With a name like The Turbulence House, it comes as no surprise to discover that wind plays a big role in the functioning of the small New Mexico guesthouse, designed by Steven Holl for artist Richard Tuttle and poet Mei-mei Berssenbrugge.
An open section carved though the structure creates a vortex of breezes at its centre, cooling the building, while photovoltaic panels tap into the sun’s power for heating. An equally important element of the building’s green credentials, however, is the fact that its stressed skin and aluminium rib construction was prefabricated in Kansas City and bolted together on site.
Here, say proponents of eco-homes, lies the real potential for prefab designers to contribute to the green construction revolution. For anything that is prefabricated can be replicated, and rather than relying on the contractors and architects working on a traditional building site to source environmentally responsible materials and design energy-efficient systems, the owners of prefab homes buy everything as a pre-prepared package.
“You can’t necessarily buy the product without buying the whole system – whether that’s green roofs, better performing windows, solar collectors or geothermal heat systems,” says Tim Alt of Altus Architecture Design. “That’s something that makes modern prefab a very eco-sensitive and energy-smart strategy.”
Altus is part of the team creating Mayo Woodlands, an innovative housing project funded by the heirs to the Mayo Clinic, the US healthcare provider, in which prefab plays a major role. As well as high-quality windows that are more environmentally sound, the houses use metal roofing, which has a 100-year life span. Asphalt roof products are cheaper and more readily available by comparison but need to be replaced three times during the same period.
“In some of our next projects, we hope to incorporate green roofs in the strategy,” says Alt. “So it’s all about how we can use this [prefab] building technology as a process that separates it from typical site construction processes.”
Of course, prefabs have been making headlines for more than their green credentials. A new generation of prefab designs are emerging to provide elegant solutions in modern styles to a building form that, after it entered service as a low-cost, mass-produced postwar housing solution, acquired a reputation for poor design and shoddy quality.
Architect Charlie Lazor’s FlatPak house could not be further removed from the dreary structures of that era. Wood, glass and concrete combine with simple, clean lines to create a stylish modern home that reflects the spirit of Blu Dot, the furniture company Lazor helped found.
The FlatPak is also adaptable to a variety of climates and locations. A white metal roof reflects heat in desert conditions while thermal glass both reduces the glare of the summer sun and provides effective insulation in winter. The house can be sited on a slope, it can be expanded for use as an apartment building or a hotel and, because of the FlatPak’s pier foundations, it can even be built on stilts.The powers of invention needed to come up with such a flexible solution to a pre-manufactured house are what Jill Herbers, author of Prefab Modern, believes give prefab architects their ability to be highly creative when it comes to devising environmentally sound construction techniques.
“These are already homes in which the architects and designers have used a great deal of innovation,” she says. “They have to figure out how to get the materials there and how to do things in a small space. So since they were on that innovative track, and have created a whole new design for homes that is refreshing, they naturally have the inclination to make it ecologically sound too.”
Another characteristic of prefabs that gives them a high sustainability rating is their economic use of materials. Since the homes are manufactured offsite, greater control can be exercised in the production process than is possible on traditional construction sites, where over-ordering is common. Rather than being discarded, as it would be by a conventional construction team, any leftover material on a prefab can be reused on the next house in the production line.
“Just by going prefab you eliminate construction waste and so you’re contributing to less material going into landfills,” says Missouri-based architect Rocio Romero, who is known for innovative contemporary designs such as the LV Home, a model she adapted from a house created for her own family in 1999.
Economic use of materials is also cited by Alt as an important advantage of the prefab concept. “We’ve tried to use modular systems so that we’re using complete sheet goods,” he says. “So there’s no waste. And the fact that you’re site assembling, rather than site fabricating, means that you don’t have any waste material on the site.”
Built with pre-engineered steel beams and using large expanses of glass that blur the visual lines between interior and exterior, the Swellhouse, created by Jennifer Siegal’s Office of Mobile Design, draws on the principle of the mass-production modular system. Once clients have chosen the number of rooms they want, components are assembled in the factory and bolted together at the site.
“There’s less waste produced when you’re building in a factory, as opposed to out in a field, where you are co-ordinating different sub- contractors,” Siegal says. “Building in a factory is much more environmentally sustainable.”
