Cat-like, it would seem that pre-fab is inching closer to unlucky number 9. Michelle Kaufman, AIA, one of contemporary pre-fab’s industry leaders, laid off 17 employees and closed her Oakland office in May after constricted credit markets and shuttered component factories made her business model untenable. Christopher Hawthorne at the Los Angles Times has noted the symbolic import of this decline, which paints the Great Recession as the latest pre-fab killer in a history that runs over a century.
There are two questions to consider now: Was pre-fab ever really “here,” and is it really “gone”? It has certainly arrived in the popular imagination. The MoMA’s Home Delivery show has put pre-fab in the public consciousness in ways it hasn’t been in decades. Beyond that, I haven’t seen any suburban subdivisions full of KieranTimberlake-designed Cellophane Houses or anything remotely like it. Hawthorne lists a few firms that have had to stop work on pre-fab projects, but others are still carrying on, like the democratically market-ready Balance Associates Method Homes “Down to earth pre-fab.”
It could be considered sadly comforting that at least pre-fab is failing to flourish in familiar ways. If Mies or Corbusier showed up today, they would have no problem at all understanding why pre-fab still hadn’t taken off. The technology needed to make it mass-produced and affordable to all is still ahead of the current marketplace, and consumer taste is evolving, but not yet ready to put pre-fab in primetime. Couple these age-old issues with a credit market pendulum that has swung with frightening ferocity back to queasily paranoid conservatism, and you have the pre-fab’s current condition, rather similar to it’s previous condition.
Certainly, any time an industry leading-innovator has to shut their doors it’s disheartening, and the currently narrow gap between the technological sophistication needed to mainstream pre-fab and the cost the market can bear makes it hurt all the more. Hawthorne’s final twist of the knife hurts the most: “If architects couldn't capitalize on the boom years -- with their easy financing, overpriced traditional houses and cheerleading design press -- to move closer to mass production, you have to wonder if they will ever be able to.” Kaufman, KieranTimberlake, and others have made excellent cases for pre-fab as paragons of sustainable building, and I hope this becomes a longer-term argument for their widespread adoption than sloppy credit markets and an impressed design media.
(Pictured above, Kaufman's Sunset Breezehouse.)
Comments (2)
“Has the Recession Felled Pre-Fab?”
What kind of headline is that? You would condemn an entire sector because one architect closes her office in the midst of a recession? Would it not be just as appropriate to boldly ask: “Has the Recession Felled Architecture?”
I have long held that the most significant reason that modular construction has not garnered more of a following in our profession is because so few architects choose to understand this promising building methodology. It is sad to see that even the AIA has failed to do its homework.
Certainly Michelle deserves kudos for her efforts in the pre-fab world these last few years, but to imply the demise of the rest of us, and there are a few, who work in this arena just because she didn’t survive a very significant economic downturn is a bit over the top.
James B. Guthrie, AIA, President
Miletus Group, Inc.
Posted by James B. Guthrie, AIA | July 13, 2009 5:11 PM
Posted on July 13, 2009 17:11
What is prefab? Panelized? Modulars?
Mobile homes? I am 71 years old and was in the thick of Romney's Operation Breakthrough. One of my clients built
3 of the few projects ever done, sold their business to a big corporation, made millions and the business was bankrupt within 3 years (my clients got to keep their $). Why? When there is a slowdown the factory overhead and taxes continue on the pre-fab operation but the stick builders don't have to carry that overhead. The box builders go back to making cheapo trailers.
I had an office at Expo 67 in Montreal across the corridor from Safdie's and watched Habitat be built, I was on the Expo site almost every day for 2 years. Habitat was and still is a great project, but the boxes were not standardized because of a fact called gravity. The bottom boxes had a lot more steel than the ones at the top. The draughtsmen doing the reinforcing shop drawings were driving Shelby Cobras from the overtime they were racking up. It seems that some unplanned glitch always arises. My own experience with residential developers
has been that they make the big bucks customizing the units, the extras. The consumers want different looks, all have different tastes. Probably the only way prefab will work is to bring back the Soviet Union. Tell people what and where they will live and let the government pick up the tab for the factory overhead. Building in the field also keeps the money local and keeps the neighbors employed, not a bad concept. And the owners can make the housing as ugly as they like. (and remember, all politics is local)
Posted by Frank Macioge AIA | July 10, 2009 5:38 PM
Posted on July 10, 2009 17:38