This story is part of Dwell’s yearlong 25th-anniversary celebration of the people, places, and ideas we’ve championed over the years.
The black and white house by Anderson Anderson featured on the cover of Dwell’s first prefab issue was not a house for everyone. It has a singularity that runs counter to the way the housing market works; it wasn’t about square footage or vaulted ceilings or resale value, for example. It was designed expressly for the people who were to live in it, and modular construction was the best way to bring it to fruition.
It was not easy to find projects for that issue, which came out in April 2001. Prefab carried with it a stigma—so large a stigma, in fact, that architects using it weren’t eager to advertise that fact. But for some reason, the topic struck a chord. So much so that I wrote a book about it (in collaboration with my husband, Bryan Burkhart, who designed it), titled Prefab. Published in 2002, it opened the floodgates. It wasn’t that it led to so many architects to explore modular building. Rather, it let those architects who’d been playing around with prefab know that they were not alone. And that potential clients were intrigued.
Dwell’s first issue devoted to prefab (“Prefab is Pretty Fabulous!” January 2001) featured this black-and-white home by Anderson Anderson Architecture.
At Dwell, we began to see prefab homebuilding as a means to an end, a way to make well-designed houses a reality for more people. Companies were already building thousands of homes at a time, creating insta-suburbs throughout the country. But the design of so many of these homes, such as it was, was removed from any context or style it may have been attempting to mimic. I recall around 2002 my sister-in-law describing a house she and her husband were purchasing in Orange County: they had a choice of a “Gothic” front or a “Craftsman” one, but the homes were identical, the facades just tacked on.
Now nearly 25 years (!) since that first prefab issue, looking through the pages of Dwell, one can see many terrific examples of prefab homes. Not very many are affordable, or as inexpensive as you might think, though, and remarkably, the building method isn’t nearly as widespread as we thought it would be so many years ago.
“The problem today is not whether to prefabricate or not to prefabricate,” wrote George Nelson, considered by many to be the founder of American modernist design, in 1957 in Problems of Design. “This question has already been settled.” The problem, Nelson continued, was how “to bring the house up to the technical level of the refrigerator, the automatic machine tool, the automobile, and to use this technique to enhance human values.”
Ah, it is always so frustrating, so humbling really, to go back in time to see how little ground we’ve covered. Over 70,000 kit houses were sold by Sears between 1908 and 1940; today in the U.S., the percentage of homes built using modular construction hovers at around three percent annually—or about 70,000 homes per year.
In many other countries, prefab is the norm. It’s free of the social stigma it has in the United States largely because the investment has been made in doing it right. In Japan, for example, 15 percent of homes are prefabricated in steel. In Sweden, as much as 45 percent of construction is industrialized, and an estimated 85 percent of homes there have prefab elements. No one is wringing their hands over it; it’s a technology that delivers well-built structures at multiple price points—including units from Ikea.
In the U.S., though, prefab hasn’t fully escaped being lumped in with trailer parks and doublewides. This guilt by association isn’t entirely underserved. Much prefab is cheap and poorly made. This makes homeowners associations and financial institutions and insurance companies wary. Why take a gamble on prefab when stick-built works just fine, thank you. Why streamline construction processes when it’s an industry that can provide good jobs? Whether one-off, architect-designed prefabs—the kind featured by Dwell—or factory-line modular homes, the building method comes up against NIMBYs, recalcitrant lenders, labor unions, and risk-averse insurers. That’s a handful of hurdles right there.
And yet, that hasn’t stopped people from trying to make prefab happen.
My book, “Prefab,” published in 2002, shows the innovations in homebuilding that were happening at the time.
Featured in the glossy pages of Dwell, prefab promised a viable path to the dream of homeownership. It also became… cool? Following Dwell’s 2001 prefab issue and the publication of my book, it seemed as if every publication was writing a story on the subject. As I recall, the New York Times put a prefab house in its holiday gift guide around then, and even Cooking Light somehow found a way to cover it.
Suddenly, the stigma seemed to be fading. So, because I was young and enthusiastic (and naïve), I convinced the publisher of Dwell that writing about them wasn’t enough—that we should hold an international competition to design a modern affordable prefab home. We chose $200K (about $350K today) as our home price—a number that seemed reasonable to an office full of people in San Francisco (where the median listing at the time, mind you, was half a million.) This was going to clear the path toward delivering modern architecture to more people at a reasonable price. And it was, I argued, what our readers craved.
At ICFF in New York around 2003, I presented models of each of the Dwell Home entries. Without a doubt, I’m overwhelmed by the sheer effort it took to ship these from San Francisco.
I remember having a meeting in Los Angeles around this time with architect and SciArc cofounder Ray Kappe, who has since died but at that time was in his early 70s. As I explained my idea, he looked at me wearily, and said, “You know, this has been tried before.” But this was going to be different!
With a real client who had selected Resolution: 4 Architecture as its architect from a group of 16 invited firms, we did build a two-bed, two-and-a-half bath, 2,400 square foot home in Pittsboro, North Carolina. It was modern, but, alas, it was definitely not affordable. The excavation for the road leading to the house and for the foundation already accounted for at least half of the budget. The needs of our advertising team threw the expenses off as well: the donation of expensive kitchen systems and cabinetry in exchange for ad space ratcheted up the actual home costs (and value) dramatically. The factory’s learning curve—they were not used to doing this kind of one-off project—took time, which took money and patience we increasingly did not have; real people were waiting to move in, and we had a magazine publication schedule to consider.
When the Dwell Home was completed, we expected a handful of people to show up to an open house on a 100-degree Fahrenheit Sunday in suburban Pittsboro. Hundreds came, sweaty but excited to kick the tires on the home. Once the spectators had moved on and the client had moved in, the homebuilding factory wanted nothing to do with building even one more of these, let alone an assembly line’s worth. It was too far outside their scope of what a house should look like (no gables, no ornate columns), and it felt like too monumental a task to retool their factory for what they saw as limited demand.
The Pittsboro, North Carolina, home Resolution 4: Architecture designed for Dwell ended up costing much more than the budgeted $200K (roughly $350,000 today).
Despite that, reflects Dwell Home architect Joseph Tanney of Resolution: 4 Architecture (Res4) on the experience, which he says he remembers fondly, it was a proof of concept. “It showed the possibilities and potential of building a modern home in an existing modular factory,” he told me in an email, “and it confirmed a rekindled enthusiasm in prefab.” The firm continues to use modular construction in many of its projects, mostly high-end single-family residences in both urban and suburban settings.
Many architects and designers during that era decided that in order to do prefab, they’d need their own factories. Marmol Radziner, Michelle Kaufmann Architects, Rocio Romero, the Office of Mobile Design, Charlie Lazor’s FlatPack, and more all emerged around this same time, energizing the movement. This being the early dot-com era, I’d often get calls at the Dwell offices from venture capitalists eager to start prefab companies (one such helped sparked the Dwell House idea), and a few even offered to hire me to run them. I was getting so many, in fact, that I invited everyone to converge one day for a symposium of sorts, a gathering of about 75 people that grew to be a prefab conference in 2004 (and would eventually morph into the annual Dwell on Design). Dwell also partnered with Empyrean to manufacture and sell its own Dwell homes.
The momentum was real until the Great Recession. The ideas, concepts, and plans of these architects and designers were all there, but they were trying to do something different in an industry that historically isn’t interested in change. And, in eras of economic uncertainty, industries become conservative, nervous to try or invest in anything new. The recession was devastating for a new prefab movement that had just found its momentum.
“The idea was great,” wrote Nelson in 1957, “but for a quarter of a century it failed to work.” Now, almost 75 years later, and some 25 years after a Dwell Home and a prefab book, I still believe prefab is a good idea.
As Jennifer Siegal, principal of The Office of Mobile Design, which uses prefab in many of its projects (some of which have been featured in Dwell) explains, “To be successful in the modular space, it is essential to design from the manufacturer’s point of view. This means understanding the intricacies of structural modular components, adhering to transportation regulations, and considering the constraints of site access and assembly.” It is only by aligning design with these critical factors, she explains, that projects can maximize efficiency, reduce costs, and ensure smooth execution. “A collaborative approach between architects, manufacturers, and builders,” she says, “is crucial to unlocking the full potential of modular construction.”
No one should use prefab for its own sake. Is it the best way to build your particular project? If so, then go for it.
Today, one of the best examples of prefabs are accessory dwelling units, or ADUs (a term that is only slightly better than “granny flat.”) The growth of them is impressive, especially in California, where new legislation led to a 15,334 percent increase in permits between 2016 and 2022, resulting in nearly 84,000 completed units. According to California YIMBY, nearly one in five homes in the state is now an ADU, many of which are prefabs Dwell has written about. (Dwell sells its own ADU, produced in partnership with Abodu).
Similar legislation in Seattle resulted in a staggering increase in the number of these units; by 2022, the construction of them outpaced single-family homes in the city. However, ADU pricing, at least in California, remains higher than you’d expect—$200,000 might only get you a 300-square-foot prefab.
This uptick represents, in part, a revitalized push for prefabrication. Some companies are building websites they say any designer can use to make a prefab home, while others are experimenting with the method in an attempt to create repeatable housing models. But as was the case with many of the concepts in my book, just because a company is advertising a product doesn’t mean it knows what it is doing—or has even built anything. When I reached out to Samara, an ADU startup from Airbnb cofounder Joe Gebbia, asking how many units it has built, a PR person responded: “As a private company we don’t disclose this number, but we can share that traction in California has been strong.” Then there’s the cautionary tale of Katerra, which wanted to transform the architecture and construction industries through modular design and supply-chain integration. Once valued at $4 billion, the company, founded in 2015, filed for bankruptcy in 2021. Katerra and others have made the mistake of assuming a house can be built like an iPhone. It can’t.
Last year, a Berkeley, California, couple used modular builder Type Five to put a 400-square-foot ADU in their backyard for $228,370.
I think all of us interested in prefab have been drawn to what seems like its inherent efficiencies—in an ideal world, it’s a highly replicable system that brings environmental and economic costs down. But in the real world, this seemingly simple aim continues to feel just ever so slightly out of reach.
Tanney explains it with a version of that well-known aphorism: “It’s super important to know that it’s not always a faster, cheaper, or better way of building an architect’s design. It is more important to design it as a prefab than to try and prefab a design.” That last bit is important. No one should use prefab for its own sake. Is it the best way to build your particular project? If so, then go for it. If not, unless you’re a multifamily developer, maybe prefab isn’t actually the best way to build a single-family house.
Res4’s Tanney believes (and I heartily concur) that although the modular industry has historically been focused predominantly on the single-family home, “prefabrication’s highest and best use currently, and in the future, is in addressing the housing crises. Specifically, the modular method of prefabrication is the killer app for producing low-rise, high-density housing given its efficiency, scale, and repeatability.”
In other countries, prefab is the norm. It’s free of the social stigma it has in the U.S. because the investment has been made in doing it right.
David Baker Architects, who has built prefab multifamily housing throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, credits the building method for greatly reducing the project timeline of its 145-unit Tanahan building in San Francisco. The firm wants to do even more, but as principal Daniel Simons explains, “For us to fully benefit from industrialized construction, we need things to be more standard across projects and between factories. Right now each project is more or less a unique manufactured product.”
Outside the realm of prefabs Dwell tends to cover, Greystar, America’s largest apartment operator, is currently building its first modular complex. (The corporation is simultaneously being accused of rental price fixing by the DOJ, it should be noted.) And I’m not going to lie: perhaps the smartest example of modular building I’ve seen in a while is the 800 units that are going to be built atop a Costco in Los Angeles, nearly a quarter of them affordable.
I’ve learned a lot these past 25 years. And probably need to extend a mea culpa to many Dwell readers, since prefab has yet to show us it can reliably produce a modern affordable home. But if I’ve taken away one thing, it’s that prefab’s potential to deliver on its promise has never been greater than it is right now.
Illustration by Ana Pérez López
Related Reading:
Allison Arieff was a founding senior editor of Dwell and served as its editor-in-chief from 2002 to 2007. She is currently the editorial director of print for MIT Technology Review. She does not, alas, live in a prefab house, but does have a factory-built 1962 Airstream trailer.
