Prefab architecture is having a moment.
and cheaper to build than traditional homes. boxabl tiny homes
They promise less waste, more sustainability,
and they have the flexibility to be shipped
to almost any location you want, which seems perfect
for a population that is able
to work remotely more than ever before.
But this isn't the first time
that prefab architecture has been talked
about as the future of housing.
So why isn't that future now?
Hi, I'm Michael Wyetzner, and I've been an architect
And today, we're gonna look at the many lives
From its ancient origins to its modern innovations,
and see why it could be the future of home building,
but it probably won't be.
First off, the word prefab is short for prefabricated,
which just means that the components
of a building are created in one place
The earliest forms of prefab housing were created tens
of thousands of years ago by nomadic peoples
around the world, including the Native American Thipi,
The Mongolian Yurt, the Sammi Lavvu, and the inuit tupiq.
Although they go by many names,
these structures are all variations on a tent,
a lightweight frame with some sort of fabric
or animal hide stretched over it.
In fact, the word tent comes from the Latin word tendere,
These 10 structures could be disassembled
and were also lightweight and easy to carry.
And the fact that they had a uniform design
and relatively few parts meant
that new ones could be created quickly
with minimal time and materials.
Later, the Romans would build on this idea,
to quickly build forts on battlefields.
And in the mid 1800s,
architect Joseph Paxton created the Crystal Palace
for the first World's Fair in London,
creating a nearly 1 million square foot building entirely
out of glass panels that were all exactly the same size,
But although this idea of prefabrication had been a part
of human history for tens of thousands of years,
it wouldn't be applied to the idea
of permanent housing in a meaningful way until
The industrial Revolution was the birth
of mass manufacturing using patterns
to make an identical product at a massive scale.
Then in 1901, the assembly line was patented
by Ransom E. Olds, the founder of Oldsmobile,
and was later famously improved
by his competitor Henry Ford,
who introduced automated conveyor belts to the process.
The assembly line was so effective
that it increased productivity by almost 500%.
And as these processes were being refined,
the housing industry found itself with a golden opportunity.
In 1848, gold was discovered in a mine
And starting the next year in 1849,
around 300,000 people moved to San Francisco
and the area around it to make their fortunes.
And these 49ERs, as they were known, needed homes,
but there weren't enough home builders locally
And so as the Gold Rush attracted people
from across the United States, the Pacific Islands,
it also created for the first time a demand
Less than one year after the Gold Rush started, around 5,000
of these homes had already been ordered
and shipped from New York to San Francisco,
and that number doesn't even include those produced
in Philadelphia, Boston, Maine, or China,
These early prefab homes were very simple.
these kit homes would become more complex, larger,
and more varied in style.
And the idea of mail order houses took off.
Among home buyers around the United States,
probably the most famous architect to design some
of these early kit homes was Frank Lloyd Wright.
This is an example of one of the early houses
which he called American System Built Homes.
And what I find remarkable about this prefabricated house
is how much it looks like all
of his other prairie style houses
that he built custom for very wealthy clients.
It's got all these great horizontal lines,
it's got the deep roof overhang,
it's got the horizontal windows that wrap around.
It's got the planters out front that sort
of transition from the lawn to a low planter
And I love that he put this what appears
to be copper edging along the roof.
In fact, the whole idea
was that he was offering a Frank Lloyd Wright designed home
at a very inexpensive price from his mail order line.
The other thing I find that's so interesting about this
is that typically Frank Lloyd Wright homes
are often in remote places, in cities,
but never clustered together like these are, on one street.
Very few of these still exist,
but there happened to be six
of them on one street called Burnham Street in Milwaukee.
And it sort of gives you a little glimpse
of what people imagine the future of housing could be like.
But Wright wasn't the only one offering Kit homes
or even the first one to do so.
By far, the largest manufacturer
of Kit Homes was Sears Roebuck
and the lesser known Aladdin company.
The Sears catalog offered a dizzying variety of styles
Well, if you ordered a home from the Sears catalog,
they would provide you with all the pieces cut to size,
including the nails and the screws
and the directions, just like a flat packed piece
of furniture that you would buy today.
Sears' Modern Homes, as they were called,
and they sold more than 70,000 kid homes from 1908 to 1942,
this entire sort of prefab package,
the homeowners still had to lay the foundation,
provide the plumbing, and provide the electricity,
and they had to do that all themselves
or pay somebody else to do it.
Which brings up a point of clarification about prefab homes.
Some types of prefab houses
are more prefabricated than others.
At one end of the spectrum,
you have these kit homes which arrive in pieces.
In fact, our firm has actually designed
a kit home of this type.
My partner, Frank Michel, devised an ingenious system
for transporting a 2000 square foot home
in a single shipping container.
Then there was a middle ground where some component parts,
even entire rooms are preassembled in a factory
and then attached on site.
And it ranges all the way to homes
that are completely built in a factory setting
and shipped to the location fully assembled.
But even this last type of home, we'll need a foundation,
a connection to the sewer system or a septic field
and electrical power from the local grid or a generator.
So let's take a look at some of these other types
with an entirely prefabricated version, the trailer.
So this is probably the most famous of the trailers
and one of the first the Airstream.
And here's everything that jumps out at me.
It's got this sort of capsule shape, it's streamlined,
and I also love that it's completely made out of metal.
It's aluminum lightweight.
It's a single axle, which is fantastic.
So it's only one set of wheels,
and it's very reminiscent of trains and airplanes.
And in fact, many early trailers were designed
to use surplus military material.
And what's totally cool about it is you hitch it up
to your station wagon and you can take it anywhere with you.
So just like the first wave
of prefab housing in the mid 1800s was fueled
by manufacturing, so was a rapid rise in the number
of people who owned cars in the United States
This meant that people could travel more often
and farther a field than ever before.
But at the time, there were relatively few hotels
and places to stay compared to today.
And that led to a demand for what was called a motor home,
which you could hitch to your car
and take with you around the country
because so many people were traveling this way
for recreation, it led to the creation of mobile home parks.
where they were originally just campgrounds
with access roads for people to park their campers.
But starting in the 1920s,
these mobile home parks became places
which led to different designs for mobile homes.
First of all, these trailer homes have no axles.
and that's because they're not meant
to be pulled behind a car.
In fact, these arrive at their site on the back
So what I love about this image is that all
of a sudden the designs
of these mobile homes have become more like regular homes.
You see a pitched roof with faux shingles on it,
and you see the screen door
and the double hung windows more like you would find
They have these access roads
where you could pull your car in into a driveway,
as you could see right here and right here.
So they're creating this village out
of these truly prefabricated homes.
So these homes were very affordable,
but quite often things that are inexpensive get associated
with things are low quality.
And the term trailer park all of a sudden got associated
which gave prefabricated architecture sort
But despite their lack of glamor,
mobile homes might be the most successful version
of prefabricated architecture we have to date.
In fact, around 6% of Americans live in mobile homes.
Another factor that makes them less attractive also
is that they're made out of metal.
to the modern mobile home included military structures
which was developed by the US Navy after World War I,
and which was in turn inspired by the British Nissen hut.
And there were many other types
of prefab homes built from excess military materials,
which used enamel coated steel for its walls
But because these are made from metal, these homes tend
and never quite caught on with the public,
despite their affordability and rapid construction times.
of mobile homes made people suspicious of the built quality
And another place where they were experimenting
with military surplus to make prefab homes was in Europe.
After World War ii, there was another surge in demand
for prefab houses as a way to create housing quickly
for homes that had been destroyed during the war.
So this is the tropical house by Jean proves.
Jean Prouve was a great French modernist architect,
with prefab construction using military surplus materials
This house was actually intended for the French colonies,
but it gives you a sense of the designs
he was creating at the time.
And what I really like about it, starting on the exterior,
is that he creates this Brise Soleil,
what we also call sunshades,
because it was intended for the tropics
to prevent direct sunlight into the inside of the house.
The other thing he does
is he has these prefabricated vented parapet panels
And I also love that he created these very simple rails
where he just takes a piece of stretched canvas
and then sort of strings it
to the metal structure almost like you would
with a sail on a boat.
So what's really remarkable about this house, as say,
compared to like a shipping container
or one of the mobile homes we looked at previously,
is this house, while it's built from a kit of parts,
is done in a much more sophisticated manner
that truly speaks to the innovative way
that Purvey designed and thought about architecture.
So what we're looking at here is one of the houses
that he built in the early 1950s
that was rebuilt from the same parts here on the waterfront
So this house was so well thought out
that it was able to be disassembled
and then reassembled all those years later.
But even though Purvey's prefab designs were beautiful
and innovative, they never really caught on
and very few of them were ever built.
But at the same time, back in California,
prefab houses would get a major boost
with the program called the Case Study Houses.
So this is the Charles and Ray Eames house.
So Charles and Ray Eames were a husband and wife, architect
and design duo who created beautiful furniture
as well as great architecture.
So the case study houses was this program that was intended
to be designs for prefabricated houses.
And so a number of very famous architects were employed
to design their version of a prefabricated house,
and then that would be used in the future
to be rebuilt again and again.
And a model of each one of these houses
was built in the Hollywood Hills of California.
And what I love about this house
is that they took component parts that you would find
or any other type of very industrial architecture.
And you could see it here with these lightweight trusses
and the steel columns and the panels,
and even expressing the required X bracing
The other thing they did, which I really like,
is they almost composed it like a Mondrian painting
in that they kept all the lines of structure black,
and they filled in most of the panels
with white and the windows.
And then they, every now
and then added a little burst of color
is warm and beautiful, and it's very affordable.
And that's because it's made out
of these very common industrial building materials.
There were many case study houses built by some
of the greatest architects of the day,
including Richard Neutra, Raphael Soriano, Craig Ellwood,
and Pierre Koenig case study program ran
from the mid '40s all the way to the mid '60s.
It never really caught on
because the style of architecture,
this classic mid-century modern, which we call it now,
didn't align with the tastes of most Americans at that time,
which was more for the traditional type of homes, colonials
and ranches and Cape Cod style houses.
And today, only the model homes that were built
for the program still exist.
Next up, Habitat 67 in Montreal.
So also in the 1960s in Montreal, Canada,
there was another attempt at solving
the affordable housing issue with prefab architecture.
And this time it was an apartment complex
by Moshe Safdie in the mid 1960s,
who at the time was a very young architect.
And this was his thesis project.
was that you create this new egalitarian housing structure
Well, I can't say enough about what a cool idea this was
and how beautifully it ended up being constructed.
And the other idea he had, which was super important,
was that he included gardens in each one so that the roof
of one unit was the garden of another unit.
And he considered that an essential ingredient
to the architecture of any home.
And these gardens give this building its unique form.
Instead of building straight up, each piece is offset
to create the space for these gardens.
So this was part of a whole movement
of utopian housing ideas by firms such as Archer Graham
But this utopian idea ran into some roadblocks.
Not only was it expensive to build,
but it was expensive to maintain,
and they ended up increasing the rents considerably.
So they never did expand it,
and they never did repeat it despite its critical acclaim
and popularity and really it's incredible
So similar to the case study houses, unfortunately,
they ended up being singular constructions
that turned out not to be for the middle class,
but ended up being for exclusively rich people.
As we've seen, prefab homes are most popular
when there's a sudden demand for housing,
but sudden demand also suddenly goes away.
Most recently, prefabbed housing surged during the pandemic
because more people were working remotely
and at the same time people were priced out
But even with all those reasons, it still only makes up 8%
of the total housing stock in the United States.
And that 8% includes all of the prefab houses
that have ever been built
and are still standing, even in Japan,
is much more popular than in the us,
it still only represents around 13%
of new construction for homes.
So why isn't prefab the future of housing?
Well, one is the extreme startup costs.
I mean, to get one built, you've gotta create a factory.
You've gotta train a workforce.
You have to get all these materials together,
and the only way to make your money back
is to sell a lot of them.
And it's unlikely you'll ever reach that economy of scale
because consumer tastes are fickle.
And not everybody wants the same type of house.
And unfortunately because they are more affordable,
people assume they're of lesser quality,
even if that's not the case.
But that doesn't mean prefab architecture
isn't worth pursuing,
even if it doesn't ever dominate the housing market.
It has many great and noble aspirations.
It reduces the environmental impact
and is a sustainable way to build,
it increases the affordability of housing
as it comes up with all these great ideas for the housing
of people after natural disasters
when their homes are wiped away.
Look at the work of Shigeru Ban, for instance,
who does these incredibly innovative designs
to house people after natural disasters.
So what do you think of prefab architecture?
Would you live in a prefab house?
Let us know in the comments below.
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