Why Prefab Architecture Could Be the Future – But Probably Won’t Be | Architectural Digest

Prefab architecture is having a moment. Prefab homes are faster and cheaper to build than traditional 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 Weitzner, and I've been an architect for over 35 years. And today, we're gonna look at the many lives of prefab architecture. 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 and assembled in another. The earliest forms of prefab housing were created tens of thousands of years ago by nomadic peoples around the world, including the Native American Tipi, the Mongolian Yurt, the Sami Lavu, and the Inuit Tupik. 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, which means to stretch. These tent structures could be disassembled and reassembled quickly, 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, creating wooden prefabricated panels 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 one million square foot building entirely out of glass panels that were all exactly the same size, 10 inches by 49 inches. 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 after the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution was the birth of mass manufacturing, using patterns and specialized equipment 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 in Northern California. 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 to meet the demand. And so, as the gold rush attracted people from across the United States, the Pacific Islands, South America, and Asia, it also created, for the first time, a demand for prefab housing. 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. Often called kit homes, these early prefab homes were very simple. After the gold rush, 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 that he designed, 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 to a higher 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. That was his pitch. 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 imagined 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 and sizes of homes. 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 pack piece of furniture that you would buy today. Sears Modern Homes, as they were called, offered over 370 designs. And they sold more than 70,000 kit homes from 1908 to 1942, ranging from simple bungalows to large multi-story colonials. So although they provided this entire sort of prefab package, the homeowner 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 Michelli, devised an ingenious system for transporting a 2,000 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 will need a foundation, a connection to the sewer system or a septic field, and electrical power from a local grid or a generator. So let's take a look at some of these other types of prefab houses, starting 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 in the early 1900s. This meant that people could travel more often and farther afield 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. These started in California, 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 for permanent residents, which led to different designs for mobile homes. First of all, these trailer homes have no axles. They have no wheels. And that's because they're not meant to be pulled behind a car. In fact, these arrive at their site on the back of a flatbed truck. 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 in an actual house. They have these access roads where you can pull your car into a driveway, as you can 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 that are low-quality. And the term trailer park all of a sudden got associated with low-quality homes, which gave prefabricated architecture sort of a bad reputation. 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. One of the predecessors to the modern mobile home included military structures like the Quonset Hut, which was developed by the U.S. 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, including lustron houses, which used enamel-coated steel for its walls, and shipping container homes. But because these are made from metal, these homes tend to have poor insulation and never quite caught on with the public despite their affordability and rapid construction times. And the negative reputation of mobile homes made people suspicious of the built quality of prefabricated housing compared to traditional site-built homes. 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 Maison Tropicale by Jean Prouvé. Jean Prouvé was a great French modernist architect, and he experimented with prefab construction using military surplus materials after World War II. 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 to create this balcony. 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 Prouvé 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 in Queens in 2007. 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 Prouvé's prefab designs were beautiful and innovative, they never really caught on with the French public 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 to build factories or any other type of very industrial architecture. And you can see it here with these lightweight trusses and the steel columns and the panels, and even expressing the required X bracing for the structure. 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. It's 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, Rafael Soriano, Craig Elwood, 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 using modular units. So Habitat 67 was designed by Moshe Safdie in the mid-1960s, who at the time was a very young architect and this was his thesis project. And his idea was that you create this new egalitarian housing structure using prefabricated units. 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 Archagram and Superstudio. 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 and innovative design. 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, prefab housing surged during the pandemic, because more people were working remotely. And at the same time, people were priced out of traditional homes. 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, where prefab architecture 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 got to create a factory, you've got to 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.