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P R E F A B (y e s, p r e f a b) |
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Why don't we build our houses the way we build our cars? Why do we ship every little and large thing needed for a building to one spot and then employ expensive skilled laborers and machinery to put it all together there—aside from the raw visual spectacle? It's a process that makes no economic or design sense. It would be smarter, surely, to have parts of the house made where craftsmen, raw materials or factories are and then shipped and assembled on site.
Builders realized this a while ago. "Most housing that's built in America today has some prefabricated component," says David Sloan, managing editor of This Old House magazine, "from I beams made out of recycled wood scraps to whole walls with windows already installed."
The problem is that in the past, this process was associated with, well, ugliness. But designers are now putting the fab in prefab. Two books out last year, Pre Fab and the Spanish publication Arquitectura Alternativa, celebrate entirely or partially prefabricated houses around the world. Many architects are adapting some of the systems builders use. Others are more fanciful. Computerized drawing and cutting methods enable designers to create the most uncommon houses they can dream up. And one Austrian designer claims his dwelling, right, can be put together on site in as little as two
hours.
—By Belinda Luscombe
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