Prefab becomes ab fab

Nancy Hanover and Gerardo Reyes had already obtained permits to add a conventional bedroom/retreat to their 1923 Mid-City bungalow when they happened to read a newspaper article last spring about a cutting-edge prefab called Glidehouse.

Taking its name from its gliding glass wall, the eco-friendly house, designed by San Francisco architect Michelle Kaufmann, is made of 14-foot-wide factory-built modules that come with plumbing, wiring, storage and shoji-like wooden screens already in place.

Hanover and Reyes, both elementary schoolteachers who say they are Modernists at heart, loved the “economical beauty” of its design, at a price -- about $200 a square foot -- they could afford. “We’re very interested in spaces, but we are also working people,” Hanover says. So they opted to do something unorthodox: build a 573-square-foot modern prefab add-on to their classic Craftsman-style house.

Today, dozens of architects and designers are experimenting with prefab, putting a decidedly hip new spin on manufactured housing.

When did prefab get cool, losing its nasty associations with double-wides and the ticky-tacky look-alike boxes of Levittown? Modern prefab housing has been popular in Europe for decades (increasingly so, thanks to IKEA and other sponsors), but the new surge in interest in the United States can be traced to January 2003. That’s when San Francisco-based Dwell magazine announced a competition, inviting 16 architects and designers to design a forward-looking prefab house with a budget of no more than $200,000. This summer, the prototype of the winning Dwell Home, designed by Joseph Tanney and Robert Lutz of the New York firm of Resolution: 4 Architecture, was unveiled in Pittsboro, N.C.

“We ended up buying every bottle of water in the county,” says Dwell Editor-in-Chief Allison Arieff, who expected 500 visitors at the sweltering site and got 2,500.

Huntington Beach’s Michael Sylvester, an Australian-born architect and business consultant who created a website, www.fabprefab.com, sees prefab frenzy as a function of growing visual literacy in the U.S. Trained by exposure to beautiful modern objects, from the iPod to the reborn Volkswagen Beetle, people want reasonably priced houses that reflect their taste and reflect well on them.

“There are a lot of people out there who are wide-eyed and excited about this idea,” Sylvester says. “They feel like they’re design savvy and design aware” but see little, if anything, they want and can afford in the conventional real estate market. Popular culture reinforces their craving for products that reflect midcentury Modernism, then and now: “Look at commercials and films today -- you see the visual language of success at the moment is Modernism,” he says. In a world where Brad Pitt hangs out with Rem Koolhaas, Sylvester has a point.

Prefab housing in America is “not a new idea,” says architect Jennifer Siegal of the Office of Mobile Design in Venice and creator of the two-story Swellhouse, fashioned from prefab steel modules. “It’s an idea that’s been out there, but it’s being reinvented.”

In fact, prefab predates the Declaration of Independence. Seventeenth century religious dissenters sailed from England with Bibles, black clothing and houses that had been taken apart to be reassembled in the New World. House kits were shipped to prospectors in California during the 1849 Gold Rush. Thousands of people ordered kit homes, even apartment buildings, from the Sears catalog and other sources during the first few decades of the 20th century. The mail-order house was delivered to the closest railroad station in thousands of pieces, and owners could put it together themselves, piece by numbered piece.

Today’s modern prefab has its roots in the Airstream trailer, World War II Quonset huts, the Case Study houses and such quirky attempts to streamline construction and shelter the masses as the metal-clad postwar Lustron homes. “It’s very in keeping with the [Machine Age] ideal of Modernism,” says Virginia Postrel, author of “The Substance of Style” (HarperCollins, 2003), “using technology and manufacturing innovation to produce good design that is available to a mass market.”

Now Target, that unlikely purveyor of affordable objects of desire, has entered the fray. Ubiquitous designer Michael Graves is offering three prefab “pavilions” of varying degrees of modernity through Target. Costing $10,000 to $26,000, the customizable kits are produced by Lindal Cedar Homes and can be used as offices, guest rooms or what have you.

On a smaller scale, dozens of youngish architects are beginning to market prefab dwellings to a consumer audience starved for good, affordable, environmentally sensitive design -- one that can be characterized as people who tend to have more taste than money.

Unlike unfashionable prefab, Kaufmann’s has such amenities as concrete counters, bamboo floors, low-VOC (volatile organic compound) paint and an on-demand tankless water heater.

Artist-designer Michael Jantzen of Valencia creates what he calls M-vironments. He is finishing a steel-and-concrete house near Gorman. Its frame consists of seven 8-foot interlocking steel cubes, on which he has hung rectangular panels of different sizes, some containing insulation. Jantzen’s M-house looks like a gigantic futuristic toy. He sees it as a playful, habitable sculpture that is more “puzzle” than traditional residence. The structure, which can be reconfigured, is a possible prototype for a kit of recyclable parts that “could be put together a thousand different ways,” says Jantzen. “As I change, I may want my space to change as well -- that traditionally has been very hard to do.”

Even the high-end architecture firm of Marmol Radziner and Associates is experimenting with prefab. Partner Leo Marmol is building a vacation house for himself out of prefab steel modules on a five-acre site in Desert Hot Springs. It could be the prototype for a prefab house that the Los Angeles firm might be able to offer for less than $200 a square foot. “There’s no question that there’s huge local interest,” says Marmol, who has received many phone calls from eager potential clients.

While Californians seem to love the idea of modern prefab, Postrel thinks such structures make better financial sense elsewhere. The Glidehouse and other prefabs may be “cool,” she says, “but they don’t solve the economic problem of living in California, which is basically the cost of the land.”

Local prefab boosters include P. David Ebersole and Todd Hughes, who recently added a pool to their lime-green 1990 prefab in Silver Lake. They sent a photo to Dwell magazine, explaining: “Our motto: Take the ‘pre’ out of prefab and make it just fab!”

Fans and would-be early adopters of the new prefab form a community that meets at fabprefab’s website. Sylvester keeps close tabs on the scene and offers informed commentary. When the Glidehouse was on exhibit in May in Menlo Park, Calif., 30,000 people visited Sylvester’s website.

While the media tend to gush about modern prefab, the site gives a more nuanced view. In the chat rooms, griping is rampant. “I don’t get it,” one visitor groused recently. “Why is it so hard to get these prefab companies off the ground? My wife and I want one, half of our friends want one, yet the majority of the companies listed on this site have not produced more than a prototype.”

Because, Sylvester responded, modern prefab is dominated not by mass marketers but by small architectural firms and because prefab is as much about “process innovation” as about design. “Architects wanting to crack the prefab puzzle need to spend as much time examining and designing processes as they currently spend thinking about objects,” Sylvester says. “This may not be their forte.’”

At this stage, Sylvester says on his home page, “modernist prefab is still more of a meme [a contagious idea] than a marketplace.”

But homes are beginning to materialize to meet the demand. Berkeley-based futurist Edgar Blazona just finished the first real house in his prefab Modular Dwelling series, which was exhibited Aug. 12 to 15 at CA Boom: a Festival of Contemporary Design in Santa Monica. Instead of Blazona’s standard bare-bones steel box, the new house is a relatively palatial 240 square feet, with bathroom and kitchen. He plans to auction it on EBay.

Architect Rocio Romero, a San Diego native who now lives in Missouri, designed her LV Home as a vacation retreat for her mother. A gleaming, glass-fronted box of plywood and corrugated steel, the 970-square-foot house shimmers on a cliff above the Pacific in Laguna Verde, Chile. Romero now sells a kit containing the shell of the LV Home pre-cut at a Missouri factory for $31,050.

“I have a client who is 70 years old, and I have clients who are just married and in their 30s,” says Romero.

Siegal expects her first Swellhouse to be produced this summer, at a cost of $180 to $200 a foot.

And Kaufmann has delivered at least one Glidehouse to a client. The prototype that was on display in May now sits by a lake in Washington state. It is being “buttoned down,” or finished, to function as a hip vacation home for its new owner. Other customers are being told to expect their houses three to four months after signing their contracts.

Kaufmann created the Glidehouse almost two years ago out of her own frustration as a would-be homeowner in the nation’s most expensive housing market. “It started with my husband and I looking for someplace to live in San Francisco. We couldn’t find anything we could afford -- not even close.”

She and husband Kevin Cullen, a general contractor, are completing a conventionally built home identical to the Glidehouse on a site in Novato in Marin County. Among the half-dozen clients who have signed up for Glidehouses, one plans to install his prefab across the street from Kaufmann and Cullen’s version. The prefab will take less than four weeks to put together. Kaufmann contrasts the speed of the factory process with the long slog of building her own home, now in its 10th month. Cullen fears their house is going to cost twice as much as the prefab version.

Before she started her own firm -- MKarchitecture -- Kaufmann worked with Frank Gehry in Los Angeles for five years. In the Glidehouse’s blurring of inside and outside and its separation of living and sleeping spaces, many see shades of Joseph Eichler, builder of Modernist tracts in California after World War II and into the 1970s -- an influence Kaufmann is quick to acknowledge. But her time with Gehry is also evident.

Much of her work was on branches of the Guggenheim and other museums, where a major goal was to provide ample storage that didn’t compete visually with public space. An entire wall is devoted to storage in each Glidehouse. But shelves disappear behind panels, because clutter hurts more in a relatively small space. Gehry also shaped her approach to lighting. She has hidden it in the storage units, eliminating the Swiss-cheese effect of light fixtures in the ceiling.

New technology has empowered small design firms such as Kaufmann’s. Richard Neutra, Charles and Ray Eames, Pierre Koenig and other midcentury architects who wanted to make Modernist housing affordable were never able to do so on a large scale, mainly because they lacked today’s materials and communication technologies. In less than two years, Kaufmann was able to establish relationships with vendors, a manufacturer, a sales force and potential clients, thanks to digital communication, and get her Glidehouse on the road.

Imagine trying to do all that in the 1950s and ‘60s, Sylvester says, without benefit of faxes, the Internet and digital photography: “She was able to sell her idea before it was made!”

In a very real sense, Modernist prefab dwellings are products, and their success will depend on their designers’ ability to maintain quality and coordinate manufacture and delivery. Sylvester predicts a brave new world of prefab houses at many different price points.

Hanover and Reyes expect their addition to cost $117,000, not including work at the site. Shipping will add $20,000 more. (Several designers of prefab dwellings say they are on the verge of signing up a Southern California fabricator, which should bring shipping costs down.) The couple like the fact that prefab is less wasteful of materials, and -- as busy teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District -- they’re thrilled they won’t have to be home to supervise weeks, or months, of relationship-testing on-site construction.

For them, prefab is simply a way to get more space with less hassle, while honoring their appreciation for modern design. Says Hanover: “It’ll be an addition that has an architect behind it, and it solves our problems.”