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Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling Barry Bergdoll and Peter Christensen, 2008 New York, Museum of Modern Art 248pp. Illusi. $45 ISBN 978-0-87070-753-9
This handsome volume is the catalogue for a show about prefabricated houses held at MOMA in 2008. For the first time since 1949 when Marcel Breuer's House in the Museum Garden, a full-size commission, was exhibited to record crowds, the show included five specially-commissioned buildings erected on the museum's vacant lot, where Jean Nouvel's 75 storey expressionist tower for Gerald Hines is now rising.
Home Delivery is the latest manifestation of a recent vogue among American architects for préfabrication, emphasising sophisticated high design, the exclusion of traditional builders and a consumerist attitude to housing. It is a movement fuelled (until recently) by easy credit and prefabricated house designs that promise to bypass the mess, expense and uncertainty of dealing with the construction industry. Momentum is sustained by seductive CAD imagery, by websites such as http.7/fabprefab, com/ edited by Michael Sylvester and by the shelter press led by Dwell, a cool lifestyle monthly.1 It is thus primarily market-led and quite distinct from the social reforming objectives of earlier generations of prefab enthusiasts.
MOMA, the grand old shop window of high modernism, blesses this new movement by providing a fine showcase for its leading practitioners, including Kieran Timberlake Associates, whose influential 2004 book provided fresh theoretical arguments for what they prefer to call 'off-site fabrication'.2 They place the architect at the heart of a productive matrix that emphasises manufacturing technologies, particularly mass-customization as an antidote to long feared monotony of mass-production. The MOMA show even overlapped with the Whitney Museum's big summer show, a Buckminster Fuller retrospective Starting with the Universe, giving New York a double dose of architectural prefab prophecies.
The catalogue is in three parts; essays, by Bergdoll recapitulating the history of architect-led préfabrication, by Rasmus Waem on Scandinavian wooden préfabrication and Tadashi Oshima on the Japanese experience with large industry participation (Toyota, Panasonic, Muji, Sekisui); the second part showcases some sixty prefab 'projects' from Edison's concrete houses, via constructive toys and methods of building such as...