Eames inspired prefab

21Oct08

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I have to admit that in the past I have been less than optimistic about modern prefab houses. Very few of them end up being priced at less than $200 a square foot. To me $100 a square foot is the magic number to try and hit before you can really claim it’s “affordable”. The 100k house is proving that it can be done with fairly typical building practices and a little creativity. So where does that leave prefab? Well not everyone has given up on it like I have, and the NY Times had an interesting article about a prefab modern home built in the Los Angeles area for $125 a square foot. The home shows some obvious influence from the Eames Case Study home and shows that using prefab techniques to achieve an affordable modern home might still be a possibility.
NY Times Article “Prefab, High-Concept and Green”

Via TreeHugger

Packages Images Photo 2008 10 16 20081016-Culver 25394625
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  3. Prefab by Michelle Kaufmann
  4. Ma Modular
  5. Simple Modern Homes

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Comments

3 Responses to “Eames inspired prefab”

  1. liam. on October 21st, 2008 8:32 am

    prefab is starting to catch up. it won’t fit into tight budgets until more people buy them and more companies design and build them. i still believe customisable prefab is the future of home building.

  2. Nic on October 22nd, 2008 9:46 am

    First a disclaimer: I am with the 100k house project. Thanks for the mention.

    I was amazed when I saw a $500k+ house (does that include site work?) billed as affordable. Granted, it was built for $125 a square foot, but the 4,200 square foot size skews that number. Economy of scale allows one to decrease the cost per square foot as you add inexpensive space (large, “empty” rooms). If we blew the 100k house up to 4,200 square feet we would probably come in under $75 a square foot.

    I agree with Liam that prefab may come down in cost as more people adopt it, but I disagree with him about it being the future of home delivery. I believe that, as usual, the answer lies somewhere in-between. I hope to see a hybrid model that will take elements of prefab and combine them with local labor to produce truly affordable, architecturally interesting, efficient homes and produce them quickly.

  3. Marleen on February 1st, 2009 12:11 pm

    Is there a way to build a house for around a 100 dollars a square foot?

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