Word: prefabs
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Most customers for the prefab meals are women. A few men show up, some with their wives as a date night. Then there are the people making meals for their elderly parents or college students looking to restock their refrigerators. Taste and convenience are the main draws. Says Laurie Stoltenberg, 40, of suburban Minneapolis, a mother of three with her own jewelry-bead business and a monthly customer of Let's Dish: "I like the idea that I'm putting a meal on the table that looks like I'm cooking from scratch--which I did, only not that night...
...number of rooms or the amount of open space the client wants." Her hope right now is that the Swellhouse designs will build for about $200 per sq. ft. But as factory systems for mass-producing house parts improve, she expects costs to come down in all kinds of prefab production. And that could mean a new world of truly affordable dwellings. "If we can come down to the range of $60 a sq. ft.," she says, "we can change the whole face of housing...
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...
Younger architects know they have to fight a stigma attached to the whole idea of factory-made housing. "With a lot of people, when you say 'prefab,' they think of mobile homes," says Rocio Romero, an architect based in Perryville, Mo. "And the prefab homes of 30 years ago were made of cheaper materials. They weren't design oriented. They were reminiscent of trailer homes." Romero rocioromero.com has just begun to produce the LV House kit. With its generous windows and clean, simple lines, the LV House is reminiscent of Philip Johnson's famous Glass House in New Canaan, Conn...
...building lot and contractor assembly, the final figure for an LV House would be well below the $337,000 median price for new homes in the U.S., though at 1,150 sq. ft. it's also just over half the median size of a new American home. Prefab houses can be cheaper because plumbing and wiring are laid in at the factory, which eliminates the services of plumbers and electricians on-site. Because prefabs take less time to assemble on-site than conventional houses, there are also fewer weather delays and contractor cost overruns...