Prefab design and building is alive and well. Despite the industry having taken it on the chin recently, with the notable business failure of modern prefab pioneer, Michelle Kaufman Designs, closing their doors, a handful of small, agile prefab building companies are finding a way to stay alive and even thrive during the credit crisis and broader recession.
 

Prefabricated homes, frequently referred to as prefab homes, have a long and rich architectural history. Frank Lloyd Wright's experiments in the field of affordable prefab housing (American System-Built Homes and Usonian houses) were particularly innovative as were the efforts of Le Corbusier (Unite Habitation). Influential figures like Thomas Edison and Buckminster Fuller also experimented with prefab housing ideas. The following is a selective survey of historical prefab projects.

In the late 1930s, on the isolated ‘back shore’ of Wellfleet, a group of self-taught, architecture enthusiasts began building experimental structures based on the early Modern buildings they had seen in Europe. Through mutual friends they invited some of the founders of European Modernism to buy land, build summer homes and settle. Like their local hosts, the recently emigrated Europeans admired the traditional Cape Cod ‘salt boxes’.

As the world population grows, the demand for clean, safe and affordable urban housing increases. Architects from around the world are responding with design concepts to provide urban housing as cheaply and efficiently as possible.

The Case Study Houses were experiments in American residential architecture sponsored by John Entenza's (later David Travers') Arts & Architecture magazine, which commissioned major architects of the day,

Use our Homeless Shelter and Emergency Housing locator to find a shelter near you.

In this feature we endeavor to document the work of constructivist architects in the Soviet Union during the years following the 1917 revolution and civil war. In little more than a decade, some of the most radical buildings of the twentieth century were completed by a small group of architects who developed a new architectural language in support of new social goals of communal life.

In this first installment we look at Konstantin Melnikov's personal home, known around the world as Melnikov House".