Jennifer Siegal

Jennifer Siegal's stomach is grumbling, which is causing audio problems for a TV crew that has invaded her sunny Venice office. "We've got an anomaly!" the sound guy shouts. Siegal, a 39-year-old designer, has already been answering a producer's questions for an hour. She sits in a vintage Steelcase desk chair and fiddles impatiently with her mike. "TV is incredibly weird," she says. She should know.

IF Jennifer Siegal has her way, new homes won't be constructed anymore. They'll be installed. That's the philosophy behind her recently completed Venice SwellHouse, a 3,130-square-foot, two-story residence assembled out of prefabricated structural insulated panels, or SIPs. The panels forming the walls, floors and ceilings were trucked in pre-cut, cored for wiring or plumbing, and numbered -- ready to be snapped together and attached to the steel frame.

IF Jennifer Siegal has her way, new homes won't be constructed anymore. They'll be installed. That's the philosophy behind her recently completed Venice SwellHouse, a 3,130-square-foot, two-story residence assembled out of prefabricated structural insulated panels, or SIPs. The panels forming the walls, floors and ceilings were trucked in pre-cut, cored for wiring or plumbing, and numbered -- ready to be snapped together and attached to the steel frame.

Jennifer Siegal's stomach is grumbling, which is causing audio problems for a TV crew that has invaded her sunny Venice office. "We've got an anomaly!" the sound guy shouts. Siegal, a 39-year-old designer, has already been answering a producer's questions for an hour. She sits in a vintage Steelcase desk chair and fiddles impatiently with her mike. "TV is incredibly weird," she says. She should know.

Woodbury University students won an honorable mention from the American Institute of Architects Los Angeles at the institute's 1998 Design Awards Program. The winning entry, a mobile eco-laboratory, competed with more than 125 projects by Los Angeles architects and is the first student project to win such an award. The cargo-trailer-turned-classroom also garnered an award from the Assn.

Competing against projects by some of the biggest-name architects in Los Angeles, an environmentally conscious--and consciousness-raising--trailer designed by Woodbury University students recently captured a prestigious architectural award. The Mobile Eco Laboratory received an Honorable Mention from the American Institute of Architects, Los Angeles chapter, making it the first student effort to be recognized in this competition for Los Angeles architects.

How crazy-making to read Dan Neil's column "Feels Like End Times" (800 Words, June 12), noting Elizabeth Kolbert's excellent and frightening series in the New Yorker on climate change, the Bush administration's dismantling of environmental regulations and the "Collapse?" exhibit at the Natural History Museum, juxtaposed with the piece about "visionary Venice designer" Jennifer Siegal, who wants to build environmentally friendly prefab houses ("Unsustainable?" by Eryn Brown, June 12). The problem is a government that puts roadblocks in front of Siegal and her buyers with regulations that have no flexibility for environmental innovation.

ALLISON ARIEFF wrote the book "Prefab" in 2002, chronicling the history of prefabricated houses and mapping the possible future of environmentally responsible modular home design and fabrication. "When I told people what I was doing, they giggled," says Arieff, one of the founders of Dwell and formerly the magazine's editor. "Like, why would anybody write a book on this really mundane ugly architecture?" Since then, the laughable increasingly has become laudable.

THE bare concrete floor -- once something of a novelty -- has become all but standard in modern homes these days, and with good reason. It doesn't consume the natural resources of hardwood, and it doesn't come with some of the environmental concerns related to carpeting. Jennifer Siegal, principal of Venice-based Office of Mobile Design, also points out that concrete can blend indoors and outdoors seamlessly, clean up easily and allow for radiant heat. However . . .

Up earlier than usual on a recent Sunday, I made a pot of coffee and opened The Times' Real Estate section, where a barrage of rather desperate-sounding come-ons caught my attention. Real estate pages have more exclamation points these days than a Tom Wolfe essay. Reduced! Foreclosure! Back on the Market! New Price! I circled half a dozen listings; plugging their addresses into Google Maps, I charted an itinerary across the city, from Hollywood to the beach and back east again.

The Japanese architect Shigeru Ban has offered a refreshing antidote to design-world slickness and ego in recent years. Soft-spoken, unfashionably mustachioed and generally disheveled, he's built his substantial reputation in the most unusual of ways: designing a series of diaphanous, often fragile-looking buildings and traveling without the armada of publicists who sail alongside the world's best-known architects.

AH, modern living: handsome. Environmentally friendly. Delivered, move-in ready. Prefab enthusiasts can witness the possibilities as Marmol Radziner Prefab hosts a tour of the company's new modular housing factory in Vernon on Sunday. Potential customers can get an inside look into the production of the Utah House 1, which will be prefabricated entirely in the factory and transported for site installation.