Word: prefabs
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...merchandisers, not élite 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...