A Lot of Empty

Micro Compact House by
Horden Cherry Lee and Haack + Höpfner

Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling
Museum of Modern Art
July 20–Oct. 20

Imagine a house available to anyone: cheap, easily assembled, expandable, portable and with all the amenities inside a compact rectilinear design. It can be situated anywhere, including in a park near other similarly designed structures.

That dream’s been a reality for more than half a century. In fact the U.S. has more of these homes then anyone else, millions of them. Its name is the mobile home, the trailerpark.

There are no trailers or double-wides on display at “Home Delivery,” MoMA’s off-the-mark prefab survey, which not-surprisingly is more concerned with the design concepts of big-name architects.

The main attraction is five commissioned prefabs arranged in the museum’s nearby empty lot, soon make way 75-story skyscraper designed by Jean Nouvel. But first we’re instructed to visit the museum’s 4th Floor for a dizzying, and sometimes amusing, history lesson as told through an overabundance of plans, models, brochures, drawings photographs, films and computer animations. (The catalog does a better job.)

Prefab’s origins are traced all the way back to 1833, a year that saw the introduction of a kit home for British colonists in Australia. But things only really got going in the 20th Century with a fever for bringing industrial efficiencies and materials to housing.

The ever-inventive Thomas Edison saw the answer in the concrete home. A single standardized mold was used for everything including staircases, bookshelves — even for pianos, which couldn’t have been very melodious. More than 100 were built in New Jersey, and a few are still standing.

It was the modernists, with their rationalist utopian ideas about transforming the world, who really got excited about prefab. Bauhaus chieftain Walter Gropius pioneered a system of copper-paneled houses which were Palestine as homes for Jews who left Germany in the prewar years. Ironically, the project’s co-designer, Hans Dustmann, would go on to become a major architect for the Nazis; Gropius fled to the United States.

Gropius protégé Marcel Breuer created his own prefab system, which was exhibited on its own in the MoMA’s garden in 1946. It was a commercial failure, and the model was bought by the Rockefellers for use as a guesthouse on their sprawling Westchester estate. However, the first structure displayed in the garden, in 1941, was Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Deployment Unit, or DDU, a repurposed grain bin which was used by the Army in WWII; for more on Bucky and his far-out housing ideas head over to the Whitney.

The inspiration for the Brueur home display was a contemporaneous prefab display in a nearby vacant lot (sound familiar?). The provocatively named Lustron was a aluminum steel-panel prefab scheme based on, no joke, White Castle hamburger joints. In an interesting turn, part of the Luston is now assembled inside the MoMA; its battleship aesthetics make it easy to understand why it failed.

Also displayed are sections of an elegant steel-based structure by Frenchman Jean Prouvé originally designed for use by a secondary school headmistress in Niger. One surviving example was bought at auction for $5 million by the hotelier Andrew Balazs for use as a lounge inside a Costa Rica resort development.

Other materials were also explored, such as with the unrealized nautilus-form All Plastic House by Ionel Schein of 1956, and a comically modish late-60s fiberglass UFO by Matti Suuronen known as Futuro House. Richard and Su Rogers too made use of plastics and other high-tech materials in their banana-yellow Zip-Up Enclosures (see above left), designed for a 1969 competition sponsored by DuPont, best known at the time as the makers of Agent Orange.

While we think of prefabs as stand-alone homes, modularity and off-site construction were also brought to bear on apartment building design. The pied piper of the apartment block himself, Le Courbusier, designed a 12-story structure for Marseille that was described as a wine rack, into which modular units could be inserted like bottles.

Following in Corbu's footsteps, the 60s saw a rash of interest in modularity and mega-structures, including by everyone’s favorite architectural fantasists, Archigram, represented by their far-out Plug-In City and Living Pod. In terms of building that were actually built, there is Habitat ’67 in Montreal, a super-cool geometric pile of interlocking concrete units designed by 24-year-old Moshe Safdie as part of his graduate school thesis. While the structure was intended to organically expand as necessary, it has remained in its original form. A similar story is told with the Tokyo’s Nagakin Capsule Tower of 1970 (see above), an arrangement of studio apartment modules attached to a central core. Architect Kisho Kurokawa intended them to be periodically replaced; they weren’t and are now suffering from disrepair. Also from that year is the practically-minded Oriental Masonic Gardens, an affordable housing community for New Haven that features clever pinwheel clusters of mobile homes (imagine that), which its architect, Paul Rudolph, dubbed the “Brick of the Twentieth Century.” Despite the enthusiasm, it would be his only realized project taking this approach.

Much more successful were the concrete-panel low-rise apartments of the Soviet Union and Eastern Block. And in the U.S., suburbia itself can be seen as partially prefab. The prototypical Levittown cookie-cutter colonial made use of standardized designs and precut lumber; in fact, William Levitt’s ideas were more popular in France than those Jean Prouvé. Today, one third of U.S. home are built offsite. But Japan is home to the most successful prefab industry, with homes are widely available through companies like Toyota and Muji.

While MoMA emphasizes the many failings of high-design prefabs, they remain optimistic. Their reason? It’s the same song we heard at the museum’s "Design and the Elastic Mind": computers are our salvation.

To gaze into this bright tomorrow, we head for the empty lot, where we’re greeted with BURST *008, a homely beach home on stilts adorned with 70s-style sunburst patterns window and connected bleachers. Designers Jeremy Edmiston and Douglas Gauthier use sophisticated software that allows prefab even for complex forms, doing away with the need for the boring box. It didn’t bode well that the house was temporarily closed to visitors.

Also employing a computer-intensive approach was a shed concept for the victims of Hurricane Katrina. Created by MIT’s Lawrence Sass and collaborators, the shotgun-style house features a neat-looking pixilated New Orleans neoclassical façade. The inside was empty, with no indication of what the layout would looks like. By contrast, the arrangement of appliances seemed to be the main point of the shoe-box shaped System3 by Oskar Leo Kaufmann and Albert Rüf/KFN Systems. All mechanical features, including kitchen and bathroom, are arranged around a central core.

The aptly named Micro Compact House (Horden Cherry Lee and Haack + Höpfner) is a clown-car prefab, packing everything from bed to espresso maker into an impossibly and oppressively small space. What appears to be a parody is actually for sale. One the other end of the size spectrum is the four-story Cellophane House by Kiernan Timberlake Associates, featuring eco-chic plastic walls interwoven with photovoltaic cells and a steel frame made of off-the-shelf parts.

To the MoMA’s credit, the five prefabs aren’t all chic glass boxes out of Dwell Magazine. But, somehow they come off as insubstantial and unrealistic.

We’re told that despite its long history of failures, that modern prefab still holds promise, even offering solutions to problems as big as the environment and poverty. It’s a message that rings untrue. This utopianism feels dishonest when the museum's empty lot is soon to be another luxury tower for the mega-rich. We remain undelivered.