Why I Still Believe Prefab Homes Are a Good Idea

This story is part of Dwell’s yearlong 25th-anniversary celebration of the people, places, and ideas we’ve championed over the years.

The black and white house by Anderson Anderson featured on the cover of Dwell’s first prefab issue was not a house for everyone. It has a singularity that runs counter to the way the housing market works; it wasn’t about square footage or vaulted ceilings or resale value, for example. It was designed expressly for the people who were to live in it, and modular construction was the best way to bring it to fruition.

It was not easy to find projects for that issue, which came out in April 2001. Prefab carried with it a stigma—so large a stigma, in fact, that architects using it weren’t eager to advertise that fact. But for some reason, the topic struck a chord. So much so that I wrote a book about it (in collaboration with my husband, Bryan Burkhart, who designed it), titled Prefab. Published in 2002, it opened the floodgates. It wasn’t that it led to so many architects to explore modular building. Rather, it let those architects who’d been playing around with prefab know that they were not alone. And that potential clients were intrigued.

At Dwell, we began to see prefab homebuilding as a means to an end, a way to make well-designed houses a reality for more people. Companies were already building thousands of homes at a time, creating insta-suburbs throughout the country. But the design of so many of these homes, such as it was, was removed from any context or style it may have been attempting to mimic. I recall around 2002 my sister-in-law describing a house she and her husband were purchasing in Orange County: they had a choice of a "Gothic" front or a "Craftsman" one, but the homes were identical, the facades just tacked on.

Now nearly 25 years (!) since that first prefab issue, looking through the pages of Dwell, one can see many terrific examples of prefab homes. Not very many are affordable, or as inexpensive as you might think, though, and remarkably, the building method isn’t nearly as widespread as we thought it would be so many years ago.

"The problem today is not whether to prefabricate or not to prefabricate," wrote George Nelson, considered by many to be the founder of American modernist design, in 1957 in Problems of Design. "This question has already been settled." The problem, Nelson continued, was how "to bring the house up to the technical level of the refrigerator, the automatic machine tool, the automobile, and to use this technique to enhance human values."

Ah, it is always so frustrating, so humbling really, to go back in time to see how little ground we’ve covered. Over 70,000 kit houses were sold by Sears between 1908 and 1940; today in the U.S., the percentage of homes built using modular construction hovers at around three percent annually—or about 70,000 homes per year.

In many other countries, prefab is the norm. It’s free of the social stigma it has in the United States largely because the investment has been made in doing it right. In Japan, for example, 15 percent of homes are prefabricated in steel. In Sweden, as much as 45 percent of construction is industrialized, and an estimated 85 percent of homes there have prefab elements. No one is wringing their hands over it; it’s a technology that delivers well-built structures at multiple price points—including units from Ikea.

In the U.S., though, prefab hasn’t fully escaped being lumped in with trailer parks and doublewides. This guilt by association isn’t entirely underserved. Much prefab is cheap and poorly made. This makes homeowners associations and financial institutions and insurance companies wary. Why take a gamble on prefab when stick-built works just fine, thank you. Why streamline construction processes when it’s an industry that can provide good jobs? Whether one-off, architect-designed prefabs—the kind featured by Dwell—or factory-line modular homes, the building method comes up against NIMBYs, recalcitrant lenders, labor unions, and risk-averse insurers. That’s a handful of hurdles right there.

And yet, that hasn’t stopped people from trying to make prefab happen.

Featured in the glossy pages of Dwell, prefab promised a viable path to the dream of homeownership. It also became… cool? Following Dwell’s 2001 prefab issue and the publication of my book, it seemed as if every publication was writing a story on the subject. As I recall, the New York Times put a prefab house in its holiday gift guide around then, and even Cooking Light somehow found a way to cover it.

Suddenly, the stigma seemed to be fading. So, because I was young and enthusiastic (and naïve), I convinced the publisher of Dwell that writing about them wasn’t enough—that we should hold an international competition to design a modern affordable prefab home. We chose $200K (about $350K today) as our home price—a number that seemed reasonable to an office full of people in San Francisco (where the median listing at the time, mind you, was half a million.) This was going to clear the path toward delivering modern architecture to more people at a reasonable price. And it was, I argued, what our readers craved.