The Prefab Fad
via Slate
Slate: In the last few years, prefabs have reappeared, in shelter magazines and coffee-table books. The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis even made prefab houses the subject of an exhibition. These hip new modular homes—Business Week referred to them as “glamorous”—have names like KitHaus, Flatpak, and Breezehouse. The SU-SI house, produced by KFN Products in Austria and shown here being lifted onto a foundation in rural New York state, is typical of the genre: stylish, clean-cut, and about $100 a square foot (site work not included). This is more than twice the price of a commercial builder house, but never mind; the current vogue for prefabs is more about industrial chic than affordability.
The SU-SI house is shipped as a completed box. Big boxes are expensive to transport on the highway—they have to be narrow enough to fit in a single lane, and narrowness imposes constraints on the designer. (They may also require heavy-duty cranes.) Another option is to make prefab houses in pieces. The LV Home, designed by Rocio Romero, is an example of what architects call a “kit of parts.” This particular kit includes a steel frame and wall panels of aluminum-coated tin. The style, like the SU-SI, is stripped down and Modernist. The 1,150-square-foot LV model starts at $35,923, although this gets you only the exterior shell. Paul Goldberger, who admired the elegant design, wrote effusively in The New Yorker that the LV represented “the future of American housing.” That’s over the top. Throw in all the stuff that makes a house a home—interior walls, plumbing, a heating system—and you’ve tripled or quadrupled the price to more than $100 a square foot.
