A blog called Greenlight has some interesting news:

The Japanese electronics giant has assembled a strategic plan to start making modular homes in about three to five years that will combine green construction along with sophisticated electronics to curb energy consumption.

While the energy savings ideas are new, Panasonic "already has a construction division that makes modular homes in Japan."

Though not likely to be coming to the US anytime soon:

the U.S. could be the last market it approaches...

Architectural Record reports:

From October 17 to 30, a temporary prefab “neighborhood” in Philadelphia will offer an optimistic view of what a revitalized city might look like in the near future. A Clean Break, curated by Minima Gallery, will be a central event of DesignPhiladelphia, an annual series of lectures, studio tours, and exhibitions organized by the Design Center at Philadelphia University.

The show will feature two actual prefabs:

• weeHouse from Alchemy Architects
• miniHome from Sustain Design Studio

Also in the exhibition:

renderings of residences designed by Gans Studio & dArchitects, Studio 804, and Interface Studio Architects ...

The exhibition is free and open to the public.

This month's Conscious Choice, "an enlightened urban lifestyle magazine," examines Prefab 2.0 in a recent article:

Judging by magazines, museums and word of mouth, you might think we were in a prefab housing Golden Age.

You’d be wrong — but not by much. Yes, prefab housing is getting more attention than it has for decades. And yes, beautiful prefab homes are on display at museums and design exhibitions. But just because they’ve built them doesn’t mean homeowners are coming in droves. Instead, only about 100 homeowners live in prefab homes in the U.S....

(One quibble: the estimate of 100 is only true based on a narrow definition, e.g. modernist prefab built in the last few years. We take a much broader view of prefab.)

The article included several profiles from around the US:

Chicago, Illinois

Prefab is an interesting idea and like any good academic, Chris Conley wanted to put the theory to a test. So when he and his family set out to build a weekend home in Libertyville, they decided to be their own guinea pigs.

Designer: the homeowner, Chris Conley

Venice, California

The one-story house has turned out to be the home of their dreams. The house came out on time and on budget.

Designer: Jennifer Siegal of Office of Mobile Design

Seattle, Washington

He was so convinced prefab was the future that he and his partner Bill Shepherd bought some land on Whidbey Island to try one out.

But if his experience is any example, prefab may not yet be ready for prime time.

Designer: Rocio Romero

New York, New York

Logistically, they were hoping that building the house in the factory would save time and money. But it didn’t quite work out that way, says Morrow. Getting the permits and doing the finish work, like building a screened-in porch and attaching the four modules to one another, took the same amount of time as any other house.

Designer: Resolution: 4 Architecture

San Francisco, California

"We wanted high-quality and enduring style," says [homeowner] Haney. "What we weren't prepared for was the quality of the house. I have built several houses and this is by far the best quality home I've ever lived in. It's fabulous. When you build on-site, there's little quality control. The individual contractors are all supposed to do their jobs, but the overall aesthetic is almost left to chance. In a factory, you have quality control at every step."

Designer: Michelle Kaufmann

Read the full article for additional details.

On Wednesday, The New York Times filed a pair of articles on small homes. The first, specifically covered prefab sheds:

Tiny, high-style prefabricated sheds like the Kithaus have received a great deal of attention over the last year, with admiring coverage in design blogs and magazines, and roughly four times more companies producing them now than five years ago. So far, the market is still small, though a tipping point of sorts may have been reached this year, when Design Within Reach began selling the Kithaus, along with furnishing packages to turn it into an instant office, bedroom, pool house or den.

Companies and models included in that article:

• kitHAUS K4
• Modern Shed
• Modern Cabana

The second explained the "tiny house" phenomenon:

... spaces that are smaller than 1,000 square feet and, in some cases, smaller than 100. Tiny houses have been a fringe curiosity for a decade or more, but devotees believe the concept’s time has finally arrived.

Prefab models mentioned:

• Tumbleweed Tiny House Company

An interesting story from Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana:

Michael Gibson recently finished a building prototype that utilizes prefabrication techniques in a way that has never been done before....

Gibson's plan included two standard prefab walls and two experimental walls he called lattice walls that were made of plywood instead of the standard dimensional lumber, which he said wastes materials. The lattice walls also used less material because of an assembly form called nesting, in which several lightweight boards nest together in a V-shaped fashion.

"The beautiful thing about the lattice walls and how they nested together was that they used less nuts and bolts," Gibson said. "They were also very lightweight, and the pressure from the roof was pretty evenly distributed, which prevented the structure from racking."

Most of the companies we track use a small number of accepted framing techniques. Some use SIPs:

• CleverHomes
• Office of Mobile Design

Others use traditional framing (whether wood or steel):

• Rocio Romero
• Marmol Radziner
• LivingHomes
• Alchemy Architects
• Empyrean International
• Hive Modular
• Michelle Kaufmann Designs

And a few use unique metal framing systems:

• kitHAUS
• KieranTimberlake Asociates

Worth noting: the plywood framing system used in the BURST* model, currently on view at MoMA's Home Delivery show, used a similar plywood framing system.

The Washington Post discussed MoMA's Home Delivery show earlier this week, leading with a quite provocative line:

The architect who masters prefabricated housing -- how to make homes that are well designed, mass-produced, affordable and easy to build -- may well go down in history as the Last Architect.

Got my attention, at least. The article continues with the prodding:

As a fascinating and important new Museum of Modern Art exhibition, "Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling," makes clear, they have mostly failed. But if anyone ever succeeds, perhaps the grand challenge of domestic architecture would be over -- time's up, pencils down.

The article makes many such observations and poses a few questions:

The paradox of the prefab dream, which began with proles in boxes, is that it lingers in the bourgeois craving for luxury goods and second houses.

And so does prefab turn out to be just another designer accessory, not so different from Louis Vuitton handbags or Prada shoes, industrial status symbols that are basically the same from unit to unit? Is it true once again that the blessings of modernism, supposedly a gift for the many, are really just a prize for the few?

Some specific thoughts on the homes in the show:

the ridiculously small confines of the Micro Compact House will [not] leave you with any desire to live there.

the System3 project ... is a compelling piece of architecture by any standard.... Stand in the System3 for a few moments, and you want to live here.

In summary:

"Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling" will leave you honestly conflicted, dubious about where history has brought the prefab dream. And more than ready to move into a prefab castle, just as soon as you can buy a nice plot of land and muster the down payment...

What do our readers think about The Posts's observations? Have most of prefab's early practitioners failed? Is prefab just a "prize for the few?"

While reading the full article, be sure to check out the accompanying slideshow.

The Christian Science Monitor took a look at modular homes last week, focusing on the green qualities:

This summer, two exhibitions of modular houses – at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry (MSI) and New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) – are putting a spotlight on how off-site building techniques can shrink the carbon footprint of a new house.

The article cites a number of reasons why building in the factory is a good idea:

• finish construction usually takes a few weeks, not months, saving energy by requiring fewer trips to the job site by construction workers
• by building indoors, workers can also more easily make sure that energy-saving features like insulation are carefully and properly installed for maximum effectiveness
• individual home-building companies may not have the resources to keep current on the latest "high-performance building" techniques ... but modular homes can have state-of-the-art environmental design built into them at the factory

The companies mentioned in the article:

• KieranTimberlake Associates
• Michelle Kaufmann Designs
• HOM Escape in Style
• Envision Prefab
• Cardinal Homes

Read the complete article for details.

Very interesting -- though apparently not headed to the US. From an article in the Wall Street Journal:

Best known for its top-selling cars like the Prius and Corolla, Toyota is looking to apply its ecofriendly image and technical know-how to help boost sales of its small and little-known prefabricated-housing division.

Unbeknownst to most of us, Toyota prefabs have been around for awhile:

Since 1975, Toyota has been building steel-frame houses designed to withstand earthquakes and typhoons and keep out burglars.

The tie-in with Toyota's vehicles is certainly interesting:

Toyota's aspirations as a home builder are also gaining new importance with the planned launch by 2010 of its plug-in vehicles, gas-electric hybrid cars with powerful lithium-ion batteries that drivers will need to recharge at home. The car maker is testing an electricity-monitoring system in its homes that would charge the vehicle during off-peak hours to keep utility bills low, while the car's battery can serve as an electrical backup, powering the home during blackouts.

I can't help but quote this imagery:

At the Kasugai Housing Works in central Japan, one of Toyota's three prefab-housing factories, an assembly line of robots, conveyor belts and helmeted workers produced a steady flow of rectangular steel-framed cubicles finished with staircases, kitchen cupboards, bathtubs and toilets.

The timeline sounds right:

Most Toyota homes are made from six or more of these large cubicles, which are assembled -- like Legos -- on the building site. From its start on the factory floor to its final completion on site, a Toyota home can be built in 45 days, less than half the time it takes for contractors to build a typical wooden-frame home, Toyota says.

Alas:

Other than what it called a one-time "experiment" building a development of 50 homes near its truck plant in San Antonio in 2006, Toyota says it has no ambitious plans to build homes outside Japan.

The company's past sales leave much room for expansion, within Japan and abroad:

• 5,000 units in 2006
• 4,600 units in 2007

I couldn't find an official Toyota Homes Website, just this little tidbit from Toyota's homepage.

Read the whole article for some housing issues that are specific to Japan.

A busy week!

Inhabitat's Prefab Friday enjoyed Method Homes' cabin:

we’re happy to report that Method Home’s modern wood wonder has blossomed into a beautiful home.

Inhabitat also covered HOM:

Simple, purposeful, ecological and crafted, HOM houses are meant as secondary residences; a HOM away from home to which busy urbanites can escape in style.

Jetson Green wrote about a container home in San Francisco, designed by Leger Wanaselja Architecture:

It's a simple design that shows what [is] possible with innovative home construction.

Visit Jetson Green for the full post and a bunch of photos of the home. The previous day, Preston previewed the West Coast Green showhome:

It's a 1700 sf container home, but you probably can't tell just by looking.

We'll cover West Coast Green and the showhome in more detail soon.

And a little more news on MoMA's Home Delivery show. New York's The Villager discussed the show:

“Home Delivery" ... is a coup for quality. It’s also a tour of prefab past, a spiffy toy store of drawings, models and actual toys from the century-plus history of industrialized home construction.

Business Week reran a short article from Architectural Record on the show:

One of New York's most exciting cultural venues this summer is a vacant lot in Midtown Manhattan....

Moco Loco ran a series of posts on their favorite three homes in the show. They introduced the show Monday. On Tuesday, they covered the System3 house:

Inside, its austere bearing gives way to a more luxurious simplicity...

Wednesday's post featured an interview with Cellophane House designer James Timberlake:

What will happen to this particular home on October 21? We are working on this concurrently with the show. We have discussed the possibility of auctioning the house.

Thursday's post looked at BURST*:

But marveling at the architecture is not the point of BURST*. Ultimately, the structure puts the emphasis on nature: The house’s rear elevation unfurls in a cascade of bleacher-style seating, all the better to sit and enjoy the view—out.

Last week, The Houston Chronicle took an in-depth look at Zamore Homes.

When Sears started selling kit houses by mail in 1908, the company promised that a man of average abilities could assemble any of the models in the catalog — from a small gabled cottage to a roomy Dutch colonial....

Exactly one century later, Houston architect Brett Zamore is bringing kit homes back.

Zamore assumes that the average man or woman of today has neither the desire nor the ability to assemble a home. That's why Zamore Homes will gather the materials, coordinate delivery and manage the construction process....

Some homes are local:

Zamore is just finishing construction on three kit houses in Houston's West End, on Center near Thompson.

Some not:

Mississippi native Karen Parker ... mother of six lost her Biloxi home to Hurricane Katrina ... selected Zamore's design and finally moved into her 1,400-square-feet home this past January.

The article provides a good working definition of "prefab":

In the strictest terms, prefabricated homes are built and assembled in a factory and then shipped to the property. In a larger sense, the term could also apply to homes with prefabricated parts that are assembled on site.

Zamore Homes models fall into the latter category.

In all, there are seven designs, in sizes that reach 2,200 square feet. But the KIT05 can grow as large as the homeowner wants.

Here's the models and specs from the Zamore Homes site:

• KIT00: 400 sf, 1 bedroom ("little casita")
• KIT01: 992 sf, 2 bedrooms
• KIT02: 1,250 sf, 2 bedrooms
• KIT03: 2,000 sf, 2 bedrooms
• KIT04: 2,200 sf, 3 bedrooms
• KIT05: varies
• KIT06: 1,300 sf, 3 bedrooms
• KIT500: 504 sf, 1 bedroom

Compared to local costs in the Houston area:

... new construction going for $130 to $170 per square foot.

The pricing sounds quite competitive:

Zamore's kit homes cost between $110 and $150 per square foot, which includes hard and soft construction costs. [information on hard vs. soft construction costs]

Here's our quick comparison to other kit homes:

Company	Models	Materials supplied	Advises
Rocio Romero	LV Series	only the walls and roof framing	windows, finishes and other materials
kitHAUS	k3	everything except interior fixtures (plumbing, lighting)	None
Jeriko House	Jeriko House	all finishes	None

The materials and finishes page on the Zamore Homes site is worth a look.

Read the full article for more details.

Listen (~16:00) to a broadcast from New Hampshire Public Radio about the show, featuring an interview with Stephen Kieran of KieranTimberlake Associates.

Bloomberg Television's James Russell reviewed the exhibition:

... a wildly ambitious display of the pleasures and peculiarities of prefabricated houses. The prototypes, augmented inside the museum by a rich history of the genre, capture both the earnestness of architecture's obsession with industrial technique and its faith in technology as an agent of progress.

Read the whole thing for some specific criticism -- and possible upside.

USA Today offered an overview:

an engrossing survey of the prefab movement...

The New York Times profiled BURST*08 and architects Jeremy Edmiston and Douglas Gauthier. The path to realizing the home was not an easy one:

... arranging all the parts into the right piles so they could just be snapped into place at MoMA turned into a logistical nightmare lasting weeks rather than days. While they sorted, the 15 or so architecture students on hand were trying to reassure the contractors about a model that looked as sturdy as a collapsible fan. As for the architects, they were running back and forth to their offices, scrambling to update the drawings and struggling to raise money.

The full chronicle of the home's construction is worth a read, but sadly, it sounds like we won't be seeing future prefabs from the pair:

For the two architects, however, the success is bittersweet. After nine years their partnership has ended. “This is our last project together,” Mr. Edmiston said.

New York Magazine's architecture critic also reviewed the show:

This sporadically exciting but ultimately diffuse show begins indoors, on the sixth floor, and sidles up on the present by way of the past. It opens, brilliantly, with both....an exhibit that can’t quite decide whether prefabrication should be treated with irony or exuberance.

The New York Times architecture critic provided a glowing review of MoMA's Home Delivery in this morning's paper:

"Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling," which opens on Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art, is a delightful surprise....In a tour de force Mr. Bergdoll [the show's curator] was able to build five full-scale model houses for the show in a lot just west of the museum. The effect is startling: expressions of a suburban utopian world surrounded by Midtown’s looming skyscrapers.

Mr. Bergdoll has not only managed to track down some unexpected gems, he has also arranged them in a way that allows us to see them with fresh eyes. He makes a convincing case that prefabricated housing was both a central theme of Modernist history and a dream that remains very much alive today.

We've provided extensive coverage of the full-scale homes; this review adds details on the accompanying exhibits:

[the show] presents more than 80 projects, from humble experiments in suburban living to stunning works of cretive imagination.

Here's a sample: (plus some external links we dug up)

• wall fragments from architects Rahim, Hina Jamelle, Jesse Reiser and Nanako Umemoto
• One Week: "a 1920 Buster Keaton film in which fumbling young newlyweds try to assemble a prefabricated house"
• the Manning Portable Cottage: an 1833 prefab that "could be conveniently packed in a ship's hold and reassembled."
• the 1931 Copper House: "designed by the Modernist master Walter Gropius. It was conceived as a system of insulated copper wall panels that could be easily transported and assembled on site in 24 hours."
• Jean Prouvé's Maison por l'Institutrice: "a reworking of his 1948 Maison Tropicale, a masterpiece of prefabricated design."
• the Lustron House: "modern technology draped as nostalgia"
• Archigram's 1965 Living Pod: "an amoeba-shaped capsule with mechanical systems plugged into the side"
• Kisho Kurokawa's Nakagin Capsule Tower, which was slated for demolition last year
• Primitive Huts by Wes Jones
• works from Greg Lynn and Teddy Cruz
• Thomas Edison's Simple Concrete House System

Read the full article for more details and a new slideshow with 12 images.

One correction to the article: the frame of the Cellophane House is aluminum not "lightweight steel."

We've previously mentioned Mississippi's Safeway Homes in regards to their strength and affordability. The Sun Herald ("Southern Mississippi's Newspaper") explains further:

Modular homes built in north Mississippi are the first in this state to receive a Fortified Home designation that qualifies the owner for...insurance discounts once the home is properly installed.

"The desire was to build a home that was very strong, but also very low-cost to maintain," said Dan Hobbs, CEO of Safeway Homes in Lexington, Miss. "The whole purpose was to build excellent quality work-force housing. It's cost-efficient housing."

Some specifics about how the Fortified Home program works:

Safeway Homes are designed to withstand 150-mph winds. While the design has received Fortified Home approval, the designation is awarded only after certified personnel have completed foundation and final inspections to ensure each home is properly and permanently anchored, and meets elevation requirements.

To learn more about the "Fortified...for safer living®" program, visit the Institute for Business & Home Safety site. Read the full Sun Herald article for more details on Safeway Home's designation.

We've covered the Empyrean NextHouse in Silicon Valley before; here's a new story about the home from the San Jose Mercury News:

The 2,400-square-foot house was built in panels by manufacturer Empyrean at its factory in Acton, Mass., shipped to the Bay Area and assembled on-site. It incorporates energy-efficient technology and sustainable materials and is the seventh in a series called the NextHouse; the project has been a collaboration with San Francisco-based Dwell magazine, which has 12 more under way across the country.

Lots of people think prefab equals one-size-fits-all.

"Prefab is somewhere in the middle between the builder home, which is like a pair of jeans that's made for the average person, and the custom home, which is like a couture item," says Sam Grawe, editor in chief at Dwell, which has been promoting modern prefab architecture since its debut more than seven years ago.

"Prefab gives you the opportunity to design your own home but also has the efficiencies of the builder's model."

Via the American Chronicle:

...This Old House partners with custom homebuilding company, Bensonwood, to build a new timberframe home.... Cutting-edge techniques, including extensive uses of prefabrication and green technologies, will be implemented to construct a new home on property owned by the Favat family in Weston, Massachusetts....

As both the architectural firm and prefabricator on the project, Bensonwood will build 75 percent of the house in a controlled workshop environment. Entire wall systems and room modules will be built, outfitted for plumbing and wiring, with windows and finishes added, in many cases, right in the workshop. Additionally, the timberframe will be created using traditional hand-craftsmanship, as well as the latest computer-aided woodworking technology, providing a level of structural integrity that will last hundreds of years. Many of the home's components will be assembled onsite by crane over a three-week period in early June....

Thisoldhouse.com will feature progress of the Weston project 24/7 through four Webcams powered by EarthCam....

More info on Bensonwood is available at their website.

Also worth a mention: This Old House has a blog, Old House My House, which will be a great place to keep track of the progress of the Weston prefab.

Back in March, Maryland's Gazette.net reported:

Amid today’s gloom and doom in the housing industry, Vince and Stephanie Scuderi are happy — finally — to talk about building their dream home.

They chose a modular home design, an alternative construction method that can save time and money....

The house was together within hours, with all the major workings in place, including framing, drywall, roofing, plumbing, electrical wiring, cabinetry and trim.

‘‘The only problem sometimes raised by the homeowner is that they see it assembled in one or two days, then wonder why it takes another 90 to 120 days to finish,” Dean said. After assembly, much work remains, including well, septic and other utility hookups, porches and decks, driveways and landscaping.

Manufacturer: North American Housing Corp.

The full article has more details and images.

The Santa Cruz Sentinel reports:

Technology entrepreneur Philippe Kahn has taken home construction, environmental stewardship and style to a new level.

Kahn ... had his new home near the Santa Cruz Small Craft Harbor trucked in from Los Angeles.

The prefabricated house was delivered last week in 18 pieces, each wrapped in white plastic and stored in the harbor parking lot. By today, the pieces, made of steel and glass, will be fit together like a puzzle to make a 3,200-square-foot, three-bedroom home on Fairview Place....

Kahn's home was constructed by Marmol Radziner, a Los Angeles architectural firm that specializes in custom, green modern homes built with prefabricated technologies.

Read the full article for more details and additional photos.

This article is too good to excerpt. 14 questions; interesting answers. Go read it!

We previously reported on Frank Lloyd Wright's prefab Duncan House. The New York Times travel section picks up the story:

We were inside the work of the master. Like any Frank Lloyd Wright house, this one was immediately recognizable.

And briefly, it was ours. The Duncan House is a vacation rental, one of half a dozen Wright houses where paying guests can move in for a weekend or a few days and pretend to be home.

Read the full article for details on the other Wright houses (though the Duncan house is the only prefab).

We've covered prefab hotel rooms in Amsterdam. Now Reuters UK reports:

You see a vacant east London building lot paved over with asphalt and used as a car park. Tim [Pyne] sees the site of a rack-'em, stack-'em prefab temporary designer boutique hotel.

An architect with years of experience designing temporary buildings for exhibitions, [Pyne] says prefab is the answer for a city like London, where quick development means a shortage of space, and shabby areas are suddenly chic.

His design is called the M-Hotel and it consists of a steel frame with trailer-style mobile homes fitted out with designer furnishings, stacked four high...

Jetson Green says:

I love the possibilities and ideas ... it's cool and innovative. The m-hotel is designed as a series of steel-framed slot boxes that slide into the frame (which makes for easy dismantling in the future). 

Also from Tim Pyne: The m-house.

We reported last year on retailer IKEA's prefab homes. More from The Guardian:

Britain's first "Ikealand" opened its metal-panelled pine doors yesterday in an experiment designed to spread the company's off-the-shelf principle from wardrobes and sofas to entire houses.

The first of 93 flatpack homes designed and equipped by the household goods store went on show in Gateshead on Tyneside, where scores of would-be buyers are being vetted to ensure that their savings and income are modest enough to qualify....

Prices on the cul-de-sac off Marigold Avenue, where each unit comes with 22 Skimmia shrubs and an apple tree in the garden, range from £99,500 [$198,000] for a one-bedroom flat to £149,000 [$295,000] for a three-bedroom house...

Treehugger adds:

Seen as a way for them to get onto the property ladder, these houses will sell for $260,000 for a two bedroom townhouse. Assembled in a factory nearby, they get to the site ready to be bolted together and take about 16 weeks from start to completion.

The system is called BoKlok (Ikea speak for smart living) and was developed in conjunction with Ikea.

I did a little research on prices in the area; these look competitive.

From last month's Boston Globe:

...a three-bedroom, 2-bath home built in pieces in a factory and assembled onsite in less than a day - opens to the public today...

It is the latest output from PowerHouse Enterprises, a Lawrence company out to extend the conventions of "eco-friendly" to include economical as well as ecological aspects....

The full article has the details.