S T Y L E  &  D E S I G N
They're All Absolutely Prefabulous
Say the words prefab housing, and most people think of snap-together bungalows and log-cabin kits. But a new generation of architects is making prefab more fun
By Richard Lacayo

April 26, 2004

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	ABSOLUTELY PREFAB A new generation of architects is making prefab fun

We tend to think of prefab housing as one of those products of the industrial age, like the videophone, that the world has not exactly rushed to embrace. Americans have no problem with mass-produced cars and mass-produced coffee. But show them a house that has been manufactured in parts in a factory, then trucked to the building site for final assembly, and they start to flinch. The prejudice against prefab may date to the earliest human notions about home. Say what you will about caves, they were definitely not factory made.

All the same, if prefab has never quite arrived, it is also an idea that never goes away. In the more crowded confines of Europe and Japan, the possibilities offered by prefab are eagerly pursued. In Sweden, Ikea has sold more than a thousand of its Bo Klok ("Live Smart") prefab apartments. In London the engineering firm First Penthouse uses cranes to lower instant apartments onto the rooftops of existing buildings. And lately a number of American architects have been venturing into prefab as a way to bring clean, modern design into a U.S. housing market still dominated by retro ranch styles, sentimental Colonials and faux-Georgian mini-mansions.

"Ninety-five percent of the domestic spaces produced in the U.S. do not have the involvement of an architect," says Joseph Tanney, a New York City-based architect. "Especially in the suburbs. I call them graveyards of complacency." So Tanney and his architectural partner, Robert Luntz, have jumped into prefab full force. Their firm, Resolution: 4 Architecture (re4a.com), offers a selection of prefabricated house designs, all growing out of a few basic forms that can be combined to make simple or more complex configurations, from the Standard Bar to the 2,400-sq.-ft. Three Bar Bridge. Tanney and Luntz expect to start construction this month on the first, the 2,000-sq.-ft. Dwell Home. Because the fees for contractors who assemble the house differ widely in various parts of the country, Tanney says the price of a finished house can vary from $120 to $200 per sq. ft., plus his firm's design fee.

At this point, a little primer on prefab might be useful. At one end of the housing spectrum is conventional "stick built" construction. At the other is the mobile home assembled entirely in a factory and then delivered in one piece to your plot. In between is the world of prefab and modular housing. Whole segments of a house—picture entire rooms or halves of them—are produced in the factory. Kitchen cabinets, toilets, electric wiring, even doorknobs are all put in place before the modules are shipped out on flatbed trucks to the building site, where they are hoisted by cranes onto a foundation. Then contractors come in for a period of weeks or months to join the sections together and do whatever finishing work is required.

By the 1920s the prefab idea had seized the imagination of the great visionaries of 20th century architecture, though they approached the question with their usual indifference to public taste. The pioneer modernist Le Corbusier wrote a famous essay in praise of "Mass Production Houses." He just never got around to producing one. Geodesic-dome inventor Buckminster Fuller spent years tinkering with his Dymaxion House. But he insisted on making it circular and steel walled. Americans weren't ready for a house that looked like a flying saucer.

So it was merchandisers, not elite architects, who would be the first to exploit the potential of prefab, though mostly in traditional styles—Tudor, Cape Cod, bungalow—that would have made Le Corbusier fall on his protractor. As early as 1906, the Aladdin Company was mailing out

factory-made Readi-Cut house kits of precut, numbered pieces. Between 1908 and 1940, Sears Roebuck shipped out nearly 100,000 of its House by Mail kits. For a cost that varied between $650 and $2,500, the ambitious do-it-yourselfer received an avalanche of 30,000 pieces, including lumber, nails, shingles, windows, hardware and house paints—plus a 75-page assembly manual, undoubtedly the most welcome part of the package.

After World War II, when many defense plants were repurposing, some turned to producing prefab wall systems--enameled-steel panels that not only were easy to clean but also allowed you to attach paintings to your walls with magnets. The Jetsons would have loved it. All the same, by the 1950s prefab was in decline. Mobile homes had emerged as the more popular low-cost alternative to stick-built housing. There are still dozens of modular-housing manufacturers in the U.S., but last year they produced just 36,000 of the more than 1.8 million new housing starts nationwide.

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