Home Thoughts
By Richard Lacayo
In 1920, Buster Keaton made a very funny silent short called One Week, about newlyweds who try to build a house from a mail-order kit. Complications ensue. A big screen playing scenes from that movie is the first thing you see at "Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling," an exhibition on view at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City that charts the bumptious history of prefabricated housing. The show, which runs through Oct. 20, was organized by Barry Bergdoll, MOMA's chief curator of architecture, who was operating in a playful mood. There are lots of video-projection screens, a glass case displaying an Erector set, even a full-scale version of part of an all-steel Lustron house that must have been a very difficult place in which to be a frustrated 1950s housewife. (Try banging your head against those walls.) But this is also a scholarly show with a complicated agenda--to be the illustrated history of an idea whose time never quite comes.
And it's been a long time not coming. The first documented example of prefab is from 1830. Called the Manning Portable Colonial Cottage for Emigrants, it was a modular system devised by a London carpenter to ease his son's transition to Australia. But it was the rise of assembly-line manufacturing in the 20th century that gave real impetus to the idea that houses, just like cars and shoes, could be mass-produced. Early in the century, Thomas Edison came up with the Single Pour Concrete System. It involved pumping concrete into wooden molds to form houses like so many multi story cupcakes. In 1917 he deposited about 100 in and around Union, N.J., but a market never materialized. People just didn't warm to the idea of living in oversize knickknacks. And besides, the walls kept cracking.
Sears, Roebuck and Co. had better luck with its mail-order home kits. From 1908 to 1940, it sold about 100,000 in no fewer than 447 models that buyers picked from catalogs. Thousands of pieces would be shipped to the customer--lumber, shingles, siding, pipes, paint, plus, of course, the all-important assembly guide. (Lose that and you had a real puzzle on your hands.) The Sears houses sold precisely because they were in utterly conventional styles: Cape Cod, colonial, bungalow and so on. Nothing about them suggested the hand of any mad scientist--architect intent on designing a brave new home for mankind. Where houses are concerned, familiarity breeds contentment.
All the same, forward-looking architects have always found the idea of prefabrication irresistible. During World War I, Le Corbusier patented the Maison Dom-Ino. It was an easily reproduced slab-and-column structural framework, just the thing to support a resolutely modern "machine for living." In the 1920s, the intellectual pleni potentiary Buckminster Fuller devised the steel-and-aluminum Dymaxion House, a six-sided dwelling suspended by cables from a central steel post. And after World War II, the French designer Jean Prouve came up with the Maison Tropicale, a metal-walled house attractive enough in its retro-modern way that one sold at auction last year for $4.9 million. The buyer was the hotelier Andre Balazs, who plans to repurpose it as a resort bar in Costa Rica.
To this day, the prefabs that appeal to a large market are snap-together modulars in traditional silhouettes. No architects need apply. But over the past decade, quite a few architects have returned to the idea in the dogged belief that a factory-produced house that isn't pure kitsch can still appeal to buyers. One of the new mantras is mass customization. Design software and high-tech tools like computer-controlled laser saws make it possible to adapt a basic design to suit individual customers. To bring "Home Delivery" to a smashing conclusion, MOMA has installed five full-scale new houses, each by a different architect or firm, on an empty lot adjacent to the museum. The message is plain: prefab may have a checkered past, but it always has a future.