The dream, Michael, is real ... not so dreamy perhaps, but very real.

Trailers (preferred dwellings of cousin marryin' beer can swillin' folks) morphed over the years from homes actually on wheels into their current incarnation as single wide/ double wide/ double wide extended "manufactured homes". These have done a pretty good job of changing the face of housing in rural and suburban areas. The next step in their evolution was into those capes and ranches and even neo-Victorian modular homes that one can see traveling to building sites on the nation's highways with those "wide load" warning cars in front and behind the tractor trailer hauling them. I always like the somewhat surreal view I get when I'm passing someone's porch or into their living room. These have even been used in some developments that seek to create "new villages" with aspirations along lines you've previously championed here.

So modular and manufactured homes have already changed the world of housing, just not in dense urban areas ... yet. Why shouldn't it be economically (and even architecturally) sensible to take a similar approach with apartment units as well as stand alone single dwellings? As the link points out with this approach a, lets say 50 unit, apartment/condo complex might take far less time to put in place than build from scratch with less neighborhood noise, dirt, and disruption? Would the results be any less aesthetically pleasing than the typical urban apartment building? If they are upscale units marketed to Limo Liberal Trailer Trash would that be any change from selling them Luxe Lofts after the starving artists have done initial gentrification work?

Building buildings inside, year 'round, without needing to deal with the weather, or getting workers to far flung job sites, etc. has been one primary driving factor in this phenomena. One of the downsides is, in a housing market slowdown like the current one, you get towns whose big industry is building them that suddenly find hundreds of workers laid off at once. (e.g. Oxford, Maine) But that's a different story.

Posted by: Chris White on April 17, 2008 9:12 AM

Oops, I meant Habitat '67, not Habitat for Humanity ...

Steve, Chris -- Right, I understand that's the dream: simple, supposedly cheap (never as cheap as claimed, though), geometrical modules that can be carted to site and bolted together in a variety of ways. Cheap, easy, pleasing housing. It's so simple, if only the powers that be would understand! It's like pop Corbusianism. In many, many decades, though, these dreams have never in fact worked out. Safdie was unable to convert his vision for Habitats everywhere into much in the way of reality. The containers-as-apartments idea has resulted in a few prototype developments and nothing else. Given the experience of real life (ie., decades of failure, waste, wreckage, broken hearts, back to the drawing boards, silliness, etc), why does the official architecture world continue to promote a way of thinking (and of conceiving of housing) that leads back and back, over and over again, to a dream that never works out? Are they doing young architects, architecture fans, and people interested in development and housing anything but a massive disservice? Or maybe they're just sadists. In any case, the Corbusian modular-housing fantasy strikes me as yet another example of Utopian dreaminess gone awry. The reality of the actual modular-construction/mobile-home, tract-and-development industry is of course interesting but a completely separate topic ...

Posted by: Michael Blowhard on April 17, 2008 10:39 AM

It seems to me that in the past the modular-home process resulted in houses that *looked* like modules (i.e., mobile homes). But that's not true with the designs I saw in my latest issue of THIS OLD HOUSE magazine. If a modularized house looks and feels like any other house (or apartment building), then it becomes just an issue of economies of scale and saving $$$. Which is good.

And it's going a little too far to claim that previous modularized concepts, like the mobile home, "didn't work out." Millions of people live in them quite happily. They're very popular in and around my north San Diego County community, particularly among retirees. Don't judge by the "trailer trash" stereotype.

Posted by: Steve on April 17, 2008 10:56 AM

Steve wrote: "They're very popular in and around my north San Diego County community..."

Mobile homes are also plentiful in Napa Valley, especially around Calistoga. For those of you who follow such things, that land is among the most expensive real estate in the U.S. Many retirees there.

Posted by: Charlton Griffin on April 17, 2008 11:34 AM

Steve -- We're talking about separate phenomena. I'm sounding off about a specific Corbusian, architecture-world/architecture-school dream, of the Habitat '67 kind. It's an unrealistic, idealistic thing that has never worked out well yet that keeps cropping up. The reality of pre-fab or modular construction of many different kinds, including mobile homes, has been a fact of life in the construction biz for decades.

Posted by: Michael Blowhard on April 17, 2008 11:41 AM

The reason these big-concept type projects don't take off is that while the main benefit of them is cost saving, they have to be sold to wealthy urban people, who don't want them because they have "cheap" stamped all over them.

Posted by: Todd Fletcher on April 17, 2008 12:23 PM

Prefabricated Housing was built on a large scale in Britain after the war. The houses were meant to last a decade - they lasted five decades and longer. People became fond of their "prefabs". I thought they were ugly bloody things.

Posted by: dearieme on April 17, 2008 12:35 PM






Post a comment

Name:


Email Address:


URL:


Comments:


Remember your info?