Andreas Fuhrimann Gabrielle Hächler: The holiday house in located in the middle of the village of Vnà in the Lower Engadine. The particular challenge of the project was to bridge the divide between the old-world charm of the village and the modern flair embodied in a holiday house for an internationally successful art gallery owner. The aim was to develop a formal language which had a certain proximity to traditional Engadine architecture and yet remained immediately recognisable as contemporary without being conservatively romanticised.

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Wired: The site, dubbed Oxley Woods, already features 90 eco-friendly homes, with 55 more planned to fill its seven acres. The factory-made dwellings make good on prefab’s promise of low cost and quick construction. They take as little as $118,000 and seven days to erect: five in the plant and a day and a half onsite, where crews slide and screw together the modular pieces. (Electrical, plumbing, and other finishing work takes another four weeks.) Manufacturing the major components offsite reduces waste and makes it easier to use green materials, like insulation from recycled paper and lumber harvested from sustainably managed forests.

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Golf 190 from Swedish Modern Living is a two story house with 6 rooms. The house is partly dress in ceder. Living and entertaining areas are designed to be upstairs and bedrooms and bathrooms down stairs.

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Claesson Koivisto Rune: Plus House is a pre-fab two-story house with the generic proportions of a traditional Swedish barn house. Instead of windows positioned like regular “holes” along the walls, entire sides are glazed. Seen in plan, these two lines of vision straight through the building are perpendicular like a plus sign.

This house was designed for pre-fab manufacturer Arkitekthus.

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Designed by Linda Taalman and Alan Koch. The iT house sits on 5 acres of high desert hillside, so remote that it has to function off-grid with green technologies.

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zeroHouse generates its own electrical power. High-efficiency solar panels produce power and store it in an onboard bank of batteries. Fully charged, zeroHouse can operate continuously for up to one week with no sunslight at all.

zeroHouse collects its own water. A rainwater collection plane gathers and divers water into an elevated 2700 gallon cistern. All plumbing fixtures are gravity-fed. eliminating the need for power-consuming pumps.
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Forbes: Eli Attia’s creation is what he calls the Roundhouse, a modular window-wrapped structure that’s supposed to make up for the bad name prefab housing has gotten over the years. “Enough of this nonsense of building homes the way we did 100 years ago,” Attia says, disgustedly motioning at the bloated homes in the canyon below the Roundhouse site. “It’s all a waste.”

A Roundhouse, they calculate, delivers 150% more square feet of floor space per unit of exterior wall than a traditional home does. Yikes, how is that possible? Take a basic 40-foot-by-25-foot layout in a boxy 2,000-square-foot two-story home. Going from a rectangular to a circular floor while keeping the perimeter fixed adds only 34% to the space. Their comparison, it turns out, was based on a nearby Mediterranean-style home with many nooks and crannies that a simple rectangle doesn’t have.

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Architecture Australia: The prototype house is achieved most elegantly here using pieces of laser-cut plywood brought to site on a single flat-bed truck. What is groundbreaking is that the aspiration for prototyping has been coupled with a formal complexity and potential for customization supported by new computer-supported design and manufacturing tools. The duo has been working for a decade now on the potentials for interlocking structures of smaller planar parts. Communicating the fabrication and assembly of 1,100 non-identical pieces required atypical forms of documentation, and with that, an original approach to thinking through how to design and realize that design.

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Huf Haus: The distinctive feature of a HUF Home is its post and beam architecture. This timber frame concept frees the designer of the constraints of load-bearing (and thus dividing) walls. It gives HUF designs their unrivalled breadth, openings and vast spaces. Wall to ceiling glazing opens the view on the surrounding nature, making it part of the living experience.

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