Keith Dewey: A combination of prefabricated containers and traditional wood frame building systems. Six 8’x20’ shipping containers stacked together to create the bulk of the house and one 8’x20’ container on stilts providing space for the home office.
via BLIP Design
In the end the project was a success because the demographic that was interested in the house (the owners that bought it, along with others) said it stood out from other projects because of the extent of green-ness incorporated into its design and construction. Builders in the Seattle area often market their homes as “green” because they have 1 or 2 sustainable “features,” but the Phinney House is sustainable throughout, and the FSC-certified wood used in it was an important part of that.
The Modern Modular Home web site has documented the construction of a modern modular home built in rural Virginia. Designed by Res4.
Also, A Prefab Project is blogging about the construction of another Res4 design in Lost River, West Virginia.
via TrailerWrap
TrailerWrap explores the potential for providing affordable housing through the adaptive reuse and recycling of existing mobile homes. Addressing issues of sustainability and energy efficiency, the TrailerWrap project seeks to create exciting, small-scale, and affordable architecture with a social and environmental conscience. It also engages young people in an experiential learning experience that helps address the local need for low-cost housing in collaboration with community partners.
via Washington Post
Loblolly House, an environmentally sustainable weekend retreat on the Eastern Shore, was built in six weeks from precision-cut panels embedded with all the necessary pipes, wires and windows.
Designed on a computer in the Philadelphia office of the firm, KieranTimberlake, the house’s 3-D construction specs were e-mailed to a custom builder in New Hampshire, who turned out a flat pack of precision-cut panels embedded with all the necessary pipes, wires and windows. Those panels were shipped to Maryland on the beds of standard 8 1/2 -foot-wide tractor-trailers.
via Hampson Williams
The prefabricated timber construction, from sustainable sources, sandwiches a heavily insulated core all set on a grid of steel screwed piles, a low impact foundation system that has a ‘soft touch’ approach to foundation design and construction.
LV Kit Home via Walker Art Center
Andrew Blauvelt: Today’s modern prefab, is not reducible to a uniform aesthetic criteria or a predictable material palette. There are, of course, similarities and generalities that can be seen in the current offerings: a penchant for minimal rooflines, large expanses of glass, and a range of finish options. Although today’s projects share the optimism of postwar prefab, they lack the totalizing vision and utopian ambitions of some of their predecessors. It is a much more contingent affair, with production expressed in tactical terms: How much customization can exist without sacrificing the efficiencies of mass production? What kind of domestic lifestyle is suggested and supported by this house if the typical single-family home created by the post-war suburb is no longer a given? Even the simple but seemingly heretical idea of architecture as a mass produced product is a decidedly different orientation for architects. However, contemporary prefab could be considered one more way for architectural design to reenter the residential market—an arena in which ninety percent of what is built does not involve an architect. Can prefab offer more ecologically sensitive solutions that are missing in more mainstream housing segments? More importantly, how does one judge the success or failure of recent prefab efforts?
Maryann Thompson Architects: This project is rooted in the utopian modernist tradition of blending ambiguity between interior and exterior space. In the primary living spaces, the horizontal planes of the floor and roof surfaces extend beyond large openings of glass. The interior is characterized by multiple planes of light entering the house at a variety of levels. While the roof and floor planes hold the primary data, the subtle articulations in the walls and windows provide intimate relation to the landscape and the path of the sun. Manipulation of partitions, openings and spaces provides a rich tapestry of changing perspective as one passes through the house.
Photo by lee_3dhighway
Newsweek: It makes me wonder whatever happened to the modern house, and why the core idea of modernism—that through mass production, ordinary people could afford the best design—never caught on when it came to houses. Le Corbusier called the house “a machine for living in”—which meant, notes New York architect Deborah Gans, that the house is a tool people control, not the other way round. The brilliance of the modern house was in the flexible spaces that flowed one to the next, and in the simplicity and toughness of the materials. Postwar America saw a few great experiments, most famously in L.A.’s Case Study Houses in the late 1940s and ’50s. Occasionally, a visionary developer, such as Joseph Eichler in California, used good modern architects to design his subdivisions. Today they’re high-priced collectibles…
via Design Spotter
The small building is in essence a timber clad raft, constructed on piles leaving it hovering just above the grass. The raft folds up and above the internal space, forming the back and ceiling ending in a large cantilevered canopy. It creates a simple and clear frame around the internal space and the terrace which works as one space with sliding doors connecting the inside with the outside. Architect: Michael Christensen.
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