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By Sara Hart

Continuing Education Use the following learning objectives to focus your study while reading this month’s ARCHITECTURAL RECORD / AIA Continuing Education article. Learning Objective: After reading this article, you will be able to: 1. Discuss quality and cost issues of prefabricated housing.. 2. Explain how architects can get builders to accept innovative ideas. 3. Define different terms used for prefabricated construction.

I wanted to move to the front of the information queue,” says Michael Sylvester, who started fabprefab (www.fabprefab.com) last year as an online market-research project because he saw commercial possibilities in the suddenly high-profile modular-construction industry. His Web showroom exhibits designers on the cutting edge of prefabricated and modular construction, but only those who are doing it in the language of Modernism. The fact that he’s limited his investigation to Modernist design is the key to his business strategy. He and an increasing number of architects are discovering that there is an unserved niche in the residential market—Modern houses for consumers who can’t afford the one-off, expensive architectural masterpiece.

“There is a lot of misinformation out there about prefabrication,” says Sylvester, an Australian expatriate living in Southern California with an architecture degree and an M.B.A. Misinformation is indeed the fog that has impeded innovation in prefabrication for decades. First of all, neither architects nor consumers understand the nomenclature, and as a result, terms such as prefab, modular, unitized, or manufactured construction are used interchangeably, when they actually describe different processes (see sidebar, page 126). As a result, prefabrication has come to describe any manufacturing process that takes place in a controlled environment, usually a factory. It’s also a term with pejorative connotations, suggesting low-quality, one-size-fits-all mass production.

 

Modules of Use, Resolution: 4 Architecture Joseph Tanney and Robert Luntz invented a system for facilitating prefabrication of affordable Modern houses. Diagram: © Resolution: 4 Architecture

In contrast, the term “custom” has emerged as the requisite modifier to high-end building, the purpose of which is to identify the product as one-of-a-kind and of the highest caliber. This suggests incorrectly that “custom” and “prefab” are mutually exclusive. Prefabrication has been creeping into high-end construction for years. According to George Petrides, owner of an eponymous home-building company (www.petrideshomes.com) headquartered in New York, nearly 50 percent of all so-called custom houses have some prefabrication, usually panelized floor joists and trusses.

The case studies that follow represent a growing desire among innovative designers and their manufacturing partners to pursue Le Corbusier’s “machine house” quest, casting off preconceived notions and turning prefabrication into the preferred method of building, with the goal of capturing the affordable, middle-class housing market for the architectural profession.