The Glidehouse Is At The End Of The Road For Green Modern Prefab
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto 
on 11.18.09
In 2002 Allison Arieff and Bryan Burkhart wrote Prefab and started a revolution. Architects and entrepreneurs all over America started looking at prefab differently. Early off the mark were Michelle Kaufmann, who launched her Glidehouse, and myself, launching the Q. It was an exciting time, we were all going to reinvent the building industry. We had so many cute lines- "you don't build a car in a driveway, why would you build a house in a field" and we had to beat all of the other architects and designers off with a stick, there were so many throwing their pencils into the ring.
Article continues: The Glidehouse Is At The End Of The Road For Green Modern Prefab
So many architects have tried their hand at emergency housing; Cameron Sinclair has shown many pictures of little domes and boxes that the people move out of the first chance they get. Now OBRA architects present their version, for an exhibition on on emergency housing at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing.
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These are tough times for modern prefab, but for every company 
Creative Commons by 
These are tough times to be introducing a new prefab, but Finnish-Japanese designer Naoto Niidome and furniture manufacturer Aamon are launching a new three-season cottage at the Finnish design fair 
Broissin Architects of Naucalpan, Mexico designed this three-storey prefab pod for an exhibition at Hacienda la Concepción at Tepotzotlán México. It has a "hydroponia" area on the ground floor, kitchen, living and bath on second and bedrooms on top. It is "ecologically friendly, being made with products comprised 90% recycled material."...
In these difficult times there are a lot of people on the move. 
Stealth chicken coop by 
Credit: Zeta Communities
It is a tough time to be in the prefab biz; your costs are pretty much fixed, while the conventional stickbuilding trades will work for food these days. It is tougher still to sell prefab wholesale to developers; they are not used to giving away any of the profits and can almost always do it cheaper by building it themselves.
But that isn't stopping Marc Porat and Zeta Communities from trying. ...
Thai designer Chutayaves Sinthuphan of 
LOT-EK, YoungWoo Chosen For Lively Pier Renewal Plan
Not far from the High Line, another decaying piece of New York infrastructure is bound for a green revival: Pier 57, the decaying concrete hulk on New York's Hudson's River will be transformed into a rooftop park and open-air market sitting above a warren of art studios -- all of it made, appropriately for the port site, out of shipping containers.
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moonroom
As we noted last year in an
It doesn't look like much, but we will probably be seeing a lot more of this. It is the frame for a 
"The Search for The Perfect Assembly-line House"- That is how John Bentley Mays, architecture critic of the 
Images from Platoon via Archdaily
I have always been a bit dubious about shipping containers as architectural elements; my dad used to make them and I grew up around them, and thought that the dimensions were all wrong for people; there was not much that you could do in a 7'-6" interior (or so I thought). Also, they are monocoque construction; the walls are the structure. So when you start taking the walls out and replacing them with beams, pretty soon you have little more than the idea of a shipping container. That was my first thought when I looked at Platoon Kunsthalle , an arts facility by Graft Architects in Seoul, Korea, built from 28 shipping containers.
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We mentioned 
Daniel Libeskind does modern prefab with the first of the Studio Series, a 515 square metre (5,500 square foot) number that Libeskind claims is built to "the highest level of sustainability in the world." It has solar power, "the maximum amount of insulation, and of course, is beautifully built to last hundreds of years- "that's sustainability!"
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Photo by 
all images via 
