Home within Reach: Designing a New Prefabricated House

Abstract

Prefabricated housing has a brighter possibility for providing a custom, modern home construction that is faster, safer, more flexible, predictable and healthier than the average new home construction. It also has greater potential to produce well designed mass-production housing. With this method homebuyers can build (or purchase) a quality home at a traditional price or possibly at a lower cost, with an exceptional energy efficient and environmentally friendly design. Today, American homebuyers are looking for more flexible and affordable housing, and are ready for the change from the traditional speculative housing modeled using the “Levittown” concept which was developed nearly 60 years ago and the McMansion which became popular in the 1980’s. There were numerous groundbreaking proposals for prefabricated housing in the late thirties, the forties after World War II, and the sixties, from architects including Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Buckminster Fuller, Albert Frey, Jean Prouve, Charles and Ray Eames, and Richard Rogers. However, those ideas were difficult to adapt to common residential design, and were too advanced and modern for the average homebuyers. Also, today the construction technology for prefabricated houses has advanced. Prefabricated housing will benefit not only architects by providing a bigger opportunity to practice their skills to a wider housing market, but will also benefit the homebuyers who are looking for housing styles which fit their life styles; a home within reach. In this project I would like to propose a housing plan by using one of the notable methods of vi construction; the Structural Install Panel System. The project site is located in Novi, Michigan, one of the most recent fastest-growing suburbs of Detroit, Michigan where tract housing, especially McMansions, are built. The city is approximately 25 miles northwest of the center of Detroit, and 100 miles south of Bay City, Michigan where the first company, Aladdin Readi-Cut Houses, offered a true “kit” house 100 years ago.