quare id faciam?

World of prefab

Weekly Dose of Architecture featured last week a built instance of the prefab FlatPak House by Minneapolis architects Lazor Office. The occasion for the Weekly Dose feature appears to have been CBS Sunday Morning's recent coverage of the house (along with various other new 'Design' marketables large & small). FlatPak, it happens, is also one of three prefab products being marketed via Dwell Magazine as The Dwell Homes by Empyrean. Dwell is one mag I maintain subscription to, as a relatively cheap window on currents in architecture & design, so I've noticed the prefab promotion before now; but I haven't bothered to look much past Dwell into how the market for these things is shaping up, or into info about house schemes, themselves, as they're under development.

I was interested, though, to come across in June's Metropolis – the other affordable title of the design/cutting-edge-consumption culture genre I get these days – an opinion piece that does a bit of pin-poking at the 'Dwell Homes' balloon. The article, 'Bringing back the box: Prefab is chic, but is it the answer to anyone's question?', is by Lyle Rexer, a writer covering contemporary arts (a couple of his books are to be found on Amazon), and the approach, as you'd expect from Metropolis, is hardly anti-modernist. Here Rexer's angle isn't to consider prefab as a design phenomenon, though, but to sketch it as a set of practical and, to a degree, sociological problems. (This is gratifying – a nice example I think of editorial level-headedness that seems to hold at Metropolis.) He's got an anecdote, happily, to come at the issue with (and this signals up front the limited nature of his criticism, if we're paying attention).

... Prefab would seem to be great as a starter home and even better as a second one outside the city someplace – a clean, uncluttered Donald Judd-type getaway. And who really wants to deal with architects and contractors anyway when you can get all that just by picking the house? [To keep things straight, here, we should acknowledge that's not quite the sales pitch you'd necessarily find prefab promoters making. – pb]
   Fair enough. But as I recently watched a friend become a prefab Mr. Blandings, I began to wonder how this experience could be a model for any future anywhere. He had a brownstone apartment; he wanted a loft. He had nineteenth century; he wanted Modernism. He had city; he wanted rural, and he had the land in upstate New York already. He thought it would be 'fun' and 'cheap enough to be more fun.' He picked a whiz kid engineer-architect with international credentials and lots of cachet among those in the know. Although the house was not a kit assembly, many key components – foundation, footings, floors, ceilings, wall panels – were prefabricated and delivered to the site ready to build. Prefab can, of course, mean many different things. In this case the architect even had his own assembly team to eliminate contractors altogether. And with all the money he saved, my friend assumed there would be lots of room for the customized touches that would make this his own statement.
   After nearly three years the house – a 24-by-72 foot Modernist box upon a box – was still not ready. ...

Among the false assumptions Rexer says he wants to dispel by way of his story there, 'First and foremost is the idea that you can get an architect without paying for one.' That's a point worth dwelling (ah!) on, I'd say, even if the question isn't quite as simple as posing it that way suggests.

Toward the end of the piece Rexer broadens the scope of his discussion considerably, if only by way of providing a sort of talking point.

The more serious problem with high-design prefab housing is that it is a repackaging of the American Dream – and that dream may not be environmentally affordable. Although it has a futurist appeal, prefab embodies a bourgeois aspiration [tsk!] no different from 1950s suburbia, of a discreet dwelling for everyone. Satisfying that primarily North American expectation over five decades has led us to the open-space crisis of sprawl.... It's hard to see how a landscape littered with Modernist boxes – each requiring water, a sewer, and a driveway – will be part of anyone's green revolution, even if the boxes do have eco-friendly bamboo floors....
   The limit of prefab now is the one imposed by the consumerist social model that has given it birth. On the global scale the every-man-a-Farnsworth-House-owner approach to shelter makes even less sense.

Whether or not there's indeed a Green Revolution on the horizon, or whether there's any use in framing it as a confrontation with the bourgeois or with (broadly speaking) the suburban, the direction his close indicates there does point to a good deal that might be pursued further (if one had time) concerning the promising & the doubtful potentials in this particular expression of the Modernist strand of the world of big-A Architecture.

Rexer's article isn't available to non-subscribers online, so if you want to read the rest, get yourself a June Metropolis. (Big plus: many evocative full-page armchair, desk lamp, bath faucet ads.) There is though another, shorter report on efforts to boost the prefab marketplace at the magazine's site, here, if the subject interests you. (Hey, you've read this far.)

Do at least take a look at the Lazor Office FlatPak House site (Flash). It's colorful, blocky, interactivity-heavy – absolute www candy.

posted by paul bowman @ 8:01 PM