Custom prefabs point the way to the future
Carolyn Leitch - The Globe and Mail
First readers have to get past the title: Prefabulous, after all, sounds like the product of an over-zealous marketer for a company making prefabricated houses. And many people do share a perception that prefabs are shoddy, cheap and unimaginative boxes — often found in the path of tornadoes.
But the houses in this book look nothing like the houses you pass on the highway — built in a factory and trucked to a building site with a red flag dangling from the back.
Such modular houses do represent a portion of the prefab business, but the industry has evolved, author Sheri Koones asserts.
The concept of prefab has been around for a long time: 19th-century farmers and city dwellers often bought mail-order kit houses from the catalogues of Sears Roebuck and Eatons. In the 1950s, the prefab industry began to focus on small, low-cost houses.
“It has only been in the last decade or two that architects, builders and homeowners have begun to take advantage of what is called, in the industry, systems-built homes. Along the way, good design has crept back into the process.”
Notwithstanding the title and the equally cheesy, “The house of your dreams delivered fresh from the factory” subtitle, the book is informative and well-researched.
Given today’s zeitgeist surrounding green building, one wonders if publishers have missed a major marketing opportunity: The book focuses on prefab houses as energy-saving and eco-friendly.
The book tells us that, over the past 10 years, there has been growing interest in off-site assembly of houses — generally referred to as “prefab” — rather than stick-by-stick construction on site.
The houses featured in the book are actually custom-designed, but nevertheless are made using newer, more sustainable assembly practices.
And although each house looks different from the others, all were manufactured partially or almost completely in a controlled factory environment and then erected on site.
The author points out that people want a safe environment with homes that are built to withstand insects, rot and weather extremes.
Other people are showing ever-increasing concern for protecting the environment and slowing depletion of natural resources. Factory-built houses, she says, use less lumber and generate less waste.
At the same time, consumers want to live in a healthy environment with a minimum of toxic chemicals and inhabit buildings that have limited potential for developing mould and mildew. The book looks at the variety of building systems, shows the results and explores the circumstances and conditions that produced each of the homes.
Ms. Koones covers the most commonly-used building systems of modular, panelized, log, timber frame, concrete and steel frame.
A theme throughout the book is that there exists a burgeoning number of homeowners, architects and builders who were convinced that better ways exist to build houses.
The author provides lots of photographs, and profiles of houses across North America, from a log home in North Carolina to a concrete Spanish-style house in Nevada. A house of stone, steel and glass stands in Toronto.
The results, the author says, include many houses that would be considered beautiful, some attractive and unique, but all energy-efficient and eco-friendly in their own way.
“When you listen to architects, to people in the business, and to the homeowners, you’ll know that prefabrication is the way houses of the future will be built. Every year brings an increase in the sophistication of the materials, the energy-efficiency of the materials and construction methods, and the design options that are possible.”
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