habitat is good model for pre-fab. i know safdie proposed a few of them around the world, but they never really took off. the first one was built in '67 so i guess the idea of modern pre-fab never made it past the trailer parks.

habitat is not a good model for prefab at all, but there aren't a lot of great projects that have been done of this type. of course, depending on how you look at the words prefab you might find quite a few examples...just not many that don't involve a considerable amount of on-site labor....(i'm thinking panelized systems that are more prevalent forms of pre-fab for infill sites)
what form of prefabrication are you looking at?
most modern prefab is currently still being done for suburban open lot markets, but there are a few more beginning to address urban sites.

not sure if pre-fab, or post-fab, or even when-we-was fab is gonna help.

places like philadelphia, with 40,000 vacant properties and counting, are not going to be fixed with a new construction system.

pre-fab is big now. lots of examples online. here in japan many, maybe even most, new houses are significantly pre-fab. have been for decades. look shite but are cheap and fast-ish.

I just get upset thay prefab is just a buzzword now. The land to building cost is too out of whack for prefab to really make sence economicly. Your biggest savings are being able to develop the site and building simultaniously.

mdler - my house is third up from the left. The one with the big black truck in front of it.

I guess the point here is that we have a lot of empty neglected spaces in our cities - so how can we make these spaces viable again - so people want to be there, and can actually make the $$ work to stay there. it's cheaper to own a big new house way out in the burbs than it is to own a run down piece of shit in the city - so if the city is ever going to truly compete with the suburbs we have to begin producing places to live that are affordable along the same lines a house in suburbia is. you can't do that one house at a time - they mass produce suburban developments because it's cheaper to do so - they have a huge piece of land that they can chop to bits - we can't do that with the city but we can potentially take the pieces of land that are there and use our ability to mass produce products like SIPS panels, etc... - which doesn't have to be a trailer at all - to begin competing with our oil dependant suburbs. i'm not saying this is the answer at all - so many layers to this thing - this is just an idea that came up at my firm today as a way to bring people back to the city. other thoughts?

So what does everyone think about this pre-fab example? Reasonably priced, green (Sh*t I've opened up the flood gates:))

I'm currently working on a modular apartment building. I've met with manufacturers who have done this on a small scale (and poorly designed), however our project will be 53 units. The lower cost of the dwelling units will allow us to afford better windows, a better skin, a green roof. I think that pre-fab can address infill issues as well. One manufacturer I spoke to will produce completely custom homes within their limitations for $60 per square foot. Add to this the fact that it takes them 10 days to build a house and I see tremendous potential in systems like this being the future of construction. Sure, I know it's been said before and nothing happend. See Refabricating Architectire for more.

more than half the cost per square foot from the previous "Sunset" example. Any pics/specs louismeier? And who is the manufacurer?

futerboy - explain how habitat '67 isn't a good example of pre-fab construction. it was intended to be low-cost housing, but it became desireable housing in montreal and drove the price up. pre-cast 3-d concrete units assembled on-site seems to me to be a good model for pre-fab.

wpg3-i don't know if SIPs or pre-fab wall panels are the ticket for creating urban infill. i am working on a project with SIPs and another with pre-fab walls. i don't know how much time savings there will be since there is still a lot of pick-up that must happen on site. granted both project will be 'greener' but it is hard to say there will any cost savings. for example, a 4-bedroom condo unit with pre-fab walls will cost approx. $10k more than the same unit framed on-site.

does there need to be a redefinition in constuction methods to create urban infill? there needs to be a shift in values for anything to be accomplished. granted there will be token projects (i.e. habitat '67) but until the general public can be sold that a 1500 sf unit in the city can provide more than a 3000 sf unit in the suburbs i am afraid that we will continue in this rut called urban sprawl - we really should just call it SUBurban sprawl at this point.

i can't recall where i read this, but as i recall habitat was expensive to begin with and didn't work as a pre-fab project cuz there was so much customization required...same as kurokawa's capsule tower. could be wrong though.

if you want a more mundane version of pre-fab you may be interested to hear that sears roebuck sold 100,000 pre-fab-ish kit homes (from its catalogue) back in the beginning of the suburban world...all quite cheap, delivered right to the property and assembled lickity-split (you can see a brief and easy history of pre-fab here if interested)...

not so sure if i am inclined to knock suburbia so quickly, jjh. won't ever live there myself, but i am not inclined to force people to live my urban lifestyle. i love tokyo and london and ny. but it is expensive, and i don't think possible for everyone. suburbs have a lot of urgent problems associated with them, and they need to be addressed. am not convinced that moving everyone downtown is gonna be much of an answer though, especially since 50% of the us popn is in suburbs right now. how to get those folk to move downtown is i think in any case not a matter of housing size at all, but something more complex. it might be more useful for us to objectively ask what problems need to be fixed in our cities, and how many of them are really going to be solved by encouraging the return to dense monocentric urban models. my own belief is that the answer to that is not many, unfortunately. we gots to be much more creative. maybe an answer can be found in pre-fab...would be interesting to see what is possible if anyone has ideas...

btw, the average home size in the states in 2001 was around 1500 ft2, in spite of all the mcmansions.

waste space meets regular repetitive prefab. i still don't get it really. the left out space is usually the most varied since it exists in contingent tangency; for an unvaried modularity to take place within waste, the neighbouring allotments must be that way inclined. there is a tension between a deliberated repitition and a consequential in-between wilderness . perhaps a variable prefab, a unique ensemble of prefabed structural, service and enclosure elements appropriated uniquely to the site.

which is to say, there could possibly be no difference in using prefab as 'infill' or as a normative construction system irrespective of what you deem the nature of the space to be. limitations, parameters,conditions are everywhere. which is to say, any space can be seen as an infill site of sorts. and any infill site has its own unique characteristic.

mdler, i find trailer parks, tent cities... spaces that precluse notions of waste and infill as given in normal urban conditions. stan allen's ideas are also somewhere in that region. designing a place with a primarily infrastructural hindsight to recieve varying configurations or varying 'infills' minimizes the uselessness in between, or seen otherwise, all space becomes the potentionally (opportunistic is the word) useful inbetween.

and also having said that, though this last seems like a completely different (and antithetical) formulation from the stratifying city of houses, shops, cars, buses...it is very much a poetic digestion, conceptially, of the transient features of the same normal city.

for the idea of an infill to be possible, the idea of stable blocks of life (idealized in suburbia) must also be possible. i find it mythical and it works for some people and not for others. so likewise, these others ... are they human 'infill'?

whooaaaa! Slow down on that coffee there noctilucent! Sounds like you need to take a break from teh books - I think that could have all been said in a few sentences (but fondly reminds of the school days).

"One manufacturer I spoke to will produce completely custom homes within their limitations for $60 per square foot"

If you could find a prefab manufacturer to build a quality custom home for $60 a sq ft, you'd better buy a bunch of 'em! That seems increadibly cheap to me.
MKD's, Res4Arch, etc., are easily above the $125 per. sq. ft. (which isn't bad at all, really).

The savings is in the time, at least for now.


The idea of infill in cities is alive and well. The idea of prefabing it is not new but I guess there are not too many examples out there. The big draw back is the cost of land. People live in the burbs because they can get a huge house, yard, etc., whereas in the city they are going to pay $300+ per foot (that's pretty cheap for a downtown), with no yard, etc.

If it was only a matter of cheaper construction, we'd have every city filled with cheap crap. But the land is so expensive, only upper end units will sell, so we get more and more expensive building (marble this, stainless that, etc.)

Ultimately, it's more about business and development than construction ideas. I would suggest approaching it from a just-outside-of-downtown site. Where the mid sized loft/apt. buildings are. It's cheaper to build and you can easily stack things, drive things in, etc.

are you american by any chance, trace?

those were a few lines. as for yours', i think they could have been stated in none. perhaps you don't see that you have not addressed the topic.

what does american-ness have to do with it noc?

trace is correct in politefully poking at your over-use of archi-babble. it really is barely intelligible. no offence.

traces other comments are intelligent, and i think also correct.

make gardens and grow your own food.......

We interrupt this post for a public announcement…treekiller on the loose. Expect commentary interruption momentarily. Now back to our regularly scheduled post.

jump:- the biblophobia. in my experience, the u.s americans are more likely to suffer from it. you can bare fangs now.

it is not about being correct or wrong, it was a choice to attack stlye and not content. you share his sentiment; thats fine, i do not care..but lets not make it about being correct or not. if you do not like, please step aside. be the judge of your own language not mine.

you and trace can have children now.

lol. very per-ish. i admit to being a roman. ;-)

no offence intended, but obfuscation is not equal to erudition. the difficulty with responding to the content above is that it is a bit hard to parse, what with all the sudden stops and starts and sideways knicks and knacks.

wouldn't feel too bad about being ignored though. this is a forum, and comments are often ignored here. it is merely the way things are...

don't fight. you're all pretty!