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The Prefab Fad - Prefabrication is everywhere in American home-building. But that doesn't mean your next house is going to be a stylish, Modernist box. (Slate)
Architects have been fascinated by prefabrication for a long time. I once saw a school in Costa Rica that had been designed by Gustave Eiffel in the late 19th century. The two-story metal building had been entirely fabricated in France, shipped to San Jose, and assembled in place. The cast-iron and pressed-metal structure was Classical in style, with decorative pilasters—and hundreds of bolt heads. (The Eiffel company still makes prefab buildings, bridges, and offshore drilling rigs.) The first house I ever designed, a summer cottage for my parents in Vermont, was a prefab, made out of interlocking tongue-and-groove cedar logs. The Pan-Abode Company precut the logs and, together with all the lumber for the floor and roof, shipped them from British Columbia in a boxcar. It took a friend and me two weeks to put it all together. It was like playing with oversized Lincoln Logs. Solid western red cedar is a durable material, as evidenced by this current photo, taken almost 35 years after the house was built.t