Prefabricated Architecture: Engineering the Modern Home

An exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art shows how prefab houses increasingly make use of design and manufacturing technologies from the industrial world

Joseph Ogando, Senior Editor -- Design News, August 5, 2008

Design News readers don't usually work on houses. All the appliances and consumer products that fill a house may be fair game, but the actual house design is something left to architects. A new exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), however, shows design engineering and architecture increasingly have a lot in common from a technology standpoint.

The exhibit, Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling, traces the history of prefabricated houses from their roots in the last century to the present. It includes a gallery exhibition of drawings, models, computer animations, wall fragments and two partially assembled steel homes.

And a vacant lot near the museum has been transformed into what Barry Bergdoll, MoMA's chief curator of architecture and design, calls the "world's weirdest subdivision." Rather than cookie-cutter houses, this subdivision consists of five contemporary, full-scale prefab homes from different architects.

The idea of prefabricated architecture is hardly new. The exhibit has patents dating back to 1833, and Bergdoll says one of "modernism's oldest dreams" is to produce architecture the way we produce factory-made consumer goods like cars or textiles.

Yet in recent years, prefab architecture has once again become a hot topic. "There has been a renewed public interest and niche market for neo-modernist prefabricated homes," Bergdoll says. Some of that interest comes down to the way contemporary prefab designs address growing concerns about sustainability and economy.

Technology has played a role in the renewed interest too. Bergdoll cites the growing availability of digital design and fabrication as an important enabling technology. "Digital fabrication and mass customization are on everyone's lips among young designers," he says. Many projects on display also made use of material technologies and manufacturing processes that are just starting to make their mark in architecture but are already familiar to design engineers.

Take the Cellophane House from KieranTimberlake Associates, for example. Standing five stories tall, this 1,800-sq-ft home has been built around a structural framework constructed from Bosch-Rexroth aluminum framing. This is the very same stuff used every day by machine builders, though not all of the machine building applications require the beefy cross sections and steel connectors used for the house framework.

The aluminum framework acts as a matrix for the home's translucent walls, floors, roof and building skin. These too have been rendered in innovative, yet commercially available, materials. Among them are corrugated polycarbonate walls and flooring, Schüco E² Glazing embedded with photovoltaic cells and Next Gen PET Smartwrap with embedded photovoltaics. According to James Timberlake, one of the Cellophane House's creators, the house's energy generation and efficiency will be monitored throughout the house's stay at the MoMA. Thermal and airflow sensors have been placed throughout the house with the relating wiring concealed in the aluminum framing. Timberlake calls this energy-efficient house a "siteless" design, and he says he's currently investigating ways to commercially produce the Cellophane House.

Other homes in the outdoor portion of the exhibit likewise made use of modern engineered materials and digital fabrication techniques. The micro compact home from Horden Cherry Lee Architects and Haack + Hopfner Architects packs a self-contained 76-sq-ft home into a timber and aluminum cube fitted with its own solar cells and wind turbine for energy generation. Another display, this one from MIT's Lawrence Sass, used digital technologies such as computer-aided design and optimization to turn a stack of ordinary plywood into a building. His 375-sq-ft Digitally Fabricated Housing for New Orleans consists of CAD-designed, laser-cut plywood panels with integrated friction joints that eliminate the need for nails, fasteners or adhesives.

The use of digital manufacturing and modern materials technologies could be found in the gallery exhibits too, particularly in displays showing wall fragments that could be used in prefab buildings. One such fragment, Migrating Formations from Contemporary Architecture Practice, has been fabricated from a collection of bulbous building blocks fabricated on a 3-D printer from Z Corp. According to Hina Jamelle, one of Contemporary's directors, the blocks are epoxy-bonded to form the self-standing wall. "The big thing is there are no fasteners," she says. While currently not structural, 3-D printing and related additive fabrication technologies show promise for the future. "With material advances, I have no doubt these types of walls will be load bearing, maybe not for high rises but certainly for houses," says Ali Rahim, another Contemporary director.  

Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling runs through October 20 at the Museum of Modern Art. Visit www.momahomedelivery.com for detailed descriptions of the projects on display as well as video showing installation of the prefab buildings.