The dream of industrializing house construction is at least as old as the motivation that led to the automobile’s invention from horse-drawn carts. An aspiration and narrative carried by industrialists, builders and architects has been the subject of many publications and exhibitions. In 1951, Burnham Kelley published one of the most extensive inventories and complete encyclopedic works on the topic. Even with all its celebrated potential for lowering costs and increasing efficiencies, the industrialized house remained marginally applied save for one segment, which has become its emblem. The trailer coach or the mobile home now referred to as a manufactured house is constructed on a mobile chassis, completed in a factory ready to be delivered and placed on any site. This sector represents 6.4% of the total real estate stock in the United States with an average production of approximately 100,000 units per year. Benefiting from the HUD code released in 1974, the factory-built home has endeavored to shed the suspect construction connotations that haunted the sector since the 1950s. HUD’s endorsement certainly helped the mobile home’s successful commercialization.
Evolving from simple 8-foot-wide self-built trailers to Elmer Frey's «tenwydes», double-wides and eventually to stacking premade units to create multi-unit buildings, the mobile home combined all dwelling functions into a uniquely integrated house - machine including the advantages of simplified ownership and relocatability. Today, the financial crisis of the early 2000s, environmental imperatives and the individualization of lifestyles underscore a quest for a simplified and ecological existence, untethered by mortgages and permanent dwellings. The «architectural» mobile home inspired by the "tiny house" or micro house movement fills the pages of design magazines or websites and provides an opportunity for architects to renew their interest in homes as products, part and parcel of globalized and connected culture. The Alpod designed by Cybertecture with Arup exemplifies the commodification of the mobile home no longer identified as a subpar dwelling system but as a smart - connected product. The home designed as an intelligent connected device brings us full circle in the application of the factory-made house as an object that bridges the fields of architecture and manufacturing.
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| Comparative analysis pre[FABRICAT]ions |
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