DIN STUDIO

So far rather than looking at current examples of prefab housing, I’ve been looking at why previous prefab initiatives failed or never really caught on in the mass produced way it’s inherently designed for. Most of this info is probably already known to most of you, but I’m going to summarize. I’ve been reading a book called Prefab over the last couple of days (which I think randomly makes a reference to Deborah Burke) that is kind of interesting, so here it goes…

Though the first use of prefab dates back to the 17th century (English settlers brought prefab houses from England to Cape Ann), over the past century it has closely followed the automotive industry and the modernism movement. Basically, as homes became a consumable commodity, prefab provided cost reduction strategies on the producer’s end. While this was great at the time (and interestingly opened up budget space for quality of life aspects of a design that were never really taken advantage of), it has ultimately left the general public with a skewed perception of prefab — that it sacrifices aesthetics, comfort, and quality for price.

While that is all pretty well known, what I found interesting was that all of the early forms of prefab housing from architects such as Le Corbusier, Buckminster Fuller, and the like were so heavily slanted toward the modernist movement and experimentations with steel and glass that it’s no wonder no one wanted to live in one. It seems that in the past, truly prefab housing initiatives failed because the design was too big of a leap in the eye of the consumer. Thus, it’s been relegated to either shotty post-war developments like Levittown or museum exhibits.

As architects, we’d obviously like to see good design work its way into the dated residential designs still being built today. A quote from Wes Jones: “The contemporary vernacular is the product of a speculative, real-estate developer consumerism which is self-consciously but unwittingly devolving into a kitsch-pastiche of formerly legitimate postures toward dwelling. The unconsciousness and ubiquity that makes this a vernacular does not reflect the traditional pervasive concern for efficiency and attendant sense of appropriateness, but a market-driven vision of what that should be, as capricious as the consumer pool and the advertising dollars which stir it.”

I guess all of this is just a long way of saying that prefab throughout the mid-20th century was doomed to fail from the beginning because of its association with modernism. Like the International Style, prefab (in the past century) attempted to cover too broad of a range — it attempted to standardize people and sites. While I understand the brief’s reasoning for wanting proposals to be able to adapt to different sites, I tend to think that that is impossible. It also seems like whenever architects get involved with prefab, they get crazy with the design (see image above) and completely alienate the majority of people. While early prefab construction is sweet from an architect’s point of view, their inability to gauge public perception ultimately gave prefab a horrible reputation.

So ya, let’s not get crazy with the design.