A new exhibition asks whether top designers can rescue manufactured housing from the public's disdain.
(originally published in slightly different form under the title "Pod Sweet Pod"
in the Chicago Reader, March 4, 2005)
"I'm going to say a horrible word," warns University of Illinois at Chicago architecture professor Roberta Feldman as she discusses the public's conception of prefabricated housing. "Trailer trash. We link it with people we consider uprooted and mobile." Housing built in a factory doesn't exclusively mean double-wides, and it may offer an affordable alternative to the usual -- and more expensive -- practice of building homes from scratch on-site. But it can be hard establishing a comfort level with a something that often seems as much joke fodder as housing type.
Feldman is co-curator of Design Innovations in Manufactured Housing, an exhibit running at the Field Museum through January 16, 2006 that attempts to move awareness of manufactured housing beyond the punch line. On display are concepts from eight architects and industrial designers who've explored ways that new technology and superior design can produce affordable prefab homes in forms as diverse as traditional freestanding one and two-story homes to stackable pods that create high-rise apartments.
"What's interesting is that the average American moves every five to six years,” Feldman says. “We're very mobile, but somehow the value of rootedness is expressed in site-built housing, even though we're not rooted. We associate renters and people who move a lot with shifty people who don't share our values and aren't civic-minded. Manufactured housing has gotten very tied up in that value system, and that's one of the reasons it's so stigmatized."
According to the department of Housing and Urban Development, 30 percent of new home construction in the past decade was either prefab or used prefab components, but examples in Chicago are rare. "We have so few examples in Chicago, I'm tongue-tied," Feldman says. "You find most manufactured housing built on the urban fringe or in rural areas."
But during the first half of the 20th century, Chicago was home to one of the great engines of manufactured housing. In 1908, Sears, Roebuck published a specialty catalog, Book of Modern Homes and Building Plans, that sold 22 styles of houses. In 1915, Sears began selling kit homes, consisting of up to 10,000 numbered parts and a set of instructions showing the buyer how to put the whole thing together. The catalogs promised substantial savings: "$945 Builds This $1,500.00 to $1,800.00 Eight-Room Bungalow Style House," read one typical ad. Although a number of other companies - including Montgomery Ward - sold houses by mail, Sears was the most successful. By 1925, it had sold 30,000 homes.
Low cost was the main incentive for buyers, but design quality also played a major role. "They were all copied after popular styles," says Elgin-based architecture historian Rebecca Hunter, who maintains a registry of mail-order houses. "In basic size, shape, and style they are no different from anything else on the block." The most expensive Sears home between 1915 and 1920, the Magnolia, sold for up to $6,000; the house included a two-story-high portico with fluted columns, a sun parlor, and a "massive but graceful stairway." By 1940, when the effects of the Great Depression forced Sears to discontinue its catalog houses, 75,000 had been sold. Large numbers of them remain in suburbs like Elgin, Villa Park, Downers Grove, but few were ever built in the city proper.
"Most of them are on the edges of Chicago," Hunter says, "by the rail lines because that's how the kits were transported. They say that parts for a typical house filled two railroad boxcars. There was also a lot of union opposition in Chicago: Chicago had very strict union labor laws, and they really gave people a hard time if they wanted to put a kit home up."
The spirit of the Sears kit home lives on today, in reduced and fairly pricey scale, at Target where, along with the architect's tea kettles and can openers, the discount retailer sells Michael Graves Pavilions, prefabricated modules that add a breakfast nook or dining room to an existing house; the largest maxes out at 215 square feet and costs upwards of $33,000.
The era of low interest rates hasn't been kind to the manufactured-housing industry. While it's meant that the home ownership rate has risen to 69.2 percent - the highest level since the Census Bureau began tracking the indicator in 1965 - it's also made site-built housing, traditionally perceived as more attractive, available to buyers who might otherwise not have been able to afford it. From 1997 to 2003, shipments of manufactured homes dropped by more than half, from 354,000 to 170,000 units, according to the Freedonia Group, a market research firm. Freedonia research also shows that in 2002, the mobile home still accounted for 65 percent of all manufactured housing in the US, and it anticipates other types of prefab housing to remain essentially flat.
But in recent years a boutique subset of the manufactured-housing industry has emerged, deploying edgy design to appeal to more upscale buyers. Flatpak, a prefab house system created by architect Charlie Lazor, allows buyers to customize not only floor-plan configurations but also mix and match different textures and colors of wood, metal, glass, and concrete to create visually distinctive exteriors. Lazor has said his goal is to make not just housing but design affordable, but a Flatpak home isn't cheap: building a 2,500-square-foot Flatpak house runs $360,000, exclusive of a 10 percent design fee, the cost of land, and any additional costs compliance with local building codes may entail.
Loftcube, created by German architect Werner Aisslinger, is another high-end designer prefab home, more affordable because it's dramatically smaller. A raised, white-framed, bevel-edged cube, the unit has a retro, space-age style that might best be described as early Jetsons. The unit offers 360-degree views, and the completely open plan extends to the exposed shower, which is reduced to one small wall segment housing the pipes and showerhead. The Loftcube, according to its Web site, is designed to be helicoptered or craned onto the "endless flat tops of the postwar high-rises." The first 2.5-ton, 388-square-foot prototype was assembled on a Berlin rooftop in 2003. The cost is 55,000 euros (approximately $72,000). Aisslinger claims to have received thousands of inquiries. Partnered with Corian/DuPont, which bankrolled the Loftcube's development, Aisslinger has announced he's going into full production mode, with first unit scheduled to ship by April.
In 2002 Dwell magazine, a glossy journal of hip home design, declared prefab housing "a terrific -- and feasible option for home building in the 21st century," and set out to prove it with a competition to create the Dwell Home, a $175,000 prefab house that would showcase the "aesthetic, environmental, economic, technologic” potential of prefab housing. Sixteen architects participated, and in May 2003 the New York firm Resolution: 4 Architecture was named the winner. Its entry, Modern Modular, combined traditional wood framing with high-tech modular design; the 2,042-square-foot, three-bedroom, 2.5-bath house was delivered to its owners in Pittsboro, North Carolina last April and was finished by July.
The benefits of designs like these may eventually trickle down to the broader market, but they currently bear the stamp of playthings for the affluent. The real-world potential for manufactured housing is in alleviating the increasing shortage of affordable housing in cities like Chicago, where, between November 2003 and November 2004 the median price of a single-family home increased 10.2 percent, to $246,000, and gentrification continues apace. Accordinbg to listings in the Chicago Tribune, North Center, not long ago a solidly working-class neighborhood, is now the priciest residential community in the city: the median home value there last October was almost half a million dollars.
That's well outside of "affordable" as the city defines it: within reach of a family of four with a household income of up $75,000 a year for a purchased home (which translates to houses between $150,000-$200,000), or $45,250 a year for rentals (between $600-$900 a month). The politics of affordable housing is reflected in the ongoing debate between Mayor Daley and Fourth Ward alderman Toni Preckwinkle. The current ordinance, approved by Daley and enacted in April 2003, mandates that 10 percent of units in city-subsidized developments be set aside for affordable housing; Preckwinkle's more aggressive proposal would require 15 percent of units in all developments be made available to lower income families. Both plans leave it to developers to figure out how to create affordable units that don't turn off full-price buyers or stigmatize lower-income residents, but don't address how technology can help the process. Which brings us to Design Innovations.
"Affordable housing must no longer be equated with fast and cheap," says Chicago architect Douglas Garofalo, explaining CorPod, which looks back to the time when travel trailers like the 1934 Airstream were actually seen as stylish, mating its classic design to current prefab parts. The concept features a concrete shell that incorporates the conduit system for electricity, heating, and water -- traditionally (and expensively) installed on-site; the CorPod itself, which contains "a complete kitchen, bathroom, storage, utility, and entertainment technologies," is lifted by crane and fitted into the shell, which is then finished with windows, doors and stairs. While the model on display is of a three-story multi-family complex, the basic CorPod modules is designed to allow in alternative configurations for single-family housing on suburban, or even rural sites.
Pods are also the driving concept behind The LaCan Project, by David Baker & Partners, which pays homage to the theories of French psychoanalyst and professor Jacques Lacan. Baker offers an alternative of the generational segregation of much American housing , where we "go to to different locales in each stage of our lives." Here the “podules” - ten-by-ten-by-ten moldules - are “developed out of a growing need to accommodate for flexible, adaptable and multiple lifestyles.” The podules come in three basic varieties - K-10 (kitchen), wet-10 (bath), and zero-10 (adaptable, universal space.) Like the CorPod, the podules can be combined in different configurations - horizontally to form a ranch-house like dwelling, placed atop one another to form a townhouse, or stacked in “mainframe" steel superstructure to form a tall tower, as in the model on display, which looks very much like the start of a game of Jenga. The LaCan project “has been designed with contemporary Americans in mind. Not only is it built to move - instead from moving to a new house with each lifestyle change, you just take it with you - "it can expand to accommodate growing families, or contract for empty nesters."
Manufactured housing requires standardization: because most mobile and modular homes are driven to their site, their pieces must conform to size restrictions on highways. Modules in Design Innovations could not be more than 80 feet long, 18 feet wide, and 14 feet 4 inches high. Several participants found ingenious ways around the limit. In Packed House, by David Khoury, "the package, typically a disposable husk, transforms itself into an integral and permanent part of the structure upon downloading." One half of the husk forms the walls surrounding the unit's courtyard; the house itself is lifted out of and placed atop the other half, which becomes a carport and entry pavilion.
Throughout the exhibit, photos and text compare individual designs to the homes of nomadic peoples. The LaCan project is compared to the vardo, the wagon in which the gypsies of central Europe live and travel in caravans in search of a living. The way the Bambuti tribe of Central Africa places their tents around a central area for privacy and safety mirrors the way the Boston firm Taylor & Burns arrange modular housing units to form an interior courtyard. The goatskin roofs of tents used by the Tuareg of North Africa let sunlight enter while deflecting heat and glare, similar to the way the clerestory windows in Ali Tayar's House Nine allows light to enter while minimizing heat from solar gain in summer.
MINiMAX, by Sumo architects Yolande Daniels and Sunil Bald, is likened to the domed yurts of Mongolian nomads, in which lattices expand like “a baby's gate” to create more space. In contrast, MINiMAX “works like an accordian.” Once on site, the end panels fold down to form extensions of the floors, and portable exterior wall sections slide out over them on motorized tracks, creating the Living Room on one end, the Master Bedroom on the other. The center section slides out perpendicular to the long side of the house to form a 2nd bedroom, and the open space it leaves in its wake is planted to form a garden. Eight divider “consoles” are shipped crammed together like the pleats of a closed accordion. Once on site, they separate and roll out along the motorized track (except for the “wet” consoles for kitchen, bath and toilet, which remain fixed in place) to define the individual spaces of the house. There's a library/entertainment console, one for a home gym, a laundry room/office, and even a dressing room console with a Murphy bed stored in its wall.
Looking at all these high-tech bells and whistles, the question arises as to whether these designs can really be built at an affordable prize. Roberta Feldman says each entry was vetted to make sure they could be constructed affordably, but concedes, “It would be very expensive to produce a prototype of many of them. At this point they read like boutique housing, but it doesn't have to be boutique if it were produced in large numbers. The Model T Ford, if they only produced one or a hundred, would have cost a fortune.”
"Maybe we should be questioning why we're not building houses the way we build cars," Feldman continues. "We're very willing to accept cars off an assembly line. We've come to recognize our manufacturing plants that create a great diversity of consumer products and meet consumer demand, yet in our housing somehow we insist that it has to be site-build to be a good home."
To get to mass production, however, still another, seemingly intractable roadblock has to be overcome - traditional building codes, of which Feldman claims Chicago's is particularly restrictive. “We have what's called prescriptive building codes,” she says, “which tell you, not in every instance, but in most of our code, what materials you have to use. Whereas a performance based building code, which, for example, most European nations are moving towards, will say what kind of performance they expect: a wall has to have a fire rating of 2 hours, which means a fire can't go through a wall for two hours. The city tried to encourage the industry to come in, especially to provide units in lower-income communities, and it didn't fly, because by the time they met the building codes, it just wasn't cost effective. It doesn't mean it's lower quality. It's not.”
“Largely that is to support unions,” Feldman continues, “which I believe in. We're in a double bind here. I think labor should get higher wages (but) - our housing codes go beyond health, safety and welfare to include other norms and other special interest groups."
However; the controversy over just one cost-saving material, PVC (polyvinyl choloride), illustrates how difficult the debate over new materials can become. "PVC is a legitimate form of piping," Feldman says. "It doesn't last as long as copper does, but it's easier and cheaper to repair." However, environmental groups like Greenpeace claim it emits deadly dioxins during manufacture and disposal, and hydrogen chloride gas in fires. While The U.S. Green Building Council currently takes a neutral stand on PVC use, it's in the midst of studying whether or not to make the avoidance of PVC products a part of its LEED certification for environmentally friendly buildings. Just last December, New York governor George Pataki vetoed legislation that would have continued a three-year-old ban on the use of PVC pipe in commercial and large residential projects. The legislation was supported by a coalition of plumbers unions, while a coalition of environmental groups joined with a firefighters association to protest the veto.
As you walk through Design Innovations, you encounter an installation, Estudio Teddy Cruz's Manufactured Site,that makes the others seem like a sideshow. It begins with the sobering reminder that 837 million of the world's people are essentially squatters. Lacking legal title to the land they live on, their homes, packed into densely overcrowded shantytowns, are makeshift structures built from whatever materials are at hand. Such is the lot for half the urban residents of Africa, a third of those in Asia, and a fourth of those in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Cruz describes San Diego as "the Home Depot of Tijuana," from which discarded materials such as wooden pallets, garage and refrigerator doors, tarps, plywood - even entire houses slated for demolition - make their way across the border to be re-assembled into housing for the poor. Inspired by "the resourcefulness of poverty," Cruz's concept is a third-world revival of the Sears catalog house. Families would receive a kit with an assembly manual, a snap-in water tank, and 36 frames that can be placed in a variety of configurations, serve as frames for concrete poured on site, or to incorporate materials found nearby. Cruz would pair San Diego non-profits with local Mexican government officials to funnel money to the “maquiladora industry” - corporations that have built plants in Mexico to take advantage of a labor force characterized by low wages, no health care, and no unions - which would fabricate and distribute the kits, “to give back to the communities it exploits.”
Ironically, it's here, among the poorest of the poor, beneath the interest or attention of zoning or unions or battling trade groups, that experimentation in manufactured housing may have its greatest freedom to develop solutions that really make a difference.
Beyond the Trailer Park
sold for up to $6,000; the house included a two-story-high portico with fluted columns, a sun parlor, and a "massive but graceful stairway." By 1940, when the effects of the Great Depression forced Sears to discontinue its catalog houses, 75,000 had been sold. Large numbers of them remain in suburbs like 
Garofalo
adaptable and multiple lifestyles.” The podules come in three basic varieties - K-10 (kitchen), wet-10 (bath), and zero-10 (adaptable, universal space.) Like the CorPod, the podules can be combined in different configurations - horizontally to form a ranch-house like dwelling, placed atop one another to form a townhouse, or stacked in “mainframe" steel superstructure to form a tall tower, as in the model on display, which looks very much like the start of a game of 
MINiMAX “works like an accordian.” Once on site, the end panels fold down to form extensions of the floors, and portable exterior wall sections slide out over them on motorized tracks, creating the Living Room on one end, the Master Bedroom on the other. The center section slides out perpendicular to the long side of the house to form a 2nd bedroom, and the open space it leaves in its wake is planted to form a garden. Eight divider “consoles” are shipped crammed together like the pleats of a closed accordion. Once on site, they separate and roll out along the motorized track (except for the “wet” consoles for kitchen, bath and toilet, which remain fixed in place) to define the individual spaces of the house. There's a library/entertainment console, one for a home gym, a laundry room/office, and even a dressing room console with a Murphy bed stored in its wall.
demolition - make their way across the border to be re-assembled into housing for the poor. Inspired by "the resourcefulness of poverty," Cruz's concept is a third-world revival of the Sears catalog house. Families would receive a kit with an assembly manual, a snap-in water tank, and 36 frames that can be placed in a variety of configurations, serve as frames for concrete poured on site, or to incorporate materials found nearby. Cruz would pair San Diego non-profits with local Mexican government officials to funnel money to the “maquiladora industry” - corporations that have built plants in Mexico to take advantage of a labor force characterized by low wages, no health care, and no unions - which would fabricate and distribute the kits, “to give back to the communities it exploits.”