PreFab House Design

The MOCA has been hosting a pre-fab house design exhibit. Pre-fab has a bad reputation here in the US, but there are architects who are interested in pre-fab design that's beautiful and in some cases ecologically sound. Some of the designs are really modular such as the Wee House which can be built in a variety of configurations, 2 bedrooms, 3 bedrooms, or 4 bedrooms and for each set there are a great variety of ways to combine each set of bedrooms, depending on what kind of look you want. I think the Wee House was my favorite. They had configurations called "The Wedding Cake" which consisted of the two bedroom module below and the third on top, like a wedding cake. They also had the LV house by Rocio Romero. We saw the video for the assembly and they were attaching the frame of the house with steel I-beams. That house is unbelievably sturdy. It was also built from the ground up in a week using a very small crew of people, who weren't all construction workers. Another prefab house I liked was the Sunset Breezehouse, which had a middle section that could be completely open to the outside environment. It was also designed to be extremely energy efficient. You could have solar panel and there was a little garden and outdoor pool for cooling. Even the flooring and cabinetry were all made of bamboo or other kinds of renewable wood. Our good friend Rik recommended this exhibit and it now makes me want to build my own prefab house! (Rik actually met one of the architects and mentioned that it's his dream to one day be able to afford to build one. The architect replied, "Me, too.")