“Too much energy has been expended making faux bricks and siding to mimic traditional housing,” says Wes Jones of Jones, Partners: Architecture (jonespartners.com). Dwell Magazine recently featured his PRO/con Package Home–along with 15 other groundbreaking designs–in its prefab-architecture contest. Winning entries boasted large balconies, airy floor plans and panache to spare (thedwell home.com). The breakthrough? Rather than mimicking tired styles, modern prefab proponents are rethinking the building blocks of the American home.
Inspired by London’s Container City and a Global Peace Containers school in Jamaica, Richard and Kim Markham stumbled onto one of those new “blocks”: the shipping container. Their 2,000-square-foot homes are built from four vertically stacked steel boxes–connected by a precut glass-and-metal staircase. If the Markhams get city approval, they’ll build 26 of the structures in Tampa, Fla.’s increasingly trendy Channel district, with units selling for under $100,000. (Another shipping-container home, designed by LOT/EK, is on display at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis before heading to New York’s Whitney Museum.)
Meanwhile, architect Jennifer Siegal has built a prototype home using a mass-produced steel frame from the portable- classroom industry (design mobile.com). Floors will be finished with bamboo, a sustainable wood, and walls will be composed of a recycled newspaper-based material. –And later this month Rocio Romero, a St. Louis-based designer, will begin selling a $50,000 build-your-own-house kit, featuring futuristic galvanized aluminum siding (rocioromero.com).
Of course, prefab housing is nothing new. In 1624, a group of U.S. fishermen took shelter in a wood-panel house shipped from England. Sears, Roebuck sold 100,000 mail-order homes in the early 1900s. And after World War II, visionary architects hoped the high-tech war industry would build homes for the masses. But Americans rejected the futuristic look of metal houses, and industry put its muscle into cars.
“The prefab movement is much more advanced in Europe and Japan, where resources are more limited and space is more finite,” says Peter LaBonte, founder of Modern Modular (modernmodular.com). Next year LaBonte plans to sell modular units that can be configured to a buyer’s liking–all for under $70 per square foot, about half the cost of a standard “stick built” house. “Custom modern architecture is like buying a tailor-made suit,” he says. “We want to be the off-the-rack suit with alterations.”
But interested consumers have to be patient. Large manufacturers have yet to jump onboard, so firms are still in the very early stages of production. Home buyers in a hurry should consider a partial prefab structure, like the one Mike Young built in Burleson, Texas. A Houston company precut and predrilled the steel frame. Three months later Young moved into his 1,000-square-foot home. Total cost: $120,000. “For the price of a shabby spec home, I got a beautiful, custom-designed house,” he says.
And every day, Young says, he learns another reason to love his modern metal masterpiece. Like recently, when a door-to-door termite exterminator came calling. Young told him to “bug off.”
CORRECTION In “Beyond the Trailer Park” (Tip Sheet, Sept. 15), we misprinted the address of Modern Modular’s Web site. It is modern-modular.com. NEWSWEEK regrets the error.
