Permanence/Mobility

Flatpak: In Aspen, ColoradoVinyl siding, once nearly synonymous with cheap and prefabricated architecture, is one material these designers won't touch with a ten-foot-pole. Over the past ten years, architects like Michelle Kaufmann (Breezehouse), Charles Lazor (Flatpak), and Kieran Timberlake (Loblolly) have been busy revolutionizing the field.

The new prefab architecture movement plays off the contradictions that J.B. Jackson explores at the end of "The Movable Dwelling." "Now that environmentalism has become an established philosophy," he writes, "the values we stress are stability and permanence... Still, we cannot help being reminded... that we have a second architectural tradition, a tradition of mobility and short-term occupancy" (223). Though Flatpak and Loblolly are movable homes, they're actually built stronger than traditional homes in America because they must withstand being shipped on the back of a truck. In that sense, they're designed to last longer and be more permanent than balloon-frame constructions. However, Flatpak and Loblolly are both designed modularly and can be disassembled and moved to another site, making them as mobile as the medieval peasant's homes Jackson describes. These prefab houses are designed to be flexible, catering to both long-term and short-term occupants.

Though I cannot be sure that Jackson envisions environmentalism in the same way, these homes are designed to reduce their carbon footprint. A third of the materials used in traditional home building ends up in the landfill; scraps from cutting down 2 by 4s or extra carpeting gets tossed. Prefab architecture generates no waste at the worksite because all materials are manufactured to size. The Flatpak house even incorporates the shipping materials into the final home, while Loblolly comes with all the wiring, plumbing, etc already installed in the walls to maximize the design efficiency of the building's innards. Michelle Kaufmann's designs work with her California environment, using green roofs, wet roofs, breezeways for passive cooling, site orientation for north-light and southern exposure, and are entirely off the grid with optional solar panels and wind turbines.

Moreover, the prefab movement is democratizing modernist architecture. At costs ranging from $120 to $300/sq foot, these architects are designing modern homes that are affordable to the middle class and comparable to traditional homes. They'll probably never achieve the same low costs as mobile homes, and they will never be appealing to people who want McMansions, but I think that they're a response to Jackson's observations about American architecture and the American landscape.