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The Prefabricated Home | The Prefabricated Home, by Colin Davies This is a book about prefabricated houses, but more importantly it is a book about architecture. Modernist architects of the last century put the prefabricated house at the centre of their project to make a new world from the products of industry. Architectural history has recorded the results with admiration but underneath it is a sad story. Architect-designed prefabricated houses were mostly commercial and industrial failures. Architects were good at designing prototypes, but bad at following through with volume production. That doesn't mean that there were no successful mass produced houses; there were. The American mobile home, for example, was a phenomenal success. But it didn't count as architecture and it has therefore been excluded from architectural history. Traditional architectural practice is based on service to an individual client and care for an individual site. But what if the client is an impersonal market sector and the building must be adaptable to any site? Architects claim authorship of the buildings they design, but what if a building is developed and refined through various versions by production engineers and market analysts? Who is the author then? Architecture furnishes many metaphors for stability and permanence: ‘foundation’, ‘cornerstone’, ‘structure’, ‘concrete’. These linguistic associations are among the sources of architecture's prestige. How is this affected by a new technology of lightweight panels and prefabricated boxes made by robots on production lines? Prefabrication undermines the traditional values of architecture. But it cannot be ignored. If architects want to exert a real influence on the built environment, then they must be prepared to learn from areas of the building industry that they have traditionally shunned, from pattern-book houses to modular hotels, from Portakabins to park homes. This book has no easy answers, but it asks the right questions. It will be of interest to architects, architecture students and anyone connected with the building industry, but its jargon-free discussion of technical and theoretical questions is specifically designed to appeal also to the general reader. The Prefabricated Home was runner up in the 2005 RIBA International Book Award Excerpts from reviews: 'Let's not beat about the bush. Let's get straight to the point. There has been an awful lot of interest in prefabrication in recent years, but not much has as yet come out of it except this book, which is a gem. The Prefabricated Home should be read especially by people who have plunged into the pursuit of the £60,000 house, if only because a lot of history is gathered together here that cannot be found in one source anywhere else. History that is as bright and fresh as a minted coin, and as relevant as the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister itself.' 'A modestly titled but densely informative book that could potentially help change the world, for real. . . . He reveals fresh insight on the broader issues of architecture and the original ideals of the modernists. . . . [Davies] writes with clarity, grace, and an intellectual rigour that is surprisingly free of jargon. The Prefabricated Home is a brilliant and timely book for anyone in the profession.' Adele Weder in Azure magazine 'The Prefabricated Home doesn't provide any answers, but it certainly asks the right questions, and they don't just relate to prefabrication and housing, they concern the profession as a whole. This is an excellent book and a definite must-read.' 'An impassioned call to architects to change their attitudes to design processes, manufacturing methods and relationships with clients. . . The Prefabricated Home is a more complex and provocative book than it might at first appear. By turns angry and optimistic, it is both a challenging and enjoyable read.' Building Design 'An excellent survey of the prefabrication debate.' Grand Designs |  | |||
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Useful prefab links: fabprefab.com | |||||
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