Noble Home: Mid-Century Modern Green Prefab
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto 
on 09. 6.07
Nobody draws anymore, we all use computers. I can't conceive of setting up a perspective by hand, that's why we have Sketchup. Thus I was immediately attracted to the Noble Home prefab, with its seductive mid-century modern drawings. The designs by Noah Grunberg and Jason Silverman of JASONOAH are evocative of this period of great experimentation, when the designer's goal was to develop a clean, modern, small and efficient home that was easy to build. Frank Lloyd Wright tried this with the Usonian Homes; Noah and Jason met while attending Taliesin, so it is a natural progression. They are also fans of Samuel Mockbee and the Rural Studio: "Mockbee felt that anyone, especially the bottom of society financially, is entitled to beautiful spaces" says Silverman. "We want to find ways of building affordable homes which are architecturally interesting, environmentally sensitive, and affordable to people on average incomes."
Noble Homes supplies a kit of precut post and beam framing, roofing, cladding and windows, all from green materials like compressed straw panelling and wood siding. It is a shell only, with owner supplying the foundation and main floor, as well as interior casework, electrical and plumbing. They estimate that their shell costs about $ 45 bucks per square foot, which for that specification is quite good, and if you are handy you should be able to finish the house for about $ 100- $150 per foot.
They note: "The housing industry is a large contributor to resource depletion and greenhouse gas pollution. Noble Homes, however, are built with materials that are as close as possible to their natural state and /or recyclable. Noble Home's building system also reduces construction waste by utilizing standard panel sized materials with minimal cutting. A finished Noble Home is energy efficient with superior insulation qualities and passive solar heating possibilities. All this amounts to less material, less processing, less waste, and less pollution."
The Noble Home prefab is "a breath of fresh air when it comes to indoor living. Toxic off-gassing materials which are commonplace even in high end construction are eliminated in the Noble Home house building kit. Most material choices in the design consist of solid, locally growns woods; compressed straw panels; and aluminum doors and windows. Noble Home's own natural finish wax can be used on most interior surfaces as an alternative to paint."
These guys learned their lessons well at Taliesen, and have produced kits with the best of mid-century modern sensibilities from clean, logical plans, brought up to date with green materials and sold at reasonable prices. And if they can't sell the houses there is a market for the great drawings.
Being a kit, there are none of the problems and expenses of shipping modular, although there is a lot more work required by the owner. In each prefab system there are trade-offs, but the goal is the the same: good design, faster construction and less waste. Noah and Jason have nailed it here.::Noble Home and ::JASONOAH via ::The Good Human
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Although I can admire the concept of building a house from a kit of prefabbed green, renewable parts, the design is just awful. I could understand if this was actually a modular house, which has dimensional constraints, but if you are building a house on-site, it doesn't have to look like a fenestrated shoebox with gables.
The Noble Home is modular. The design shown above is old, and the current home is completely based on a 4x8 panlized module, without all the interior posts shown above, that creates restraints but allows affordabilty in on-site construction costs, waste, and time for construction. It is built partially in a shop and can be constructed in less than 4 weeks.
The designs seem quite attractive to me particularly for early stage drawings.