Prefabrication experiments - 84 - BoKlok by Ikea

The marketing, commercialization, design, production and distribution of prefabricated housing units engenders a multifaceted puzzle that has often resulted in either marginal commercial success or more often in complete commercial failure. The companies that have succeeded in bringing a bulk production strategy to housing construction are to be commended for enduring in a market sector weighed down by one-off replicas that are built conventionally and sometimes lack regard for both design and construction quality. As Colin Davies observed in his book, The Prefabricated Home, only about twenty percent of housing is the result of a design process.

The difficulty of bringing some type of standardisation to architecture has produced many experiments both by architects and industry. However, housing has remained an exercise in customization built on the light standardisation of doors, windows, kitchens, fixtures, etc. It seems that to attain substantial prefabrication of manufactured units, knowledge of the construction industry must be combined with knowledge of mass marketing and commercialization. This union of multiple fields would surely be a major differentiating asset. In 1996, the marriage of Skanska, a large multinational construction company, with Ikea, would make for a formidable team toward mass-producing dwellings. Ikea proposed this partnership as a strategy to bring instant construction credibility to their product, which was sold in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, and most recently in the UK. 

Ikea’s take on industrialised housing, the BoKlok modules are a result of this marriage aimed to bring the benefits of factory production to the low-cost housing market. The original objective was to allow Ikea's successes in furniture and product design to percolate into mainstream housing design. Each module is factory produced as a standard volumetric unit and then delivered on site. The BoKlok offers standard modules for terrassed and multifamily dwellings and is geared toward demonstrating that smaller is better when it comes to design and to controlling our environmental footprint. The Ikea modules are certainly recognizable as Ikea on the inside but seem to lack the same inventiveness on the outside. The BoKlok system has achieved marginal success but can been largely discussed as yet another unsuccessful attempt to bridge the gap between housing, production and design.

From BoKlok catalogue