Architect 2014-02.pdf

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CENTER
ARCHITECT THE AIA MAGAZINE FEBRUARY 2014
CRITIQUE
PREFAB GROWS UP
FACTORY-BUILT HOMES HAVE GOTTEN THE HYPE, BUT MODULAR’S TRUE POTENTIAL MAY LIE IN BUILDING TALL.
Text by Christopher Hawthorne
REMEMBER THOSE PERFECTLY TRIM and
modern modular designs that were supposed to
revolutionize the home-building industry, and
that seemed to appear every other month on
the cover of certain shelter magazines?
Well, the prefab residential dream is still
out there, battered but surviving, and seeming
to cede none of the rhetorical high ground. Not
long ago I saw an item about Pharrell Williams,
the hip-hop impresario, teaming up with Zaha
Hadid, Hon. FAIA, on a new line of prefab
houses. (“There’s a collaboration I’m working
with Zaha Hadid,” Williams told an interviewer.
“We’re touring around with the idea of a
prefab for a house.”) And then I came across a
magazine essay about how “the factory-built
home is gaining traction,” and immediately
was whisked back to those heady days of the
early aughts, when every architecture buff I
knew was shopping for a vacant lot to put up a
sleek and affordable three-bedroom by Marmol
Radziner or Michelle Kaufmann.
The truth, however, is that the aspiration
at the core of all those stories about the modern
prefab house—that it was a prototype for a
new and cheaper way to get stylish architecture
built at a mass scale—never really came close
to being fulfilled. Like the Case Study Houses a
half-century earlier, this 21st-century version
of democratized High Architecture could never
crack the byzantine, if profitable, code of the
home-building industry, which continues
to deliver tens of thousands of stick-built
residences every year to subdivisions around
the country.
It’s not so much that there is not a
substantial market in the United States for neomodern
prefabs; it’s that the potential home
buyers for those designs tend to live in major
metropolitan areas where the available land is
both very expensive and not flat. And it’s cheap,
flat land that makes any new home-building
enterprise succeed at scale.
But a funny thing happened on the
way to prefab’s seeming demise: Modular
construction began going vertical in a pretty
significant and architecturally ambitious way.
It turns out that while modular systems still
don’t make a lot of economic sense for one-off
Zhang Yue, a developer
who is using a prefab
system to build the
world’s tallest tower,
Sky City, in Changsha,
China, has constructed
a test slice (lower left)
of stories 165 to 173.
More images at
architectmagazine.com
LLOYD ALTER