Trailer park materials make it to MoMA
Prefab housing should never be sneered at. At time of great necessity, cheap materials easily combined to form a decent standard of housing, were paramount. In the days after Hurricane Katrina, FEMA built many - albeit not nearly enough - trailer parks; using prefab techniques to build easily and quickly assembled residences for those who need it most.
As with most mundane and necessary things, someone comes along and decides the idea should be spiced up. From there, a new artform is born. Houses as art is not a new concept: we’ve been decorating our homes and building brand new ones specifically to show off our fine taste. Classical forms used on gated mansions, glass-fronted modernist homes, even Frank Lloyd Wright’s use of the otherwise unassuming brick to great effect are all demonstrations of this desire to turn the home into something more than four walls and a roof.
MoMA commissioned five architects: KieranTimberlake Associates of Philadelphia; Lawrence Sass of Cambridge, MA; Douglas Gauthier and Jeremy Edmiston of Manhattan; Oskar Leo Kaufmann and Albert Rüf of Austria; and Richard Horden of Horden Cherry Lee in London to form an exhibition of prefab houses.
Their gorgeous designs use the same materials that go into very cheap homes, but by adding their flourish these architects have turned ordinary boxes into beautiful and environmentally friendly dwellings. The exhibition is open from July 20 to October 20.
This is interesting. I think, while it’s true that prefabricated homes should not be sneered at-like a maths formula there is great satisfaction for the architect to see, well, the architectural formula work for a large number of houses-the simple facts remain ever since prefab took off big time since the industrial revolution:
* Homes are not currently produced cost effectively enough for current demand.
* The consumer is either not familiar with the concept, or does not desire a mass produced house or flat.
* Social stigma exists because of low quality mass produced designs used in the past and present (take a look at Park Hill in Sheffield and the work of Team X).
* Difficulties obtaining finance due to stricter guidelines being used by lenders to assess prefab home loans.
While I accept modern architects are experimenting more often with prefabrication as a means to deliver well-designed and mass-produced modern homes, economic viability is just not quite there yet. This MoMA is just another idea, like Corbusier’s Ville Savoye; an idea realised, but mot probably never to be realised on the scale of say, Barratt Homes.
That seems pessimistic, but history is pessimistic; Laugier’s big urban housing schemes failed, Van der Rohe’s and Corbusier’s schemes horribly failed, as Team X show. Frank Lloyd Wright, who you mentioned, did succeed with his Prairie homes in Chicago- but only in Chicago under his supervision. The key is in the detail, and to have a Prairie home like the ones he built, to encompass the beauty of the finish of the design (the essential beauty that vindicates this prefab) costs bucket loads nowadays. Hence the Frank Lloyd Wright Prairie failed to fulfill a necessary criterion for prefab housing; economic viability.The same goes for Van der Rohe and Corbusier…it may look simple but, without the right people at the right price, it ain’t.
Nowadays, well-known architects are famous for snubbing prefab housing: Foster, Hadid, Piano, Rodgers, Koolhas…you’ll be lucky if they build you one home, for a horrific sum of money, once every twenty years. The reason for snubbing? History tells you it doesn’t work. Architects don’t want to take the risk of being known for an idea that is fundamentally flawed-they strive for legacy. People who did take the risk are few and far between-Louis Sullivan and his skyscaper comes to mind, but not much else.
To end optimistically, maybe MoMA is the change in the course of history; certainly modernist homes have come into fashion recently and are all the rage at the moment as Grand Designs shows. But until costs go down for these super building contractors and structural engineers like Arup, I don’t see anything happening any time soon. But I may just be too old fashioned and naive to see how fast technology is moving…