My invitation to interview industrial designer Yves Béhar about his first step into architecture, an immaculately designed Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU), brought me to a design festival of unprecedented scale and wealth.
Held in the historic core of Downtown Los Angeles - a neighborhood physically and economically between the Financial District and Skid Row - Summit LA18 was a three day festival that hosted, according to its promotional material, “a wide array of talks, performances, wellness classes, art installations, gourmet food, and experiences designed to foster relationships and inspire new perspectives.”
A cursory glance at the titles of highlighted events, including “Al Gore and Jaden Smith on New Hope for Solving the Climate Crisis” and “Manufactured Organs and The Radical Quest to Cure Aging” was my first clue of what relationships might be fostered and what new perspectives might be prioritized at this event; my second clue was the intensive application for entry (followed by an entrance fee upwards of $4,000 upon acceptance).
I first met Yves on the footsteps of the first full-scale prototype of the ADU, named LivingHome YB1. As the founder and principal designer of Fuseproject, an industrial design and branding firm based in San Francisco, Yves felt that designing a home was the “logical next step.”
View this post on InstagramUnveil of the first of many! @livinghomes #tinyhome #adu #prefab ! Thank you @summit for the amazing crowd :) Thank you to @samsungus for kitchen appliances and #TheFrame TV and @flos for lighting. And thank you to @likeswaterfalls And everyone at @plantprefab and @livinghomes my awesome partners in this adventure.
A post shared by Yves Behar (@yvesbehar) on
As he gave me a tour of the little home with unabashed pride, periodically interrupting himself to take hurried photos of corner details on his phone, he told me that he was encouraged to venture out of industrial design and into architecture after learning about the recently passed legislation that streamlines the process of installing backyard accessory dwelling units in California. The history of Southern California design was therefore the inspiration for YB1: the design revels in an elegance of thinness and transparency akin to that of the Case Study House movement developed for the uniquely warm and nascent climate of Los Angeles.
The materials that make up the home, he assured me, were all sustainably sourced: the speckled kitchen surfaces are all laminate composites and the wood is entirely certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (exactly where these materials were sourced, however, was unbeknownst to both Yves and the team of LivingHomes spokesmen on site). The home was built in Plant Prefab’s factory, minimizing the environmental impact of on-site construction. And though it is not a passive-energy design, there are optional Smart Home capabilities available, allowing its prospective user to monitor energy consumption and water usage.
But in between the familiar calls to denser living strategies and sustainable construction was a single point Yves was eager to get across: the YB1 line is entirely customizable. The window placements, the materials colors, the room arrangements and countless other elements can be optimized to suit the needs of any backyard of any client of any level of particularity. “Adaptable design” and “flexible customization” are not the keywords one might expect to hear while touring a prefabricated home, let alone a building type championed in an effort to increase affordable housing in population-sparse regions. The unit we toured had an hypothetical price tag of $280,000 (not including the Minotti-designed furniture).
When Henry Ford famously said that “any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black,” he was reflecting on how he uniquely cut down the costs of automobile production. Standing apart from his predecessors, all of whom assumed the industry could only function as one both exclusive and bespoke, Ford promoted factory production as a means of economic standardization. The modern assembly line, in other words, imagined a future that prioritized efficiency at the expense of variation. The ability to customize in the factory setting nearly defeats the purpose of factory production itself, and a designer of a building system with YB1’s level of customization is less a designer of a system than an architect in the oldest sense of the word.
There are two things to keep in mind in this project’s defense. First, some of the options for customization, to be fair, are in the spirit of climatological adaptation (according to the press release, “there two roof options, designed for application in different climate zones -- flat roofs in two heights with the option of a clerestory, which are materially efficient, work well in southern climates and allow for solar panels or a green roof, and a pitched roof version that is ideal in colder regions or to fit more traditional rooflines in the neighborhood”). And second, the next generation of the Yves Béhar line will (reportedly) be robotically manufactured to drive down production costs in a nod to the original intent of the assembly line (hovering closer to a $100,000 price tag). Notwithstanding, YB1, with its current specifications, is far too expensive for the backyard of the typical Southern Californian home (and in most imagined scenarios might steal the thunder of the larger home in front of it).
I thanked Yves for the tour and checked out the rest of what Summit LA18 had to offer, only to learn that YB1 was as fitting a center piece for this design festival than I could have ever imagined. Dozens of startup design companies lined its parking lots with booths, each one promising that their product might somehow positively affect the masses in the hands of only so few. A full scale reproduction of a T-Rex skeleton - apparently a statement about the plight against the world’s species in the Anthropocene - stood alongside a boutique florist promoting the ‘Grow Your Own” movement out of an immaculately refurbished Volkswagen Van.
I am confident that Yves Béhar has nothing but good intentions with his line of Accessory Dwelling Units, just as I am confident that the participants of Summit LA18 would like nothing more than to see their efforts promote real, positive change for the world around them. But in an era of unquestionable urgency, it is difficult to separate high design for the sake of the few from the global imperative to truly sacrifice a bit of luxury and convenience for the sake of the whole.
2 Comments
yves is such a shockingly average designer who has done an admirable job leveraging his exotic name and accent into way, way more media coverage than he could possibly deserve.
From what I can see, this seems to be a pretty credible attempt at prefabricated housing. Seems like a decent plan for a backyard accessory guest house to me. And frankly, the $280k price tag (more like $350k all in) is not bad for such a structure. You’d be hard pressed to stick-build a similar accessory building for that, certainly where I live in Los Angeles. And if it is factory built, that means it comes to the site largely complete. So construction duration is a fraction of what it would be in a conventional build. General Conditions are much smaller. Time is money.
My firm designed a line of factory built houses, of which we sold several units. One on the things we discovered very early on is that factory built housing will never be dirt cheap. It’s not low-cost “housing for the masses”. But it can be easier, faster and somewhat less expensive for people-of-means, who are looking for a neat and simple solution to a particular building type, such as a vacation house on a remote rural site, or a backyard accessory structure.
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