Note: As part of a brief summer break from cars and roadside architecture, we're having a look at mobile homes and their prefabricated relatives. Looking at an Airstream trailer, it dawned on me that this congenial, familiar form has been a part of the environment for as long as even our oldest citizens can remember...long enough that lots of people don't notice it anymore; it's something like the Swiss Army knife of trailers. In Part One, we retraced the Airstream history. Here in Part Two, we'll have a look at some innovative prefab and modular solutions to the problem of affordable housing. Let's travel back in time to the beginnings of a sharp economic downturn, as the sun set on the housing bubble...
During the autumn of 2008, as the Great Recession began to have its affect on the world beyond the housing industry, I had a look at two museum exhibits encompassing mobile and prefabricated housing solutions. The first stop on my eastward trek from Boulder was Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry, which had assembled Bay Area architect Michelle Kaufmann's two-story, prefabricated, solar-powered Smart Home, billed as Chicago's Greenest Home. Kaufmann's Oakland firm was responsible for the design and construction of about 40 prefab houses beginning in 2004. Her Smart Home featured an impressive energy efficiency rating, generous glazed areas, and cubic forms redolent of the design themes already familiar to readers of Dwell magazine...
During the autumn of 2008, as the Great Recession began to have its affect on the world beyond the housing industry, I had a look at two museum exhibits encompassing mobile and prefabricated housing solutions. The first stop on my eastward trek from Boulder was Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry, which had assembled Bay Area architect Michelle Kaufmann's two-story, prefabricated, solar-powered Smart Home, billed as Chicago's Greenest Home. Kaufmann's Oakland firm was responsible for the design and construction of about 40 prefab houses beginning in 2004. Her Smart Home featured an impressive energy efficiency rating, generous glazed areas, and cubic forms redolent of the design themes already familiar to readers of Dwell magazine...
My next stop was New York City's Museum of Modern Art, where a more diverse, multifaceted exhibit called "Home Delivery" chronicled architects' attempts to explore the potential of prefabricated construction techniques and modular forms (including stackable ones), and the possibilities of what were then becoming known as Tiny Houses. In addition to gallery exhibits encapsulating prefab design history in architect's models, drawings and photos, "Home Delivery" featured no less than five prototype home designs commissioned by the museum from an international field of architects and erected on a lot next to MOMA...
This photo attempts to capture the variety and ideological ferment conveyed by this exhibit. On the left we see Kieran Timberlake Associates' 5-story modular Cellophane House, with lightweight metal structure and bolted connections*. The Cellophane scheme placed great value on ease and speed of assembly, and seemed to draw inspiration from commonly available products like Unistrut display systems. Barely visible to the right of Cellophane House is the Micro Compact Home (a favorite; we'll get there) and then the low, minimalist shoebox of the Austrian System 3 House, with the Burst 008 Beach House in the right foreground. The two-story Burst 008 aimed at using digital technology to minimize waste; the fractal composition of layered planes was computer-generated, and guided the cutting of around 200 plywood sheets. Design was by Jeremy Edmiston and Douglas Gauthier.
The Micro Compact by Horden Cherry Lee Architects and Haack & Hopfner Architects, with its crisp, mass-producible, literally cubic form and communications mast with solar panels, seemed to fill the need for housing modules which could be helicoptered into disaster areas as instant habitat for emergency workers (the exhibit followed Hurricane Katrina by 2 years). But it was also envisioned as instant student or vacation housing. Inside, no opportunity for multiple, overlapping uses or fold-away work surfaces was wasted. This version of Micro Compact has steel panels; some later versions were constructed of aluminum to save weight. Below, Micro Compact is viewed through the enormous window wall of System 3, which was designed by Oskar Kaufmann and Albert Ruf to be delivered within the confines of a shipping container.
The Cellophane House featured translucent polycarbonate stair treads and landings to go with the visible copper lattice of PV cells integrated into its window walls...
The Digitally Fabricated Housing for New Orleans below, designed by Lawrence Sass, was a noble attempt at using technology to fill the post-Katrina housing void in that city. It was designed to be assembled by the housing consumer and could allegedly be knocked together with a rubber mallet. Also part of the concept was the idea of shipping the digital cutting machine with the material for the house. I wondered, though, whether technology might better be used in tooling up for a more universal housing solution (perhaps something between the tiny Micro Compact and the ambitious Cellophane) than in generating unconvincing, two-dimensional looking Victorian ornament.
Meanwhile, unbeknownst to me, a team of faculty and student architects advised by Michael Hughes at University of Colorado in Boulder was re-imagining the space and form of the long-neglected mobile home, and also having a look at how mobile home parks might better meet the needs of housing consumers. Boulder's Mapleton Mobile Home Park had been purchased by local non-profit TCH in 2002 to insure an island of affordable housing in a very expensive housing market. A core concept of the project is ownership of the individual plots of land by the residents. This potentially erases the trap of high land rental costs, coupled with depreciating, energy-inefficient trailers which often confronts residents of conventional mobile home parks. The team's design for their Trailer Wrap house prioritized the sense of place and home related to a specific site; if your house is not going anywhere after all, it's that spatial relationship that matters, not the wheels. On a standard 25 x 75 foot mobile home lot, the team gutted and retrofitted a donated 1965 mobile home from top to bottom, with a new shed roof over wraparound clerestory windows sheltering a new open-plan space, new finishes inside and out, and an expansion of the interior living space into an "outdoor living room" with privacy provided by a network of wood slats. The roof slopes down to the south for a future PV array, and the long north elevation allows indirect lighting through the clerestories.
The light and airy open plan positioned the sleeping and living / dining spaces at opposite ends, linked by a plumbing core servicing the bathroom and kitchen. As with the houses on exhibit at MOMA, spaces and possible uses overlapped where possible and recognized the changing boundaries of work and home, including provisions for a kitchen / office duality.
The Trailer Wrap project occupied five semesters for the faculty* (Michael Hughes, Bruce Wrightsman, Peter Schneider and Willem van Vliet) and students involved, and construction cost was $46,000...
Meanwhile, in Finland, a culture and economy where prefabricated housing was already firmly established, Heikkinen-Komonen Architects proposed the Touch House, manufactured housing with a similar articulation of private indoor-outdoor space to the Trailer Wrap, but without the trailer ...
And reflecting the fact that Scandinavians already had a substantial lead on the Americans in prefab technology and acceptance, so much so that IKEA offers lines of prefabricated houses in its stores there...
Epilogue: Michele Kaufmann Design's prefab home operation closed its doors in May 2009, a victim of the financial crisis. Banks, which during the housing bubble period had been eager to provide mortgages on scanty evidence of applicant's income or even jobs, were suddenly nervous about providing loans for prefabricated homes. Despite a history grounded in Sears Roebuck's early 20th century marketing of kit houses (the subject of a future essay), prefabricated and modular houses have struggled for market share in the USA. As the US economy began to emerge from the Great Recession in 2011, only about 46,000 prefab houses were in use nationally, as compared to around 130,500,000 conventional houses*. When you compare this figure with the 70 percent share of all housing in Sweden, you wonder what factors may be in play to explain the fact that Scandinavians apparently like prefabs over two hundred times as well as Americans. We'll explore possible reasons when we review the history in Part 3.
*Footnotes: Figures on numbers of prefab vs. conventional houses are from Wikipedia. The Trailer Wrap project is detailed by Michael Hughes and Bruce Wrightsman in Oz, Volume 28, Article 4 dated Jan. 1, 2006, "Trailer Wrap: Re-Fabricating Manufactured Housing", from newprairiepress.org.
*Errata: Like the New York Times, I originally reported that Cellophane house was 4 stories and steel-framed. Kieran Timberlake's website notes that it was built from off-the-shelf aluminum framing components using custom steel connectors, and was 80 percent complete within 6 days. Like the Times reporter, I failed to visit the penthouse floor and terrace; Kieran Timberlake correctly counts it as the 5th story.
Photo Credits:
All photos of Chicago and New York exhibits: the author
CU Trailer Wrap project: Michael DeLeon Photo, reproduced by plastolux.com
Touch House (bottom photo): Heikkinen-Komonen Architects, Finland
This photo attempts to capture the variety and ideological ferment conveyed by this exhibit. On the left we see Kieran Timberlake Associates' 5-story modular Cellophane House, with lightweight metal structure and bolted connections*. The Cellophane scheme placed great value on ease and speed of assembly, and seemed to draw inspiration from commonly available products like Unistrut display systems. Barely visible to the right of Cellophane House is the Micro Compact Home (a favorite; we'll get there) and then the low, minimalist shoebox of the Austrian System 3 House, with the Burst 008 Beach House in the right foreground. The two-story Burst 008 aimed at using digital technology to minimize waste; the fractal composition of layered planes was computer-generated, and guided the cutting of around 200 plywood sheets. Design was by Jeremy Edmiston and Douglas Gauthier.
The Micro Compact by Horden Cherry Lee Architects and Haack & Hopfner Architects, with its crisp, mass-producible, literally cubic form and communications mast with solar panels, seemed to fill the need for housing modules which could be helicoptered into disaster areas as instant habitat for emergency workers (the exhibit followed Hurricane Katrina by 2 years). But it was also envisioned as instant student or vacation housing. Inside, no opportunity for multiple, overlapping uses or fold-away work surfaces was wasted. This version of Micro Compact has steel panels; some later versions were constructed of aluminum to save weight. Below, Micro Compact is viewed through the enormous window wall of System 3, which was designed by Oskar Kaufmann and Albert Ruf to be delivered within the confines of a shipping container.
The Digitally Fabricated Housing for New Orleans below, designed by Lawrence Sass, was a noble attempt at using technology to fill the post-Katrina housing void in that city. It was designed to be assembled by the housing consumer and could allegedly be knocked together with a rubber mallet. Also part of the concept was the idea of shipping the digital cutting machine with the material for the house. I wondered, though, whether technology might better be used in tooling up for a more universal housing solution (perhaps something between the tiny Micro Compact and the ambitious Cellophane) than in generating unconvincing, two-dimensional looking Victorian ornament.
Meanwhile, unbeknownst to me, a team of faculty and student architects advised by Michael Hughes at University of Colorado in Boulder was re-imagining the space and form of the long-neglected mobile home, and also having a look at how mobile home parks might better meet the needs of housing consumers. Boulder's Mapleton Mobile Home Park had been purchased by local non-profit TCH in 2002 to insure an island of affordable housing in a very expensive housing market. A core concept of the project is ownership of the individual plots of land by the residents. This potentially erases the trap of high land rental costs, coupled with depreciating, energy-inefficient trailers which often confronts residents of conventional mobile home parks. The team's design for their Trailer Wrap house prioritized the sense of place and home related to a specific site; if your house is not going anywhere after all, it's that spatial relationship that matters, not the wheels. On a standard 25 x 75 foot mobile home lot, the team gutted and retrofitted a donated 1965 mobile home from top to bottom, with a new shed roof over wraparound clerestory windows sheltering a new open-plan space, new finishes inside and out, and an expansion of the interior living space into an "outdoor living room" with privacy provided by a network of wood slats. The roof slopes down to the south for a future PV array, and the long north elevation allows indirect lighting through the clerestories.
The light and airy open plan positioned the sleeping and living / dining spaces at opposite ends, linked by a plumbing core servicing the bathroom and kitchen. As with the houses on exhibit at MOMA, spaces and possible uses overlapped where possible and recognized the changing boundaries of work and home, including provisions for a kitchen / office duality.
The Trailer Wrap project occupied five semesters for the faculty* (Michael Hughes, Bruce Wrightsman, Peter Schneider and Willem van Vliet) and students involved, and construction cost was $46,000...
Meanwhile, in Finland, a culture and economy where prefabricated housing was already firmly established, Heikkinen-Komonen Architects proposed the Touch House, manufactured housing with a similar articulation of private indoor-outdoor space to the Trailer Wrap, but without the trailer ...
And reflecting the fact that Scandinavians already had a substantial lead on the Americans in prefab technology and acceptance, so much so that IKEA offers lines of prefabricated houses in its stores there...
Epilogue: Michele Kaufmann Design's prefab home operation closed its doors in May 2009, a victim of the financial crisis. Banks, which during the housing bubble period had been eager to provide mortgages on scanty evidence of applicant's income or even jobs, were suddenly nervous about providing loans for prefabricated homes. Despite a history grounded in Sears Roebuck's early 20th century marketing of kit houses (the subject of a future essay), prefabricated and modular houses have struggled for market share in the USA. As the US economy began to emerge from the Great Recession in 2011, only about 46,000 prefab houses were in use nationally, as compared to around 130,500,000 conventional houses*. When you compare this figure with the 70 percent share of all housing in Sweden, you wonder what factors may be in play to explain the fact that Scandinavians apparently like prefabs over two hundred times as well as Americans. We'll explore possible reasons when we review the history in Part 3.
*Footnotes: Figures on numbers of prefab vs. conventional houses are from Wikipedia. The Trailer Wrap project is detailed by Michael Hughes and Bruce Wrightsman in Oz, Volume 28, Article 4 dated Jan. 1, 2006, "Trailer Wrap: Re-Fabricating Manufactured Housing", from newprairiepress.org.
*Errata: Like the New York Times, I originally reported that Cellophane house was 4 stories and steel-framed. Kieran Timberlake's website notes that it was built from off-the-shelf aluminum framing components using custom steel connectors, and was 80 percent complete within 6 days. Like the Times reporter, I failed to visit the penthouse floor and terrace; Kieran Timberlake correctly counts it as the 5th story.
Photo Credits:
All photos of Chicago and New York exhibits: the author
CU Trailer Wrap project: Michael DeLeon Photo, reproduced by plastolux.com
Touch House (bottom photo): Heikkinen-Komonen Architects, Finland
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