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INSIGHT: Mod Mods: Manufacturing Markets for Modulars

With market forces finally putting wind in the sails of pre-fab, the promise of sales should finally save industrial production of housing from the utopia to which it has been consigned.

Manufactured housing has been an enduring Modernist utopia. In 1932, students at The Bauhaus “manufactured” a prototype, the “Five Roomed House.” 1945 brought the world Jean Prouvé and Marcel Lods prototype for a prefabricated metal house. The mid-1960s brought forth the Metabolists in Japan – a more concentrated affection for manufactured residences fastened to vertical utility columns to make high-rises. None of these went beyond prototypes or one-offs. The apotheosis of this vision, achieved at the dawn of Post-Modernism and with appropriate irony, was the washrooms for the Lloyds Building in London by Richard Rogers (1985). Beautifully crafted and mass-produced, these loo modules appropriately prefigure the Post-Modern fetishization of the bathroom.

The common cord of this whole utopian project, one that continues to this day unraveling into its constituent threads, is the ideal of the market driving design – a design so exciting that those who can afford it will want it (or in the tighter straits of post WWI and WWII reconstructions, the idea that governments might fob off the utopia on their populations). Recent efforts such as Resolution: 4 Architecture’s Modern Modular, Snøhetta’s Lucinda and Bloom, and Taalman Koch Architecture’s iT House have, I suspect, wound off the finest and final threads. The resulting products are quite appealing, stylish, and unique. Unfortunately, unique they are likely to remain despite considerable investment in the prototypes.

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