Prefab movement needs to rethink its model

It's always a little risky to see in one headline about the architecture business, or in the fate of a single firm, a parable for the profession as a whole. But news that the prefab specialist Michelle Kaufmann has suddenly closed her Oakland office and laid off all 17 of her employees does seem to have Larger Symbolism written all over it.

Kaufmann's is hardly the only prefab firm to face trouble in recent months. Empyrean International, the company that built houses for Dwell magazine's prefab arm, abruptly shut down last fall. Marmol Radziner, the Los Angeles firm known for smartly designed Neomodern houses, has mothballed its prefab factory in Vernon in what it says is a temporary move.

In a certain sense, of course, this batch of bad news is inseparable from the dismal state of the larger economy. Not to mention that the world of "modern prefab" design -- a catchall term referring to a range of modular and prefabricated residential construction -- has diversified widely in recent years. The work Kaufmann was doing is very different from, say, the kit-of-parts glass house developed by the L.A. firm Taalman Koch Architecture, Lazor Office's FlatPak or the hulking steel-framed houses Ray Kappe has designed under the Living Homes brand.

But if prefab is foundering again, it is doing so in some depressingly familiar ways. The demise of Michelle Kaufmann Designs resounds with echoes from several corners of prefab's long history. For nearly a century, hopes of building crisply Minimalist houses in factories -- and in the process democratizing home design -- have always raced ahead of market realities.

When Dwell declared on a 2005 cover that "prefab's promise" was "good design for everyone," it was reviving a dream that goes back to the beginning of the modern movement, to the moment when architecture and industrial production first made eyes at each other. In 1931, Le Corbusier praised "the mass-production house, available for everyone" as "incomparably healthier than the old kind (and morally so too) and beautiful."

The difference this time around was that advanced computing power and milling tools, not to mention encouraging shifts in popular taste, were supposed to help the dream actually come true. Kaufmann and others also made a compelling case that factory-built architecture, particularly because it minimizes waste and damage to building sites, is also green architecture.