Prefabricated Architecture: Engineering the Modern Home

August 5, 2008

3 Min Read
Design News logo in a gray background | Design News

Design News readers don't usually workon houses. All the appliances and consumer products that fill a house may befair 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 architectureincreasingly have a lot in common from a technology standpoint.

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

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

The idea of prefabricatedarchitecture is hardly new. The exhibit has patents dating back to 1833, andBergdoll says one of "modernism's oldest dreams" is to producearchitecture the way we producefactory-made consumer goods like cars or textiles.

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

Technology hasplayed a role in the renewed interest too. Bergdoll cites the growingavailability of digital design andfabrication as an important enabling technology. "Digital fabrication and mass customizationare on everyone's lips among young designers," he says. Many projects ondisplay also made use of material technologies and manufacturing processes thatare just starting to make their mark in architecture but are already familiarto design engineers.

Take the Cellophane House fromKieranTimberlake Associates, for example. Standing five stories tall, this1,800-sq-ft home has been built around a structural framework constructedfrom Bosch-Rexroth aluminum framing. This is the very same stuffused every day by machine builders, though not all of the machine buildingapplications require the beefy cross sections and steel connectors used forthe house framework.

The aluminum framework acts asa 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 wallsand flooring, Schüco E² Glazing embedded with photovoltaic cells and Next GenPET 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 thehouse's stay at the MoMA. Thermal andairflow sensors have been placed throughout the house with the relating wiringconcealed in the aluminum framing. Timberlake calls this energy-efficient housea "siteless" design, and he says he's currently investigating ways tocommercially produce the Cellophane House.

Other homes inthe outdoor portion of the exhibit likewise made use of modern engineeredmaterials 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 andaluminum cube fitted with its own solar cells and wind turbine for energygeneration. Another display, this one from MIT's Lawrence Sass, used digitaltechnologies such as computer-aided design and optimization to turn a stackof 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 theneed for nails, fasteners or adhesives.

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

HomeDelivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling runs through October 20 at the Museum of Modern Art.Visit www.momahomedelivery.comfor detailed descriptions of the projects on display as well as video showinginstallation of the prefab buildings.

Sign up for Design News newsletters

You May Also Like