To meet the housing needs of emerging consumer societies without
stripping the world of natural resources, pre-fabricated housing will play a
big role. It’s already being used in everything from emergency shelters in
Burma, to low-cost housing in the U.S., to facilities for the 2012 London
Olympics.
As Wired1 magazine reports, one of the world’s
leading manufacturers of pre-fab buildings is Britco, in Canada. Britco makes
houses on an assembly line with 23 stations. Each year, the company produces
and delivers 600 buildings including houses, banks, classrooms, barracks, and
even McDonald’s restaurants.
By
building the structures in a central location, with all of the construction
workers, plumbers, and electricians on-site, the company can offer homes that
meet the buyers’ local building codes, yet take less time and cost less money
to build.
While
most pre-fab housing is built as cheap, temporary shelters, such as the
dormitories that workers live in for several months while working in oil fields,
there is also a growing
demand for stylish houses that are designed by leading architects but fabricated in a factory.
One
example is the Glidehouse, designed by San Francisco architect Michelle
Kaufmann, who worked for Frank Gehry and Michael Graves for several years. It
is an energy-efficient house with a glass front wall, metal sidewalls, bamboo
floors, and sliding doors to hide the home’s storage areas.
Britco
produces Glidehouses in 24 days. Buyers pay $210,000 for the house, plus
roughly $100,000 more for delivery, foundation preparation, and permits. So
far, Kauffman has sold and installed 10 Glidehouses on the West Coast, with
orders for 55 more.
Among
the other architects at the forefront of this trend are:
- Alchemy Architects in St. Paul, Minnesota
- Michael Graves of Lindal Cedar Homes in
Seattle
- Ray Kappe in Los Angeles
- Charlie Lazor of FlatPak in Minneapolis
- Marmol Radziner & Associates in Los
Angeles
- Joseph Tanney and Robert Luntz of
Resolution 4: Architecture in New York, New York
- Rocio Romero in Perryville, Missouri
- Jennifer Siegal in Los...
