Leave it to Bjarke Ingels the BIG thinker guy, to put his efforts towards formalizing yet another segment of his creative talent by structuring a company associated within, or at least with, BIG, that he says will revolutionize the way we design and build homes. The future of housing is certain, we need more of them, thus continuously finding means and methods of building custom or speculative homes of better quality that more people can afford is a critical goal. The idea of modularized prefabricated standardized home construction has been around for the past one hundred and fifty years. Too many attempts at modular homes brought very mundane and low grade finished products to market have not yielded any real impacts on changing housing mass customization. Turns out most companies that mass produce modular homes do so with very low quality at an affordable price, or increasing the pricing for high end quality that then begs the question of viability against traditionally built homes. At least with factory controlled component manufacturing a certain level of quality can yield better results, but that’s not to say that even in traditional stick frame site construction quality control isn’t built in, most good general contractors continuously manage quality as the project progresses, the opportune cost savings though should come in the framework of repeatability and mass production. James Parkes wrote a really nice article in Dezeen.com about Ingel’s new venture, Nabr. A quick review of this website reveals that in this context, housing is not limited to single family suburban sprawl, the images are of multi story housing projects, so modularization in this context is inclusive of multiple levels of housing types.
Modular Prefabricated Housing Gets another Champion
