Standing, sprawling, expansive, and anchored to a picturesque setting, the villa connotes luxurious detached dwellings. In the countryside and usually articulated to its landscape by some type of monumental relationship, the villa is associated with architectural opulence. Axiality, symmetry and summits were used in classic architecture, sometimes referred to as Palladian architecture, to showcase this dwelling typology’s potency by dominating its environment. Modern architects implemented infinite horizontal free space to achieve a similar goal. Large panes of glass, continuous open spaces, and generous roof overhangs came to represent the modern villa.
The Case Study houses explored in California, Le Corbusier's iconic villas, and even Mies van der Rohe's Tugendhat villa inspired these novel tectonics and fabrication methods; balloon frames, steel skeletons or concrete flat slab construction were applied as efficiently produced systems that could bridge the gap between standardization and customization. Still, industrialization was only marginally harnessed by these affluent properties as their scope, size and highly customized nature had little to do with prefab approaches, which usually denoted affordability. Current interest in sustainable building, modern architecture's aesthetics along with mainstream media’s distribution of dreamy architecturally defined villas with industrialized lines has driven some manufacturers to the niche villa market: Turkel Design is a Boston based firm that conceives and manages the production and delivery of customized site-specific home kits. This is not a new idea; Carl Koch’s Techbuilt brand, also based in Massachusetts, idealized an analogous kit format for his clients in the 1950s and 1960s.
Turkel has taken Koch’s business model to next level by offering superbly designed prefab. Their process has underlined the potential of contemporary design and manufacturing tools to streamline the house procurement process. Using the same materials, methods and third-party factories from project to project, the process is highly normalized without standardizing design. This design – fabrication - construction integration harmonizes architects and builders by placing factory optimization between the two fields. Each villa is a mass-customized production. Applying the same design attitude, components, teams, and systems thinking across multiple projects not only leads to a coherent architectural language for the Turkel villas but also to a highly perfectible process.
see Turkeldesign.com (portfolio)
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