The Ray Kappe RK1 LivingHome looks pretty good, but the rest are definitely underwhelming to me. Even the RK1 suffers from some problems, such as a design made without reference to the site its on - so things like views and solar orientation will potentially suffer greatly. Also problematic is the flat roof which is never a good idea for long-term leak and maintenance avoidance. As good as the wood siding looks in the picture now, it will not hold up well and will look terrible in a few years and create a big maintenance problem.
I think the key to making the prefab promise work is to develop a kit of parts that can be assembled in a custom way for a specific site and client, thus optimizing functional requirements, views and solar exposure, and ideally integrating the house with the topography of the site (if the site is sloping) rather than building a very unattractive platform to put the house up on.
Interesting to note how much light matters in a well designed house - it seems that the position of windows are one of the major architectural feats to make these houses great.
You really think that looks good? Looks like living in a fish tank to me.
One thing that I don't get about "modernist" home design is all the big multi-use rooms. I hate that. I like separate rooms. Notice how it would be very uncomfortable for two people to live in any of these places. No privacy.
Also, many small rooms is energy efficient. Traditional English homes have a couple small rooms, with basically just enough room for two or three to sit around a very small fireplace or stove. Point being you can very efficiently heat just the small room.
I think these big, open space rooms are trying to evoke traditional Japanese design. But because they don't have ceiling to floor shoji screens they miss the whole point. Shoji are used to break up the space, achieve privacy, and also only heat a small space contained in a box of screens.
They keep talking about energy efficiency but I don't believe it. With all that glass these houses must get very hot in the sun and very cold at night.
Definitely dig the Michelle Kaufmann homes. Her website is awesome in the sheer volume of information it has. Most prefab home sites seem to just have pictures and a phone number, whereas she has detailed pricing and videos and testimony and talks a lot about sustainable design and self-sufficiency.
Her story sounds like a good one for the YC crowd too. She and her husband were looking for their own house and couldn't find anything they liked, so they designed their own home and the business just kind of took off from there. Classic case of 'building something people want', since they solved their own problem.
How much would it cost to build a little 1 BR house on your own? Any idea how to get started with something like that? How do you learn how to build a house? Is there a book?
Uhm, that's a pretty standard size for a studio apartment, and would be on the big end for a Manhatten studio apartment. Note that that model is labeled "studio".
But I am surprised that these are so expensive. You'd think that a factory would have advantages over having guys come to a lot and building a house (imagine if we built cars that way). Maybe the volumes are too low to get much in the way of economies of scale.
Modern subdivision house construction is basically a moving assembly line.
I don't think prefab makes any sense for a premium modern house. You want to use materials like steel reinforced and chemically sealed concrete, stucco, stone, and perhaps solid hard wood. You can't feasibly transport this stuff from a factory to a building site pre-assembled. Prefab only potentially makes sense for light chintzy crap made out of wood and fiberglass, and even then on-site construction teams are very efficient at nailing together stick-wood houses on a concrete foundation so you're not going to save anything.
There are modern alternatives to concrete and wood which are cheaper. A house built of expanded polystyrene - basically a denser version of styrofoam with a hard shell over it - can be had for a materials cost of about $30K
http://manolohome.com/2008/08/11/the-habitat-for-the-21st-ce...
I could easily see something like this becoming ultra-cheap with economies of scale. Make them in a factory and ship them in a few truckloads, then snap them together almost like legos.
This is not the only alternative to wood and concrete. If you look around, a lot of people are working on modern (or not so modern) alternatives.
I think the key to making the prefab promise work is to develop a kit of parts that can be assembled in a custom way for a specific site and client, thus optimizing functional requirements, views and solar exposure, and ideally integrating the house with the topography of the site (if the site is sloping) rather than building a very unattractive platform to put the house up on.