Lazor
Office’s FlatPak is a prefabricated system that allows buyers to highly customize their homes using a series of modules that create highly individual homes tailored to particular sites. More photos and a link to the FlatPak site are available after the jump.
The Guardian has an in depth, insightful commentary criticizing the link between the prefab and environmental movements aimed in particular at the stir that the MoMA exhibit has created:
Beyond prefab’s trendiness, or perhaps to facilitate it, advocates are pushing its purported environmental advantages. Built on an assembly line, its waste output can be much lower than site-built houses. Bulk purchasing allows cheaper access to eco-friendly materials like solar panels. There’s no construction site, per se, so the area surrounding the house is less impacted. As Greenbiz, an online environmental news site, wrote last fall: “While they may seem like an odd couple, prefabricated housing - in which most of a home’s structure is pre-built in a factory then assembled on-site - is an oddly natural partner for the green movement.”
MetroShed, a UK based company with additional production facilities in the US that we have covered before, is launching its 2008 line of prefab structures. These buildings come in a wide array of varieties, from “sheds” which are multipurpose structures ideal for an office to the MetroCabin, larger cabins starting at around $35,000. MetroShip, a houseboat, and MetroPlay playhouse lines are also available, setting the company apart in some respects from its competitors.
The MetroShed buildings come pre assembled in a flatpack format with all necessary fasteners. The company claims that no building experience is required in order to assemble and that the kits are even designed to avoid any heavy lifting.
The New York Times is reporting on a bold move my the Museum of Modern Art in New York City: the museum has commissioned four architects to bring their prefab homes to a vacant lot in New York in an exhibit that is sure to greatly raise international awareness of what today’s prefab structures have to offer. We’ll be covering this exhibit more as information becomes available and when it is installed.
the Museum of Modern Art has commissioned five architects to erect their own prefab dwellings in a vacant lot on West 53rd Street, adjacent to the museum. Whittled down from a pool of about 400, the five architects are participating in “Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling,” an exhibition opening in July.
