, Annika Mengisen wonders whether prefab will ever catch on. For answers, she questioned two authors of prefab books, Allison Arieff and James Trulove.

Here are the questions posed; read the full post for their answers.

• Where do prefab houses stand in the U.S. real estate market?
• What, if anything, is the housing crisis doing to prefab?
• What would push prefab beyond a niche market?
• If prefab did catch on, what would the economic implications be?
• What does prefab do for the environment?
• What could prefab do for storm-prone areas?

Just a reminder:

There will be a Marmol Radziner Open House in Venice, CA this Sunday, October 12, from 2pm - 5pm. Free but reservation required.

Next week you can hear firm principal Leo Marmol, FAIA. Wednesday, October 15, 6pm - 8pm ($22).

Clayton Homes is holding a Showcase of Homes at the Triad Center in Greensboro, NC this weekend, October 10-12. From the press release:

Literally, Clayton Homes constructs a temporary neighborhood in the parking lot of The Triad Center, fully adorned with sidewalks, landscaping, mailboxes and street signs. The Showcase of Homes provides an opportunity for people to tour a variety of manufactured homes and see how dramatically the homes have changed in recent years.

What to expect:

• 20 new, fully-furnished homes on display
• on-the-spot financing
• hot dogs, drinks and popcorn
• $100 gas card drawings each half hour

Clayton CEO Kevin Clayton explains:

Our unofficial motto is 'Best Home -- Best Price' and we take that very seriously.

It has been his mission since taking over as CEO ten years ago to produce manufactured housing that surpasses site-built homes in look, quality, and value.

Clayton Homes produces both "manufactured" and "modular" housing. These terms have a specific meaning in the industry, part of which is covered on their website:

Manufactured Home: Built entirely in the factory under federal code administered by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).... Covers single or multi-section homes and includes transport to the site and installation.

The industry stopped using the term "mobile home" (and presumably "trailer home") when the HUD code became effective June 15, 1976. Not mentioned: manufactured homes do NOT qualify for a traditional mortgage, in part because the homes tend to lose value every year.

Modular Home: Built to state, local or regional code where the home will be located. System-built homes are transported to sites and installed.

These homes are built to the same standards as conventional "site-built" homes and qualify for a standard mortgage. (In fact they are often somewhat stronger in order to survive transportation and installation by crane.)

At least one home in the Showcase had 2 stories (see above), so it appears that a mix of both types will be shown.

More about Clayton Homes:

• owned by Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway
• recent news coverage outlines how they've avoided the current sub-prime issues

what: Clayton Homes is holding a Showcase of Homes

where: Triad Center in Greensboro, NC

date: October 10-12

time: 9am - 7pm

details: free and open to public

We didn't make it to this year's West Coast Green, but followed the coverage of those who did. Most interesting: SG Blocks' Harbinger show house.

We previously gave an overview of the house in the run-up to the show. The home was designed by Lawrence Group and built by SG Blocks, SG standing for "sustainable, green."

Inhabitat visited and gave a full review. I found this quote about containers particularly interesting:

The same local skilled workers who repair the containers are hired to repurpose them into house modules, which can then be easily shipped on trains. This process translates into a miniscule transportation footprint and blazingly fast build times: “when you deliver the finished components to site, you can install up to 12 containers using one crane in one day - that’s the equivalent of a 5,000 square foot house that is set in place in one day”.

Preston over at Jetson Green toured the house.

Everyone I talked to loved it. You might think that a shipping container home would feel closed-in and constrictive, but this home certainly wasn't. At 1700 sf, everything felt just right to me.

The home will be on view at other trade events:

The Harbinger Home will go on a journey just as the containers did. It will go to the Urban Land Institute next for their October show, then up to Washington DC for Ecobuild America [in December].

Private Island Blog approves:

The home is ideal for island life as it is set up for the use of solar power and rainwater recycling.

The story behind the name:

West Coast Green had a contest in the naming of the house. The winner, Gregory Schaefer, came up with "Harbinger House", saying:

'By definition, a harbinger is something which allows us to see the future, a foretelling, a symbolic event or bridge. I think we usually are aware of these in hindsight, but here, today we can clearly see the future. The Harbinger House is a model of sustainable design that needs recognition for its forward thinking vision and creativity.'

Visit the West Coast Green site for a long (55 minute) video of the assembly of the Harbinger House. Floorplans are also available.

Via email from Alchemy Architects, we learned about 3 upcoming open houses for the weeHouse.

Saturday, October 11, 2008

• 10am - 5pm
• Sloansville, NY

Sunday, October 12, 2008

• 10am - 5pm
• Ulster Park, NY

As these two homes are private residences, please RSVP and get specific directions by emailing Betsy Gabler: betsy@weehouses.com.

The third open house is public:

Thursday, October 16 - Thursday, October 30, 2008

• Philadelphia, PA
• Part of A Clean Break Exhibition, and Design Philadelphia

A blog called Greenlight has some interesting news:

The Japanese electronics giant has assembled a strategic plan to start making modular homes in about three to five years that will combine green construction along with sophisticated electronics to curb energy consumption.

While the energy savings ideas are new, Panasonic "already has a construction division that makes modular homes in Japan."

Though not likely to be coming to the US anytime soon:

the U.S. could be the last market it approaches...

Contemporist looked at homes from Modern Living in Sweden.

Inhabitat's Prefab Friday covered BURST*008:

The BURST homes ... are clearly not about affordability, but about systematizing the process of designing homes based on specific rules.

Inhabitat also wrote about the Redondo Beach house from DeMaria Design Associates:

The home, constructed with a combination of prefabricated shipping containers and traditional buildings materials, is a stunning beachfront residence.

ColoradoBiz Magazine reports on Sidekick Homes from Kephart Living:

Sidekick specializes in ADUs, or accessory dwelling units. They're anti-McMansions, small — sometimes tiny — living quarters built for backyards of existing homes, typically for aging relatives. Hence, they’re sometimes called "mother-in-law" or "granny" flats.

That's a great niche for modular construction.

The article included some local details:

One complication for the backyard ADU business is that zoning rules vary among municipalities and neighborhoods. ....

"They’re promoted by cities like Arvada [Colorado] as a way to help with the affordable housing issue and the issue of housing the aging population, which are both coming together pretty strongly right now," Kephart says.

In Denver, ADUs are allowed only in neighborhoods zoned for mixed use, such as Stapleton...

Other basics:

• price: $75,000 - $200,000
• size: 400 - 1160 square feet
• owner Michael Kephart launched Sidekick Homes early this spring

The best part:

They're ... pre-built and trucked from the factory to the home site with everything from the ceiling fixtures to the kitchen counters intact.

MKD has added the above video to their Web site. It shows the assembly of their mkSolaire at the museum in Chicago. Fun to watch.

There are plenty more where that came from.

Architectural Record reports:

From October 17 to 30, a temporary prefab “neighborhood” in Philadelphia will offer an optimistic view of what a revitalized city might look like in the near future. A Clean Break, curated by Minima Gallery, will be a central event of DesignPhiladelphia, an annual series of lectures, studio tours, and exhibitions organized by the Design Center at Philadelphia University.

The show will feature two actual prefabs:

• weeHouse from Alchemy Architects
• miniHome from Sustain Design Studio

Also in the exhibition:

renderings of residences designed by Gans Studio & dArchitects, Studio 804, and Interface Studio Architects ...

The exhibition is free and open to the public.

Last week, NPR covered MoMA's Home Delivery exhibition. The story shared many of the same details we've already reported. However, one new tidbit was the mention of a large prefab project going up in Brooklyn:

On a former landfill in the reedy seaboard of southern Brooklyn, where ocean breezes gently stroke the air, the sound of power tools splinters the morning silence.... the first phase of the Nehemiah Spring Creek affordable housing development.

Spring Creek looks like any construction project, built the conventional way. But the town houses lining these just-paved streets aren't actually built on site. They were trucked in, arriving at the site in almost move-in condition...

The town houses are prefabricated, manufactured miles away in a vast warehouse at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Then they are brought here whole on a flat-bed truck at night, when they won't interfere too much with New York City traffic...

The online article and accompanying audio are worth a visit.

From a recent press release:

Michelle Kaufmann ... completes 30 homes, sees business triple over past year.

This seems noteworthy, especially considering the current state of the US housing market. Congratulations to MKD!

Earlier this month on her New York Times blog, Allison Arieff posted a well-argued commentary on MoMA's Home Delivery show:

The puzzling thing about "Home Delivery" is its focus on homes that you can’t actually have delivered. The exhibition is chock full of gorgeous and historically significant architectural drawings and models, but the curatorial agenda of the show is muddled.

Specifically:

...it’s hard to understand the decision to exclude from the exhibit the small but significant group of architects who are actually producing prefab homes on a significant scale today.

She mentions:

• Michelle Kaufmann Designs
• Rocio Romero
• Resolution: 4 Architecture
• IKEA's BoKlok

In contrast, Arieff liked the Whitney Museum's now-closed show on housing pioneer Buckminster Fuller:

Eccentric to be sure, this visionary couldn’t have been more prescient with his concerns about the way we live.... In contrast, "Home Delivery" has tons of cool stuff to look at, but it really does feel odd that a show about homes has so little to say about the experience of actually living in one.

I'm sorry that we missed that one.

Read the full post for more details; Arieff knows the field.

materialicious moved from materialicio.us to materialicious.com. They've been reposting old content and adding some new content.

Jetson Green's guest post on affordable, green prefabs sparked a few responses around the web. Treehugger's Lloyd Alter concluded:

If Jim Kunstler is right and the American suburban experiment is dead, then there will be lots of cheap labor about and prefab is pretty much dead too- it will never be competitive.

But at some point when the housing market returns and there are banks that lend money, people are going to demand the quality and consistency that comes from a factory. That's why cars aren't built in driveways.

BuildingGreen also had something to say:

Unlike Ludeman, I'm not ready to give up on prefabrication just yet. I still think there's promise in the idea of prefabricated green, especially in the mainstream and affordable housing markets. As for green modernist housing, the benefits of prefabrication may never come through for such a relatively small market.

Inhabitat's Prefab Friday looked at the Cellophane House from KieranTimberlake Associates:

If its ease of construction doesn’t amaze you, consider the aluminum frame and structural polycarbonate floor plates. Or the easy bolt connections that facilitated the easy assembly and the available built-in environmentally-friendly features, and then you just might be wondering if you covet the ingenuity behind these homes.

Design blog coochicoos shared some photos from his weekend visit to Marmol Radziner's Palms House.

This month's Conscious Choice, "an enlightened urban lifestyle magazine," examines Prefab 2.0 in a recent article:

Judging by magazines, museums and word of mouth, you might think we were in a prefab housing Golden Age.

You’d be wrong — but not by much. Yes, prefab housing is getting more attention than it has for decades. And yes, beautiful prefab homes are on display at museums and design exhibitions. But just because they’ve built them doesn’t mean homeowners are coming in droves. Instead, only about 100 homeowners live in prefab homes in the U.S....

(One quibble: the estimate of 100 is only true based on a narrow definition, e.g. modernist prefab built in the last few years. We take a much broader view of prefab.)

The article included several profiles from around the US:

Chicago, Illinois

Prefab is an interesting idea and like any good academic, Chris Conley wanted to put the theory to a test. So when he and his family set out to build a weekend home in Libertyville, they decided to be their own guinea pigs.

Designer: the homeowner, Chris Conley

Venice, California

The one-story house has turned out to be the home of their dreams. The house came out on time and on budget.

Designer: Jennifer Siegal of Office of Mobile Design

Seattle, Washington

He was so convinced prefab was the future that he and his partner Bill Shepherd bought some land on Whidbey Island to try one out.

But if his experience is any example, prefab may not yet be ready for prime time.

Designer: Rocio Romero

New York, New York

Logistically, they were hoping that building the house in the factory would save time and money. But it didn’t quite work out that way, says Morrow. Getting the permits and doing the finish work, like building a screened-in porch and attaching the four modules to one another, took the same amount of time as any other house.

Designer: Resolution: 4 Architecture

San Francisco, California

"We wanted high-quality and enduring style," says [homeowner] Haney. "What we weren't prepared for was the quality of the house. I have built several houses and this is by far the best quality home I've ever lived in. It's fabulous. When you build on-site, there's little quality control. The individual contractors are all supposed to do their jobs, but the overall aesthetic is almost left to chance. In a factory, you have quality control at every step."

Designer: Michelle Kaufmann

Read the full article for additional details.

Apartment Therapy Chicago looked at Werner Sobek's R128 and H16 homes:

These structures aren't available through a manufacturer; they're custom homes designed using lightweight, modular parts. The "prefab" part of these homes lies in their skillful engineering. R218 (shown above) is made from 100% recyclable, easy-to-assemble mortise and tenon joints and bolted joints, while the H16 is made from prefabricated architectural concrete...

And Apartment Therapy New York caught The New York Times' coverage of "high-style sheds":

The focus of the story is on the immediate gratification of prefab sheds ...

Prior to the New York Times' articles, Treehugger wrote about friggebods, or Swedish garden sheds:

Dorte Mandrup Arkitekter have designed a lovely little 100 square foot cabin/office/guest room prefab that is lovely to look at.

Inhabitat's Prefab Friday covered the Danish Easy Domes:

The dome offers individuals the opportunity to build their own high quality homes, coming with pre-built wooden sections, ready to assemble on either a concrete or timber plinth. Once on site, the dome houses take only one day to raise and seal, and for domes less than 50 square foot, no crane is needed to complete construction.

On Wednesday, The New York Times filed a pair of articles on small homes. The first, specifically covered prefab sheds:

Tiny, high-style prefabricated sheds like the Kithaus have received a great deal of attention over the last year, with admiring coverage in design blogs and magazines, and roughly four times more companies producing them now than five years ago. So far, the market is still small, though a tipping point of sorts may have been reached this year, when Design Within Reach began selling the Kithaus, along with furnishing packages to turn it into an instant office, bedroom, pool house or den.

Companies and models included in that article:

• kitHAUS K4
• Modern Shed
• Modern Cabana

The second explained the "tiny house" phenomenon:

... spaces that are smaller than 1,000 square feet and, in some cases, smaller than 100. Tiny houses have been a fringe curiosity for a decade or more, but devotees believe the concept’s time has finally arrived.

Prefab models mentioned:

• Tumbleweed Tiny House Company

Marmol Radziner recently completed construction of their Palms House in Venice, CA. Here are the Open House dates:

• Sunday, September 14, 2pm - 5pm
• Saturday, September 27, 2pm - 5pm
• Sunday, October 12, 2pm - 5pm

Click the above links to reserve a slot. Space is still available on all dates.

Event better, you can attend a special session at the house hosted by firm principal Leo Marmol, FAIA:

• Wednesday, September 24, 6pm - 8pm
• Wednesday, October 15, 6pm - 8pm

An interesting story from Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana:

Michael Gibson recently finished a building prototype that utilizes prefabrication techniques in a way that has never been done before....

Gibson's plan included two standard prefab walls and two experimental walls he called lattice walls that were made of plywood instead of the standard dimensional lumber, which he said wastes materials. The lattice walls also used less material because of an assembly form called nesting, in which several lightweight boards nest together in a V-shaped fashion.

"The beautiful thing about the lattice walls and how they nested together was that they used less nuts and bolts," Gibson said. "They were also very lightweight, and the pressure from the roof was pretty evenly distributed, which prevented the structure from racking."

Most of the companies we track use a small number of accepted framing techniques. Some use SIPs:

• CleverHomes
• Office of Mobile Design

Others use traditional framing (whether wood or steel):

• Rocio Romero
• Marmol Radziner
• LivingHomes
• Alchemy Architects
• Empyrean International
• Hive Modular
• Michelle Kaufmann Designs

And a few use unique metal framing systems:

• kitHAUS
• KieranTimberlake Asociates

Worth noting: the plywood framing system used in the BURST* model, currently on view at MoMA's Home Delivery show, used a similar plywood framing system.

Inhabitat's Prefab Friday looked at the Lifepod:

Escape to the beach, the mountains or the trees in San Francisco-based Kyu Che’s sustainable Lifepod. Loosely based on the traditional Mongolian ger (or ‘yurt’ as the Russian translation goes), the Lifepod is at once organic and high-tech. Built to be highly portable, the Lifepod is a fully functioning, off-the-grid mini capsule for modern nomadic living.

Shedworking reported that Alchemy Architects are considering bringing their weeHouses to the UK:

Mark Ramuz from Garden2office is talking to them about the possibility of bringing over the smallest of their buildings if there is enough interest.

A recent email from Alchemy Architects says:

We have now included more and lowered our prices! 2,000 SF weeHouses with Good Stuff are around $125/SF or less, leaving you extra coins to put into your site.

Old pricing was in the $150/SF range, so it's quite a drop. Actual pricing depends on your part of the country.

Also mentioned:

Order a weeHouse SMALL with an off-grid Solar Package before November 1, 2008 for only $99,000 [$109,000 for CA and other states west of Colorado]. Outfitted with Fusion's 720W AC Energy Kit, you only need to provide the foundation, well, and septic to have a completely finished retreat.

Higher capacity solar kits are available for larger homes. For details: FusionModular.com.

We've thoroughly enjoyed A Prefab Project which chronicles the construction of a Resolution: 4 Architecture prefab in West Virginia. Homeowner Chris more or less calls it quits in a recent post, and I can't help but be a little sad.

Granted, the home is complete, but the blog has been such a great resource for understanding the process of building a prefab.

If you haven't taken a look at the blog previously, it's definitely worth it, especially now that the long road is coming to an end.

Well, not exactly "this week", more like "the last two weeks." Here's all the news from while I was away on vacation.

Earlier this month, architecture blog Contemporist covered some minimal prefabs from Swedish company Arkitekthus:

Their goal is to bring good design to a larger market that otherwise could not afford an architect designed home.

Inhabitat's Prefab Friday looked at Travelodge's shipping container hotel in England:

The completed design uses eighty-six containers of various sizes that were retrofitted into bedrooms and bolted together onsite. The exterior has been clad and fitted with windows, thus converting the assemblage into a seamless 120-bedroom hotel.

Inhabitat also showed off the XO Mobile Structure from 70ºN Arkitektur:

... embodies an extreme of living simply - or simply living. The gorgeous prefab features a minimalist two-room construction that comes as-is and goes anywhere you please.

The Dwell blog discussed prefab sheds:

Lately, I've been coveting a Modern Cabana or Modern Shed for my personal back-40 in Los Angeles.

Treehugger cited another Dwell blog article in a post about "park models," or trailers, and their relation to prefab:

There is a vast infrastructure of trailer parks around North America that are due for change and upgrading, and a few visionary park operators are beginning to look at the market for modern.

I am on vacation all of this week, but will be returning September 1. Look for new posts then.

The Washington Post discussed MoMA's Home Delivery show earlier this week, leading with a quite provocative line:

The architect who masters prefabricated housing -- how to make homes that are well designed, mass-produced, affordable and easy to build -- may well go down in history as the Last Architect.

Got my attention, at least. The article continues with the prodding:

As a fascinating and important new Museum of Modern Art exhibition, "Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling," makes clear, they have mostly failed. But if anyone ever succeeds, perhaps the grand challenge of domestic architecture would be over -- time's up, pencils down.

The article makes many such observations and poses a few questions:

The paradox of the prefab dream, which began with proles in boxes, is that it lingers in the bourgeois craving for luxury goods and second houses.

And so does prefab turn out to be just another designer accessory, not so different from Louis Vuitton handbags or Prada shoes, industrial status symbols that are basically the same from unit to unit? Is it true once again that the blessings of modernism, supposedly a gift for the many, are really just a prize for the few?

Some specific thoughts on the homes in the show:

the ridiculously small confines of the Micro Compact House will [not] leave you with any desire to live there.

the System3 project ... is a compelling piece of architecture by any standard.... Stand in the System3 for a few moments, and you want to live here.

In summary:

"Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling" will leave you honestly conflicted, dubious about where history has brought the prefab dream. And more than ready to move into a prefab castle, just as soon as you can buy a nice plot of land and muster the down payment...

What do our readers think about The Posts's observations? Have most of prefab's early practitioners failed? Is prefab just a "prize for the few?"

While reading the full article, be sure to check out the accompanying slideshow.

From Materialicio.us, here's a useful tip for those interested in MoMA's Home Delivery exhibition:

I just went to see the show myself this past monday, and I put the best of the photos I took up on Flickr the next day. I tagged them and yesterday decided to see who else had visited and tagged their photos with “Home Delivery”. I was pleasantly surprised to see many other photos on Flickr. A great way to get a photo tour if you can’t make it to the show.

The link: Flickr Home Delivery search

Witold Rybczynski filed a slideshow report from MoMA's Home Delivery show. In his usually candid style, he gives his impressions of the show, inside and out:

Prefabricated houses have remained an elusive goal for architects, and the MoMA show is a stylish litany of second-place finishers, also-rans, if-onlys, and downright losers.

I'd dare to say that just being included in the MoMA show makes each of the featured projects a first-place, upright winner, but maybe that's just me. Anyway, back to Witold:

After considering some 500 firms, the museum chose younger, lesser-known architects, and the range of solutions demonstrates both a sense of enthusiasm and a variety of novel prefabrication technologies.

He shares his thoughts on the BURST*008:

The rather crudely built structure looks out of place here—or, I suspect, anywhere.

The System3:

most people's idea of contemporary prefabrication: It's elegant, stylish, and rather austere.

Larry Sass's Instant House:

an ingenious and very complicated answer to the wrong question. ... The laser-cut decorative fretwork on the porch is nice, though.

The m-ch:

Nothing revolutionary here, but a very nicely designed package.

(Though he suggests buying an Airstream trailer instead.)

And the Cellophane House:

The design, fabrication, and construction are seamlessly integrated, and the various pieces are automatically ordered from the fabricator to suit the design as it is entered into the architect's computer. If there is a Next Big Idea in prefabrication, this may be it.

For the rest of Rybczynski's thoughts and some great photos, check out the whole slideshow at Slate.

The Christian Science Monitor took a look at modular homes last week, focusing on the green qualities:

This summer, two exhibitions of modular houses – at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry (MSI) and New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) – are putting a spotlight on how off-site building techniques can shrink the carbon footprint of a new house.

The article cites a number of reasons why building in the factory is a good idea:

• finish construction usually takes a few weeks, not months, saving energy by requiring fewer trips to the job site by construction workers
• by building indoors, workers can also more easily make sure that energy-saving features like insulation are carefully and properly installed for maximum effectiveness
• individual home-building companies may not have the resources to keep current on the latest "high-performance building" techniques ... but modular homes can have state-of-the-art environmental design built into them at the factory

The companies mentioned in the article:

• KieranTimberlake Associates
• Michelle Kaufmann Designs
• HOM Escape in Style
• Envision Prefab
• Cardinal Homes

Read the complete article for details.

I was away this weekend, so here's last week's prefab news a bit late. (Posted Tuesday, but dated Saturday in line with our "This week" series.)

Inhabitat's Prefab Friday looked at Marmol Radziner's new Rincon 5:

The unit was recently showcased in a Los Angeles event that explored its possibilities as a guest house, yoga studio, and home office. Want to make your new guest bedroom a Rincon 5? The basic unit costs $223,000 to be built, delivered and installed, plus the price of whichever upgrades you think your guests will appreciate most.

Materialicio.us noted that the price of the OMD showhouse in Venice has been reduced. The home (without the lot) was originally listed at $295,000, and then reduced to $259,000. Now:

reduced to $175,000

This year's West Coast Green features a new Showhouse built of containers:

At its core, the 1,700 sqft two-story home will be made of reused shipping containers, which will make construction, in any environment, sustainable, fast, and safe.

Being built right on the tradeshow floor, the home will open to a series of outdoor living spaces and decks, showcasing a dramatic outdoor kitchen ... and a stunning garden of native and naturalized plants and mature olive trees.

The stats:

• 1,700 sf
• 2 bedrooms
• 2 bathrooms
• 2 stories

Jetson Green likes it:

It's a 1700 sf container home, but you probably can't tell just by looking. Sustainability will be number one, with GreenPoint and LEED certification in the plans. Plus, it seems that ecofabulous will be doing the interior design work, so the home, you can believe, will be modish, posh, and green.

Until August 18, you have the opportunity to come up with a name:

Name the Showhouse!
We’ll pick the top submissions, and post them for everyone to vote on.
Whatever name gets the most votes, wins!
We will announce the winning name on September 1st

This year's West Coast Green building conference and expo comes to San Jose, California at the end of September:

You’ll find over 380 exhibitors showcasing the latest in resource-efficiency among a stunning array of green and healthy building products. Over 100 experts and visionary leaders will be presenting their latest developments, insights, and inspiration at the expanding frontiers of the field.

While there aren't many prefab-specific agenda items worth noting, the conference's educational agenda includes a presentation by Michelle Kaufmann on "The Art of Mass Customization".

The long list of presenters includes Allison Arieff, former editor of Dwell magazine, and even Al Gore.

The show features a Showhouse built of containers; we'll cover that tomorrow.

features: SG Blocks™ Showhouse; speakers Al Gore, Allison Arieff (former editor of Dwell magazine), Michelle Kaufmann

MSNBC's Virtual Lifestyles visited the mkSolaire in Chicago and filed the above video report. Look for:

• explanations of the home's green features
• an interview with Michelle Kaufmann
• a quick montage of the home's assembly
• various views inside and out
• a talking plant!

The price mentioned for the home: $450,000.

The Chicago Tribune visited Michelle Kaufmann's mkSolaire exhibit last week:

everything in and about the 2,500-square-foot home on exhibit just outside of the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago has been designed to show the public how easy it can be to incorporate environmental sustainability into their own abodes.

Michelle Kaufmann commented on her hopes for the exhibit:

"We tried to look for ideas in every choice that we make in our homes ... hoping that everyone who goes through it will be inspired to make some change on some level.... Some people will walk away and want to do an entire new home, or some people will think when they go for their towels next and go for organic linens."

Some of the many features of the home:

• half the energy of traditional homes
• a third of the water of traditional homes
• water from the bathroom sink is diverted to the toilet
• a bicycle in the children's bedroom must be pedaled for 30 minutes to charge a battery to power video games

Interesting:

Visitors receive a resource guide that tells about the function of each feature, how they're assembled and where they can be purchased.

e-OCULUS, the blog for the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects, criticized MoMA's Home Delivery exhibition:

Even though digital fabrication is interesting, I believe there is so much more that goes into prefab housing today than mass production. The eras represented in the exhibition are coming together to create contemporary prefabrication that exists out of necessity, invention, experimentation, as well as digital design. If MoMA had chosen to include examples of buildings that are built, or at least in planning phases ... the exhibition would have more relevance and urgency needed to put the many current prefab ideas into production.

DVICE, a blog from SciFi.com, shared some favorites from the show.

Inhabitat had a double Prefab Friday. First, they linked to ScribeMedia's video from MoMA, seen above:

Chock full of interviews with architects and led by Chief Curator of Architecture & Design Barry Bergdoll, it’s a must-see for anyone interested in a current survey of the potential of prefabricated housing.

Second, they covered the Glenburn House:

...it would be easy to miss this deceptively simple, yet elegant house nestled into the surrounding countryside. But once you have reached this beautiful abode designed by Sean Godsell it’s hard to forget it.

A useful link: Sean Godsell's site.

Jetson Green provided an update on the GreenMobile® from Mississippi State University:

At present, the university ... is trying to finalize agreements with industrial partners.

The Marmol Radziner blog has lots of news about their recently completed Palms House.

The home's specs:

• 2,800 sf
• 3 bedrooms
• 2.5 bathrooms
• living/dining, kitchen, office

KTLA, a TV station out of LA, visited the house last week and filed a number of video reports (hosted by a slightly overbearing correspondent). One is seen above. A couple others:

• the first floor (3:11)
• the second floor (2:24)
• the exterior (3:02)

Back in June (sorry we missed this!), the home was featured on Planet Green Channel's Renovation Nation:

Our episode highlights the green features of prefab building and follows the Palms House as it traveled through our factory.

Be on the lookout for a re-run in your area.

Another new book: KieranTimberlake Associates principles Stephen Kieran and James Timberlake profile the design and construction of their Loblolly House in a volume released in June:

Through the use of state-of-the-art building information modeling (BIM), the architects were able to streamline the design-build process. Thousands of parts were collapsed and integrated into a few dozen panels and blocks that slid into an aluminum frame set on wooden pylons. Consisting of 70 percent prefabricated components, the kit-of-parts house was assembled (mostly with a wrench) and lifted into place on-site in less than six weeks.

The Dwell blog approves:

... handsomely documents the entire design-build process of the Loblolly House.... I dare say this book should be required reading for all architects, contractors, and developers.

Also worth noting:

The book includes a DVD of the film "A House in the Trees" by producers Rick Deppe and Kathleen Blake, a real-time documentary of the design, fabrication, and assembly of Loblolly House.

The list price of $40.00 is reduced to $26.40 at Amazon.

See also: our page of prefab books.

Marmol Radziner + Associates released a new monograph last month. Written by firm principles Leo Marmol and Ron Radziner, the book also features a foreword by Paul Goldberger, architecture critic for The New Yorker. From publisher Princeton Architectural Press:

If you design some of the most stylish and beautiful modern houses in the Los Angeles area, including many for celebrity clients, how do you ensure that the projects are built to the standards you, and your patrons, demand? If you're the highly sought-after firm of Marmol Radziner + Associates, you do what an increasing number of practices are doing: become your own contractor, building your projects with the same rigor and beauty with which they were designed, and, in the process, remake your firm into one of the most visible and successful design-build firms in the country....

[The book] explains in detail how this pioneering design-build firm — one of the few led by architects — has managed to integrate building–installation, construction, and fabrication into one seamless design process.

Keep an eye on the Marmol Radziner blog for announcements of book signings.

Listed at $40.00, the book is on sale at Amazon for $26.40.

See also: our page of prefab books.

Very interesting -- though apparently not headed to the US. From an article in the Wall Street Journal:

Best known for its top-selling cars like the Prius and Corolla, Toyota is looking to apply its ecofriendly image and technical know-how to help boost sales of its small and little-known prefabricated-housing division.

Unbeknownst to most of us, Toyota prefabs have been around for awhile:

Since 1975, Toyota has been building steel-frame houses designed to withstand earthquakes and typhoons and keep out burglars.

The tie-in with Toyota's vehicles is certainly interesting:

Toyota's aspirations as a home builder are also gaining new importance with the planned launch by 2010 of its plug-in vehicles, gas-electric hybrid cars with powerful lithium-ion batteries that drivers will need to recharge at home. The car maker is testing an electricity-monitoring system in its homes that would charge the vehicle during off-peak hours to keep utility bills low, while the car's battery can serve as an electrical backup, powering the home during blackouts.

I can't help but quote this imagery:

At the Kasugai Housing Works in central Japan, one of Toyota's three prefab-housing factories, an assembly line of robots, conveyor belts and helmeted workers produced a steady flow of rectangular steel-framed cubicles finished with staircases, kitchen cupboards, bathtubs and toilets.

The timeline sounds right:

Most Toyota homes are made from six or more of these large cubicles, which are assembled -- like Legos -- on the building site. From its start on the factory floor to its final completion on site, a Toyota home can be built in 45 days, less than half the time it takes for contractors to build a typical wooden-frame home, Toyota says.

Alas:

Other than what it called a one-time "experiment" building a development of 50 homes near its truck plant in San Antonio in 2006, Toyota says it has no ambitious plans to build homes outside Japan.

The company's past sales leave much room for expansion, within Japan and abroad:

• 5,000 units in 2006
• 4,600 units in 2007

I couldn't find an official Toyota Homes Website, just this little tidbit from Toyota's homepage.

Read the whole article for some housing issues that are specific to Japan.

Here's a round-up of other recent coverage on Zamore Homes.

Inc.com included Zamore's pitch:

...I sell detailed designs, plus a list of materials that customers can have shipped from nearby facilities, including Trussway for building supplies and Ikea for cabinets. I was the general contractor for the first three homes, which will be on sale in Houston this summer. Eventually I'll charge $3,000 to $7,000 for the list and drawings.

materialicio.us concludes:

Pretty damn cool, if you ask me…

Dwell's blog wonders:

But is Zamore’s method the most sustainable? Michelle Kaufman, a leader in the prefab industry, argues that, in her experience, it’s more energy efficient to build offsite.

Apartment Therapy Los Angeles remarks:

Now if they could only reduce the price of the land itself here, we'd be living in pre-fab comforts!

Jetson Green covered the homes earlier this month.

A busy week!

Inhabitat's Prefab Friday enjoyed Method Homes' cabin:

we’re happy to report that Method Home’s modern wood wonder has blossomed into a beautiful home.

Inhabitat also covered HOM:

Simple, purposeful, ecological and crafted, HOM houses are meant as secondary residences; a HOM away from home to which busy urbanites can escape in style.

Jetson Green wrote about a container home in San Francisco, designed by Leger Wanaselja Architecture:

It's a simple design that shows what [is] possible with innovative home construction.

Visit Jetson Green for the full post and a bunch of photos of the home. The previous day, Preston previewed the West Coast Green showhome:

It's a 1700 sf container home, but you probably can't tell just by looking.

We'll cover West Coast Green and the showhome in more detail soon.

And a little more news on MoMA's Home Delivery show. New York's The Villager discussed the show:

“Home Delivery" ... is a coup for quality. It’s also a tour of prefab past, a spiffy toy store of drawings, models and actual toys from the century-plus history of industrialized home construction.

Business Week reran a short article from Architectural Record on the show:

One of New York's most exciting cultural venues this summer is a vacant lot in Midtown Manhattan....

Moco Loco ran a series of posts on their favorite three homes in the show. They introduced the show Monday. On Tuesday, they covered the System3 house:

Inside, its austere bearing gives way to a more luxurious simplicity...

Wednesday's post featured an interview with Cellophane House designer James Timberlake:

What will happen to this particular home on October 21? We are working on this concurrently with the show. We have discussed the possibility of auctioning the house.

Thursday's post looked at BURST*:

But marveling at the architecture is not the point of BURST*. Ultimately, the structure puts the emphasis on nature: The house’s rear elevation unfurls in a cascade of bleacher-style seating, all the better to sit and enjoy the view—out.

Last week, The Houston Chronicle took an in-depth look at Zamore Homes.

When Sears started selling kit houses by mail in 1908, the company promised that a man of average abilities could assemble any of the models in the catalog — from a small gabled cottage to a roomy Dutch colonial....

Exactly one century later, Houston architect Brett Zamore is bringing kit homes back.

Zamore assumes that the average man or woman of today has neither the desire nor the ability to assemble a home. That's why Zamore Homes will gather the materials, coordinate delivery and manage the construction process....

Some homes are local:

Zamore is just finishing construction on three kit houses in Houston's West End, on Center near Thompson.

Some not:

Mississippi native Karen Parker ... mother of six lost her Biloxi home to Hurricane Katrina ... selected Zamore's design and finally moved into her 1,400-square-feet home this past January.

The article provides a good working definition of "prefab":

In the strictest terms, prefabricated homes are built and assembled in a factory and then shipped to the property. In a larger sense, the term could also apply to homes with prefabricated parts that are assembled on site.

Zamore Homes models fall into the latter category.

In all, there are seven designs, in sizes that reach 2,200 square feet. But the KIT05 can grow as large as the homeowner wants.

Here's the models and specs from the Zamore Homes site:

• KIT00: 400 sf, 1 bedroom ("little casita")
• KIT01: 992 sf, 2 bedrooms
• KIT02: 1,250 sf, 2 bedrooms
• KIT03: 2,000 sf, 2 bedrooms
• KIT04: 2,200 sf, 3 bedrooms
• KIT05: varies
• KIT06: 1,300 sf, 3 bedrooms
• KIT500: 504 sf, 1 bedroom

Compared to local costs in the Houston area:

... new construction going for $130 to $170 per square foot.

The pricing sounds quite competitive:

Zamore's kit homes cost between $110 and $150 per square foot, which includes hard and soft construction costs. [information on hard vs. soft construction costs]

Here's our quick comparison to other kit homes:

Company	Models	Materials supplied	Advises
Rocio Romero	LV Series	only the walls and roof framing	windows, finishes and other materials
kitHAUS	k3	everything except interior fixtures (plumbing, lighting)	None
Jeriko House	Jeriko House	all finishes	None

The materials and finishes page on the Zamore Homes site is worth a look.

Read the full article for more details.

Listen (~16:00) to a broadcast from New Hampshire Public Radio about the show, featuring an interview with Stephen Kieran of KieranTimberlake Associates.

Bloomberg Television's James Russell reviewed the exhibition:

... a wildly ambitious display of the pleasures and peculiarities of prefabricated houses. The prototypes, augmented inside the museum by a rich history of the genre, capture both the earnestness of architecture's obsession with industrial technique and its faith in technology as an agent of progress.

Read the whole thing for some specific criticism -- and possible upside.

USA Today offered an overview:

an engrossing survey of the prefab movement...

The New York Times profiled BURST*08 and architects Jeremy Edmiston and Douglas Gauthier. The path to realizing the home was not an easy one:

... arranging all the parts into the right piles so they could just be snapped into place at MoMA turned into a logistical nightmare lasting weeks rather than days. While they sorted, the 15 or so architecture students on hand were trying to reassure the contractors about a model that looked as sturdy as a collapsible fan. As for the architects, they were running back and forth to their offices, scrambling to update the drawings and struggling to raise money.

The full chronicle of the home's construction is worth a read, but sadly, it sounds like we won't be seeing future prefabs from the pair:

For the two architects, however, the success is bittersweet. After nine years their partnership has ended. “This is our last project together,” Mr. Edmiston said.

New York Magazine's architecture critic also reviewed the show:

This sporadically exciting but ultimately diffuse show begins indoors, on the sixth floor, and sidles up on the present by way of the past. It opens, brilliantly, with both....an exhibit that can’t quite decide whether prefabrication should be treated with irony or exuberance.

Dwell reports:

...for those who can’t visit the city anytime soon, the museum now has an online version of the show, replete with installation videos, archival footage, and an interactive timeline of prefab housing.

Admittedly, clicking through Home Delivery can’t beat scaling the five structures that now stand in the museum’s adjacent lot. But it’s certainly the next best thing.

The online exhibition takes over the top portion of the blog. It's quite comprehensive; well worth a look.

Jetson Green wrote about Ideabox.

Ideabox has been busy adding ... Cubes to their product mix.... The cubes are 215 sf each and can be attached to Confluence Modern to grow the size a little bit.

JG also covered the Method Homes Cabin:

...Method Homes' first foray into green prefab is met with success as the home is complete -- it looks gorgeous and exudes the company's "Down to Earth Prefab" tagline. The cabin home is currently available for tours and, if you like it, you can place an order for your own.

Moco Loco also looked at the cabin:

The first prefab cabin by Seattle-based Method Homes (completed in 3 months) is based on a flexible template that allows for a full range of customization.

We'll take a more in depth look at both companies soon.

Inhabitat's Prefab Friday looked at two different unconventional prefabs. First, they covered strange treehouses from Our Planet Retreats:

Our Planet Retreats, an innovative UK-based company, is building eco-resorts in gorgeous pristine locations like the Phillipines, Vanatu, and Papua New Guinea. Visiting guests stay in simple floating spheres in the trees that are reached by spiral stairs. Crafted from fiberglass and built by locals, each sphere can accommodate up to 4 people.

They also wrote about EcoShack's Nomad Yurt:

...a beautiful soft-shelled structure that finds elegance in its simplicity.

(Dated Saturday but actually posted on Monday. Sorry for the delay.)

MoMA's Home Delivery exhibition opened this weekend. The blogs were full of coverage.

Voxant's TheNewsRoom includes a video report. (Note: the video is interesting -- but runs automatically, may be slow, and may cause browser problems.)

Zavod Big, a design blog in Eastern Europe, covered the "Touch" home from Kannustalo of Finland.

Green in Medusa featured some beautiful images of the show, plus this note:

Whether you like these architects and the concept of Pre-Fab or not the show is worth visiting.

Treehugger featured pictures last week and a look at several reviews on Monday.

Dwell shared some photos.

Core 77 showed off an image of a futuristic wall fragment at the show.

future forum 2008 included exquisite photographs, interesting discussion, and this conclusion:

HOME DELIVERY is an impressive narrative about both failures and successes of the concept. What is evident in the optics of the MoMA showcase is that prefabricated homes have evolved over the years and now come in astonishing variety and appeal to the most sophisticated expectations.

C-MONSTER.net also has photos.

MoMA's exhibition catalog is available for purchase (Amazon, sale price $29.70), but won't ship until August 1.

The catalog includes three essays:

• "Home Delivery: Viscidities of a Modernist Dream from Taylorized Serial Production to Digital Customization" by Barry Bergdoll [curator]
• "Scandinavia: Prefabrication as a Model of Society" by Swedish historian and critic Rasmus Wærn
• "Postulating the Potential of Prefab: the Case of Japan" by Ken Tadashi Oshima, a historian of Japanese architecture.

Other contents:

• "substantial descriptive texts" of each of the 63 projects in the show, written by Peter Christensen
• contributions from guest authors Robert Rubin, Friedrich von Borries, and Florian Breipohl
• a chronology of prefabricated buildings
• a selected bibliography

Sounds like a must-have.

The blogs were mostly abuzz with news of MoMA's Home Delivery show this week. We'll provide a rundown of coverage early next week.

In other prefab news, Inhabitat's Prefab Friday looked at a community art center designed and built by Studio804 of the University of Kansas School of Architecture:

...this innovative building uses modular design with the length of long truck trailers as the defining width component measure - an outside the box thinking that makes larger prefab buildings possible.

Lots more info on the project page.

The New York Times architecture critic provided a glowing review of MoMA's Home Delivery in this morning's paper:

"Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling," which opens on Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art, is a delightful surprise....In a tour de force Mr. Bergdoll [the show's curator] was able to build five full-scale model houses for the show in a lot just west of the museum. The effect is startling: expressions of a suburban utopian world surrounded by Midtown’s looming skyscrapers.

Mr. Bergdoll has not only managed to track down some unexpected gems, he has also arranged them in a way that allows us to see them with fresh eyes. He makes a convincing case that prefabricated housing was both a central theme of Modernist history and a dream that remains very much alive today.

We've provided extensive coverage of the full-scale homes; this review adds details on the accompanying exhibits:

[the show] presents more than 80 projects, from humble experiments in suburban living to stunning works of cretive imagination.

Here's a sample: (plus some external links we dug up)

• wall fragments from architects Rahim, Hina Jamelle, Jesse Reiser and Nanako Umemoto
• One Week: "a 1920 Buster Keaton film in which fumbling young newlyweds try to assemble a prefabricated house"
• the Manning Portable Cottage: an 1833 prefab that "could be conveniently packed in a ship's hold and reassembled."
• the 1931 Copper House: "designed by the Modernist master Walter Gropius. It was conceived as a system of insulated copper wall panels that could be easily transported and assembled on site in 24 hours."
• Jean Prouvé's Maison por l'Institutrice: "a reworking of his 1948 Maison Tropicale, a masterpiece of prefabricated design."
• the Lustron House: "modern technology draped as nostalgia"
• Archigram's 1965 Living Pod: "an amoeba-shaped capsule with mechanical systems plugged into the side"
• Kisho Kurokawa's Nakagin Capsule Tower, which was slated for demolition last year
• Primitive Huts by Wes Jones
• works from Greg Lynn and Teddy Cruz
• Thomas Edison's Simple Concrete House System

Read the full article for more details and a new slideshow with 12 images.

One correction to the article: the frame of the Cellophane House is aluminum not "lightweight steel."

Abilmo produces and supplies prefabricated, "pop-up" hotel rooms for large events in Europe:

Far too many events lasting only a few days are faced with the challenge of ... accommodation which cannot be satisfied by the existing hotel capacity.

The solution comes in a small, efficient package:

Each room once folded measures: 4.40m x 2.38m x .468m [14.4' x 7.8' x 1.5']

Compact loading of 18 foldable multi-purpose rooms per truck.

Each room includes most of the comforts one would expect in a hotel:

• Ceiling hung with cloth, low voltage lighting, wood flooring, furniture in wood
• Area of 12 Sqm [130 sf]
• Thermal and acoustic insulation, individual heating and air conditioning system
• Individual bathroom with WC, shower and hot water

Abilmo's concept seems to have applications beyond hotel rooms. The concept of reusability is becoming more popular; we've seen a few examples in the past couple years. Most recently, we've reported on the groHome, winner of last year's EPA Lifecycle Building Challenge and KieranTimberlake's Cellophane House. Both of these models embrace the idea of reusable building parts.

Treehugger seems convinced:

It is an interesting idea - why build an entire hotel for a big event when you can just move it around?

A video tour of the home:

Last week, Lloyd Alter wrote about KieranTimberlake's Cellophane House ... which reminded me that we hadn't yet covered it in detail. The home is one of the five in MoMA's Home Delivery exhibition.

Referencing a talk given by Steven Kieran and James Timberlake a few years back, Lloyd explained why the Cellophane House is so exciting:

I saw that prefab wasn't just about building in a factory, but was about reinventing the way we build, not just where.

...

"Chunking" is what car manufacturers do; they have subassemblies that are put together into modules, and then put together into the finished product. Builders already do a bit of that, buying pre-hung doors and nail-in windows. KieranTimberlake take it to the next level on the Cellophane House.

Visit Treehugger to read Lloyd's complete post.

Here's more info from the KieranTimberlake project page for the home:

Cellophane House is a five-story, offsite fabricated dwelling... The 1800 square-foot residence has two bedrooms, two bathrooms, living and dining space, a roof terrace, and a carport.

Like their Loblolly House, this one is designed to be easy to put together and take apart.

Cellophane House relies on a system of customizable elements. An aluminum frame serves as a matrix on which other factory made elements like floors and ceilings, stairs, bathrooms, and mechanical rooms can be attached. The aluminum structural framing is bolted, rather than welded, allowing it to be taken apart as easily as it is assembled. Moreover, this frame allows any of the walls, floors, structure, or envelope to be replaced at any time, without invasive modifications.

They describe the concept using soaring rhetoric:

A building is, at root, nothing more than an assemblage of materials forming an enclosure. We recognize that these materials came from somewhere, are held together for a time by the techniques of construction, and will at some future time transition into another state. While we tend to think of buildings as permanent, they are in fact only a resting state for materials, a temporary equilibrium that is destined to be upset by the entropic forces that drive the physical universe.

Definitely worth a view: a time-lapse video of the home's assembly.

I'll give Lloyd the final word (as I'm inclined to agree):

[The Cellophane House is] a demonstration of pushing the technological building envelope to the very edge; like so many things that came out of the space program that are now part of our everyday life, there are ideas here that in ten years will probably be part of every building.

model: Cellophane House

designer: KieranTimberlake Associates

MoMA's Home Delivery show opens a week from tomorrow so it's been getting a lot of attention around the web.

The New York Times added a little article blurb to the slideshow they posted the other day:

Even by New York City standards, it’s quite a sight. On a 17,000-square-foot vacant lot just west of the Museum of Modern Art, a mini-suburb of contemporary houses is being built — practically overnight.

Lloyd Alter of Treehugger wrote a series of posts on the exhibition:

• Monday: the Digitally Fabricated House
• Tuesday: the BURST*008
• Wednesday: the System3 house
• Thursday: the micro compact home
• Friday: the Cellophane House

HAUTE*NATURE took a green perspective.

We'll let Inhabitat's Prefab Friday have the last word:

get down to the MOMA to take in this fantastic prefab extravaganza.

We've been following A Prefab Project's construction of a Resolution: 4 Architecture home since near the beginning.

Over a year later, the home is complete and available to rent. It's an excellent opportunity to understand what a Resolution: 4 Architecture home can be. Homeowners Chris and Sarah have definitely put a lot of energy and care into the home, and it shows.

A few guests have been testing the place out over the past couple months. Chris shared some stories:

... all of the folks who have stayed so far have been superstars. John and Laura, our first guests, talked with me for an hour on the phone about their visit, and took copious notes. (And have already booked two more weekends!) Chris and Ritamary chipped in one of those wire brush scrubbers for the grill. Ross and Libby sent along a professional-quality blurb and a fancy corkscrew. And Jake, whose Herculean bicycle trip from Pittsburgh to our cabin really cannot be appreciated unless you are a biker.

Jake documented his bicycle trip to the cabin with a blog and great photos.

Our previous coverage of the project:

• the home was delivered and set about a year ago
• lessons learned in July of last year
• a budget update in August

Today the New York Times published an online slideshow documenting the progress of the homes in MoMA's Home Delivery exhibition.

Definitely worth a view.

We don't usually cover non-residential prefabs, but a quick blurb published in the The Times (UK) caught my eye last month:

Work has begun on Britain’s first flat-pack school, which is arriving in a convoy of 20 lorries from a prefab building specialist in Switzerland.

St Agnes CE Primary in Longsight, Manchester, will be built from ready-made wooden frames that cut construction time, saving hundreds of thousands of pounds. Six hundred computer-cut wooden panels will be added, to complete the three-storey building. The biggest panels weigh two tonnes and are 12m (36ft) long.

Manchester's Evening News provided a little more info and the above video:

The panels will be made in a factory near Lausanne in Switzerland which specialises in manufacturing pre-fabricated panels from sustainable forests nearby. Holes for doors, window and sockets are drilled in advance using precise cutting techniques.

Other advantages:

Designers say the specially-treated timber joists are even more fire-resistant than steel, which can buckle and break under high temperatures.

Last year we covered a house in the San Francisco area that used a similar system made by Thoma Holz in Austria.

I'm a little obsessed with the progress updates over at MoMa's Home Delivery blog. Not least: several of the videos are great -- but some of their best are hidden behind a proprietary interface.

Try this. In the top right corner of their blog, move your mouse over the image. With luck, a control bar will slide up a bit from the bottom. Click the tiny square icon on the right and notice that the hard-to-read gray text on a light gray background changes. In theory, that means you switched to another video. In practice, it's hard to tell since there's not much action in some of them.

The time-lapse installation videos are definitely worth a look -- though it would be much better if each video was in a separate post that bloggers could link to.

MIT's news office described the work of professor Larry Sass for MoMA's Home Delivery exhibition. (We covered details of his "Digitally Fabricated House for New Orleans" and the MIT yourHOUSE project back in January.)

Inhabitat's Prefab Friday took advantage of the holiday to talk about prefab and migration:

How can architecture reconcile the transborder pressures of providing adequate housing with the inevitable tides of hyper-immigration? How can it help manage the increasing sprawl of the destitute colonias swelling between the two countries? And how can we bring new models of planning and infrastructure to areas of booming migrant settlement?

Materialicio.us covered a new community of homes, built by Wieler, a company which we will cover in depth soon:

Nathan Wieler and his wife were the owners of the original Res4a Dwell House who worked with Dwell to set up the original competition, built the house, tried to sell the house but remained there, and went on to promote prefabs...

Yesterday we mentioned the EPA's Lifecycle Building Challenge. We're most intrigued by last year's winning student entry, Texas A&M's groHome:

Using a library of pre-manufactured components brought to a site and assembled efficiently, the structure is designed with a specialized bolted connector [joint] that allows for components to be unplugged easily and without damage. Radio Frequency Identification Tags (RFID) can be embedded to take inventory and check the history of components.

More detail on the "gro(w)ability" of the home:

The plug and play concept is taken from the computer industry. .... The chrysalis of this idea is in our joint, the groJoint. It is designed to receive a beam on four sides and column or foundation on the top and bottom. Connections are all bolted which allows for components to be "unplugged" easily and without damaging the component....

The Texas A&M Solar Decathalon Website has more background information on the team and the project.

A few of the prefab companies we cover already use similar standardized systems:

• kitHAUS
• Taalman Koch's iT House
• KieranTimberlake's Loblolly House
• the Jeriko House

We missed this item last year when we covered West Coast Green 2007: the EPA's Lifecycle Building Challenge. From a West Coast Green email:

... a design competition for students and professionals focusing solely on innovation regarding deconstruction and building material reuse.

And the Lifecycle Building Challenge was born! Submissions from architects, students, planners and builders poured in, ranging from de-nailer guns to radio-tagged, re-useable wall panels to design that considers reuse as it's primary function.

The awards were presented last year at West Coast Green.

The Challenge returns to this year's show. The ability to take apart a building and re-assemble it elsewhere seems like prefab in its purest form.

We first looked at the WIRED LivingHome back in July 2007. The home was open to the public in November and shortly thereafter was put on the market. According to Curbed LA:

...the home, originally listed at $4.15 million, has been re-staged and priced at $3.75 million.

Likely, the nation's real estate slump has something to do with the price revision. If you're looking for a top-of-the-line prefab though, here's what you get:

• 5 bedrooms
• 4 bathrooms
• 4,057 sf
• $924/sf

Tons of pictures are available at Redfin and on the home's own site. Curbed toured the home in November and provides some additional photos.

Our other coverage:

• Revision3's extensive video tour of the home
• webcam coverage of the install

designer: Ray Kappe for LivingHomes

The LA Times featured the above video (3:03, following a short advertisement) of the install of the Marmol Radziner prefab in Venice, CA that we mentioned last week.

Jetson Green enjoyed the video:

It's fun ... because you can see Ron Radziner's enthusiasm bubble inside as he explains one of his company's newest creations. These guys are having fun, you can just tell.

Inhabitat's Prefab Friday took a look at La Reserva:

This stunning prefab in Colina, Chile, is the work of Santiago-based architect Sebastián Irarrázaval. Despite its unique form, it is not meant as a custom design but rather a housing solution that can take shape repeatedly. Constructed of concrete, steel and timber, the 120 square meter structure (1290 sq ft) lives large with a simple geometric that is at ease with the surrounding landscape.

Plenty Magazine's blog covered the BURST* models that will be a part of the upcoming Home Delivery exhibition at MoMA:

“Everyone thinks prefab is just a big chunk of house you dump on a site and then you bolt it down,” says [designer] Gauthier. “Ours is a little bit more like an Ikea project. It’s thousands of pieces that can all be handled and stitched together on site.” Though the interior of the Burst*008 house will be modified to respond to the constraints of New York City and the MoMA’s specific building requirements, the structure will share many attributes with its Australian seaside counterpart.

Sander Architects designs homes that use prefabricated steel skeletons. The Los Angeles Times discusses the advantages of steel:

With costs below those of conventional building methods, quick and easy assembly and no termite issues, prefabricated or pre-engineered steel buildings are finding a place in the residential home market.

Homeowner Thomas Small explains part of his reason for choosing steel:

"Most of the metal in this house is recycled and will be recyclable at the end of its use in this house," Small said.

"And there's also very little waste with metal. It was made at the factory and then shipped here. There was no sawdust. No cutting," he said. "And we didn't have to hire specialized builders. It was built by the contractor who built the rest of the house, and bolted together very easily."

Firm principal Whitney Sander describes the process:

"It fits together like an erector set," Sander explained. "And it goes together in three weeks. The inside takes longer, but the prefabrication can save you months and thousands of dollars."

Some numbers from recent Sander Architects projects:

Two projects completed within the last year cost about $130 per square foot or about one-third of traditional custom residential costs, which can top $400 per square foot, according to Sander.

Small's construction costs were about $175 to $200 per square foot, compared with $120 to $350 for traditional non-custom homes, according to construction experts.

These sounds like impressive savings, though finishes and other construction unrelated to the steel skeleton play a large part in determining final construction costs. Read the complete article for more about Sander Architects and steel framing.

This last week has seen some impressive progress in the installation of homes for MoMA's Home Delivery exhibition, opening July 20.

In the video above, the System3 home hatches from its shipping containers and is craned onto its temporary foundation in midtown Manhattan. The bones of the BURST*008 model can also be seen in the video, from about 0:10 to 0:25.

Visit the Home Delivery blog for up-to-the-minute blog posts, images and videos.

The Seattle Times reported a few weeks back on an attempt by Unico Properties to bring affordable housing to Seattle:

Several years ago, Unico lost some good downtown office tenants to outlying locations. Sperling says that when he asked the companies why they were moving, they told him most of their employees spent too much time commuting and couldn't afford to live in Seattle.

So, Unico turned to modular construction:

The company retained architectural firms Mithun and HyBrid to explore whether units could be built economically that might appeal to the design, environmental and technological tastes of young urbanites.

The result: the two Inhabit prototypes. The wood-frame units were built in a factory in Burlington, Skagit County, trucked to Seattle, and lifted by crane onto the plaza at the base of Unico's Rainier Tower.

For reference: Mithun, HyBrid Architecture.

The savings?

[The Inhabit units cost] 15 percent less than a conventional project.... [and] the prototypes were built in just three weeks. Units could be put together while other work is going on at the site, and neighbors wouldn't experience as much disruption.

Features of the units include:

• 480 - 675 sf
• studio - 1 bedroom
• 62 units total
• floor-to-ceiling windows, a "green" roof to reduce stormwater runoff

Our previous coverage of prefabs being used for similar high-density developments:

• the KT2 from the new partnership between KieranTimberlake and LivingHomes
• an mkLoft development in Denver
• a prefab hotel in London

(Hattip: Jetson Green)

We've previously mentioned Mississippi's Safeway Homes in regards to their strength and affordability. The Sun Herald ("Southern Mississippi's Newspaper") explains further:

Modular homes built in north Mississippi are the first in this state to receive a Fortified Home designation that qualifies the owner for...insurance discounts once the home is properly installed.

"The desire was to build a home that was very strong, but also very low-cost to maintain," said Dan Hobbs, CEO of Safeway Homes in Lexington, Miss. "The whole purpose was to build excellent quality work-force housing. It's cost-efficient housing."

Some specifics about how the Fortified Home program works:

Safeway Homes are designed to withstand 150-mph winds. While the design has received Fortified Home approval, the designation is awarded only after certified personnel have completed foundation and final inspections to ensure each home is properly and permanently anchored, and meets elevation requirements.

To learn more about the "Fortified...for safer living®" program, visit the Institute for Business & Home Safety site. Read the full Sun Herald article for more details on Safeway Home's designation.