Word: prefabs
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...THEY'RE ALL ABSOLUTELY PREFABULOUS A new generation of architects is making prefab more fun By Richard Lacayo...
...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...
...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...