Innehållsförteckning för December 2013-January 2014 från Dwell

Prefab Now When discussing the trajectory of prefab, the conversation often begins with the Crystal Palace, designed in London by Joseph Paxton in 1851. Both venerated and excoriated in its day—Fyodor Dostoevsky was decidedly not a fan—the Crystal Palace was a wonder of prefabricated technology, a soaring glass-and-steel edifice that symbolized a new age of modernity, industry, and technology. Called “the most visionary and adventurous building of the whole nineteenth century” by the late author Marshall Berman, the Crystal Palace—though no longer standing after a 1936 fire—remains an essential starting point for both the enduring promise of prefab and the equally persistent resistance that has often inhibited its large-scale adoption. At Dwell we prefer to focus on the promise. We feature homes that offer glimpses of just how far prefab…

The incredibly prolific Stockholm studio Claesson Koivisto Rune first delved into prefabricated architecture in 2008 with Arkitekthus, a typical prefab factory in Sweden. Using a slightly different framework, their new collection of three houses for another building company, Fiskarhedenvillan, comes with plans and building materials—and buyers must build the structure themselves, onsite. With a hybrid pitched-flat roof and large windows that allow light to flood the interior, the Tind house archetype bridges the gap between modern and traditional Scandinavian design. It’s more flexible and less expensive than what architect Mårten Claesson calls a “more processed product, where a factory builds the sections and it’s delivered on a truck like Legos.” Instead, the Tind house is delivered as building materials, planks, and insulation, with instructions on how to assemble. The designer…

Bay Area–based architect Michelle Kaufmann is a prefab pioneer. She started in the industry in 2003, a year and a half after Dwell’s inaugural prefab issue, just when consumer interest in sustainable, high-design, factory-built homes was finally burgeoning. She’s since built 54 prefab homes and has learned—sometimes the hard way—the challenges and risks inherent in the industry. Especially in an age of savvy marketing and slick Photoshop renderings, it is critical for clients to gather the hard facts when interviewing their potential architect or company. Here, Kaufmann presents the essential questions every consumer should ask when considering prefab. 1—How many houses have you built? WHY ASK? “It takes more than a single show home to know what you’re doing. I think ten is the magic number—that’s when an architect or…

Whether he’s drawing up world-class public architecture, like France’s Centre Pompidou–Metz, or temporary disaster housing ingeniously constructed from cardboard tubes and beer crates, architect Shigeru Ban never loses his focus on innovative, logical design. “I don’t take a different approach depending on the project I’m working on,” says Ban, who has offices in Tokyo, Paris, and New York. He has recently been working on prefab housing, lowering costs and eliminating wasted space by using factory-made storage units (in his parlance, furniture) as structural support. The Japanese brand Muji will begin selling his kit house in 2014. How did you come up with the idea for the prefab “furniture” house? The project is the realization of a dream I’ve had for many years. In the Hanshin-Awaji earthquake, in 1995, many people…

Bring It Home After outgrowing their holiday flat above a beachside cafe on the Mornington Peninsula outside Melbourne, Australia, Anna Horne and her husband, John Willems—with their two young sons, Jude and Sam, in tow—decided to purchase land nearby and install a prefab house. At the time, Horne, having trained in architecture, was working for former colleagues who had just started their own prefab company, Prebuilt. “Up until that point, there were no kit homes available in Australia with a design focus,” says Horne. “I loved that my friends’ company was breaking new ground with logical, design-based ideas. It certainly makes building more manageable—and affordable.” Horne designed the house, which consists of three modules, based on a model created by the architectural firm Pleysier Perkins for Prebuilt. Constructed in Prebuilt’s…

Project: Murren Residence Designer: Marmol Radziner Location: Las Vegas, Nevada Sage Design Studios transformed the developer-flattened landscape into a picturesque desert setting with naturalistic undulations, meandering trails, and drought-tolerant shrubs. When Jim Murren, a Las Vegas–based casino executive, approached the Los Angeles firm Marmol Radziner for a modern house to complement his hillside desert lot, he hit an architectural jackpot. Murren’s previous home was a Palladian-style villa, but houses like that no longer interested him. “They are not forward-looking,” he says. As chairman and CEO of MGM Resorts International, one of the development companies responsible for Vegas’s LEED Gold CityCenter buildings, Murren was also interested in green architecture. “I support the creation of buildings that have a positive environmental impact, and in Las Vegas I think you need to embrace…

Scouts’ Honor In 2013, the Boy Scouts of America made conservation a stronger focus of the organization by introducing a new sustainability merit badge and opening an educational center in the 10,600-acre Summit Bechtel Reserve in West Virginia. Using the Living Building Challenge as a guide (a rigorous set of construction standards similar to LEED), Seattle-based architecture firm Mithun spearheaded a multidisciplinary team to create a tree house that would turn lessons into an adventure. Sited on a former coal mine, the building features a locally made prefabricated steel megastructure, FSC-certified black locust wood housing, a photovoltaic array, a wind turbine, and a rainwater catchment system. Visitors learn about energy and water conservation as they climb outdoor staircases that lead from the forest floor to the 125-foot-high rooftop rising above…

As an “Arconaut” (one who has lived at Arcosanti), I was especially excited to see your article on Soleri’s gem in the Arizona desert (“A Radical Proposal,” September 2013). Though thousands of volunteer hours have gone into this project’s construction, and though it has influenced many, it often goes unnoticed. Thanks for giving it the recognition it deserves; I hope to continue to see lesser-known (but publicly accessible) architecture featured in your magazine. Halley Anderson Cleveland, West Virginia I can’t tell you how impressed I was with the July/August issue’s focus on American-made designs. Since 1980, we have lost nearly nine million jobs in the manufacturing sector in this country. We can reverse that trend by just buying more American-made products, such as those you featured. I liked the way…

Combining experience in their respective fields of environmental entrepreneurship and venture capitalism, Bill Haney and Maura McCarthy founded their prefab company in 2008 with a few goals in mind. For one, Blu Homes would owe as much to the tech industry as to the construction industry. It would also speak to a generation of home builders for whom green is the status quo—and it would do so directly, without middlemen. Under Haney and McCarthy, Blu Homes has put up over 100 prefab houses across 18 states. Dwell queried Haney about Blu’s competition, audience makeup, and design inspiration. How is Blu Homes’s building model any different from traditional development channels? Historically, housing companies are in the land business. They buy wholesale and then sell retail units on the land. They speak…

Of all the mid-century modern variants, British is probably the least well known: Americans have rediscovered the Eameses; the Scandinavians know their Aaltos. Eleanor Pritchard, a contemporary English textile designer, knows her Enid Marx, who designed the seat fabrics for London’s public transportation lines, and Jack Pritchard (no relation), the Isokon director who produced the iconic Penguin Donkey bookcase. And all the other key figures of British modernism—whose greatest hour was the 1951 Festival of Britain, a national exhibition of the arts and sciences and of applied design—are familiar heroes. “It was incredibly optimistic,” she says of the era. “The idea that good design would make people’s lives better.” London-based designer Eleanor Pritchard sources Shetland lambswool from mills across the United Kingdom for her blankets, pillows, and upholstery. She designs…

The brief was basic: a simple guesthouse where a family of five could live for a few years while the architecture firm Bohlin Cywinski Jackson designed their main residence. “Since we were living out in the forest”—a wooded, 482-acre plot at the edge of Bend, Oregon—“we wanted a house that felt like we were living outside and that was resistant to fire,” says James Verheyden, a hand surgeon. He and his wife, Jean, an otolaryngologist, also hoped to build the 2,084-square-foot structure efficiently and, given its future role as a guesthouse, somewhat affordably. Besides those guidelines, they gave the firm carte blanche. “When someone comes to me for an operation, they don’t tell me how to operate,” James says. Fortunately, the residents and architects saw eye to eye almost immediately.…

Leave No Trace It was a love for architectural diversity that first drew Michael Sylvester to Venice, California, known for its tiny 1920s bungalows set cheek by jowl with lot-hogging postmodern boxes. He bought a 5,600-square-foot piece of land with one of those bungalows on it, “only it wasn’t a cute Craftsman with redeeming values; it was a stucco box with structural problems,” says Sylvester. He and his wife, Tamami, lived in the bungalow and eventually called upon Boston-based architectural designer Sebastian Mariscal—whose Wabi house (see Dwell, September 2011) particularly intrigued Sylvester—and allowed him free rein on a design for a new house. As he is known to do, Mariscal took an organic approach. “When I first visited the site, I was moved by how the trees in the front…

Project: Monad Architect: Lang Wilson Practice in Architecture Culture Location: Vancouver, Canada Oliver Lang has always been something of a renegade. The German-born architect never settled into the idea of the high-rise condo nor of the conventional, detached single-family home—even after moving to Vancouver, a city that’s currently rich in both forms. Instead, Lang would rather look a few decades back to the innovators of mid-century design for guidance. “Modernism on the West Coast has always been about the relationship of architecture to landscape,” he says. Fifty years ago, that relationship took the form of post-and-beam single-family homes on treed lots—a rapidly vanishing option in a city like Vancouver, with its high land prices and need for densification. “If we still want to work within this paradigm, why not apply…

Georgie Bean “I fell into my line of work by accident, probably from curiosity about how other people like to live,” says Georgie Bean. “I remember selling raffle tickets door-to-door as a kid so I could get a glimpse into people’s houses!” The Melbourne-based writer and stylist has worked for Wallpaper and Vogue Living. For this issue, she tells the story of a vacation home located on Australia’s Mornington Peninsula (Backstory, p. 65). William Lamb Reporting the story about Mimi Parsons and Tom Siebens’s summer retreat (“Ferry Feat,” p. 88) gave William Lamb, a writer and editor based in Jersey City, New Jersey, his first look at Fishers Island, New York—whose seascapes enchanted the Rockefellers, Roosevelts, and DuPonts. The experience also brought him closer to fulfilling his goal of visiting…

Project: Onemana Holiday Home Designers: Studio 19, Unitec Institute of Technology, unitec.ac.nz Location: Onemana, New Zealand Every summer for over a decade, Andrew and Shiree Morrison have journeyed to Onemana, a coastal town on New Zealand’s North Island. They used to stay in a small trailer, often fantasizing about building a house on their sloping plot of land but always coming up short on the amount of money needed to get a project underway. So their longtime friend, builder John Cocks, suggested an unconventional solution to obtaining a custom home within their budget: collaborating with architecture students. At Auckland’s Unitec Institute of Technology, Dave Strachan leads a program called Studio 19. The yearlong class guides students through every step of a real-world architectural project, from client brief to full-scale build.…

In 2011, Restore Neighborhoods Los Angeles (RNLA), a nonprofit organization that invests in housing, sent out a request for affordable and sustainable designs intended for lots located in the city’s South Central area. “We very much want to introduce new design ideas and new technologies to low-and moderate-income districts,” explains John Perfitt, executive director of RNLA. “We think that good design and new construction methods can, over time, have a very positive influence in restoring neighborhoods.” After whittling down the field from nine proposals, they selected a net-zero prefab design submitted by Habitat for Humanity and Minarc, a Santa Monica–based architecture firm known for its innovative, energy-efficient kit houses. Thanks to a streamlined, waste-free construction method and affordable materials, like unembellished cement board cladding and Minarc’s signature Cradle to Cradle–certified…

The Lambert House is named for its first owner, Saul Lambert, a New York City artist and illustrator who shared many of architect Richard Meier’s modernist ideals. Lambert’s widow, Joanne Underwood, recalls the early design process: “Saul had a strong idea about what he liked and didn’t like. Plain and geometric, light and clean proportions—and that’s what Meier was able to do.” The architect met Lambert’s needs by keeping things functional for the modest 1,425-square-foot beach house, using walls of windows to bring in natural light and sticking to a simple floor plan. The home is the pinnacle of affordable living, with its built-in kitchen and beds. “All you need is a few chairs,” Meier says. Looking back, the architect still feels “very proud” of his early project, and, as…

It all started with a 12-foot stepladder, balanced somewhat precariously on the bed of a pickup truck. Joseph Tanney and Robert Luntz of the Manhattan firm Resolution: 4 Architecture were on Fishers Island, New York, for their first look at the three-acre lot where they were to design a second home for Mimi Parsons and Tom Siebens, an American couple who keep their primary residence in the Notting Hill section of London. They arrived to find that Parsons’s father, Harris, had driven his Chevrolet pickup to a clearing and erected a ladder in the back, hoping to give Tanney and Luntz a sense of the site’s magnificent views of Long Island Sound. Tanney and Luntz watched as Harris Parsons—82 at the time—scaled the ladder with minimal effort and great enthusiasm.…

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