History of the Prefabricated Home

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.

 

 

 

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Manning Portable Colonial Cottage for Emigrants (1833-1840)

H. Manning's portable cottage for his son who was emigrating to Australia from London became the prototype for what would become the first documented prefabricated house. ...more
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Sears Catalog Homes by Sears, Roebuck & Co. (1908 -1940)

For nearly thirty-two years, Sears, Roebuck and Company of Chicago was the most prolific designer and manufacturer of prefabricated housing anywhere in the world. Between 1908 and 1940 the company sold over 100,000 homes through their "Modern Homes" mail-order catalogue. ...more
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American System-Built Houses by Frank Lloyd Wright (1911-1917)

Just three years after Sears, Roebuck and Company began constructing catalogue homes in bulk, Frank Lloyd Wright designed a markedly different type of house, the "American System-Built Houses" (also known as the "American Ready-Cut System"). ...more
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Baukasten by Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer (1922-1923)

The seeds of the fascination with the prefabrication within the Bauhaus began in unrealized projects conceived during the Weimar years. In 1922 Walter Gropius established an "estate co-operative" that Fred Forbat, a young Hungarian architect, was charged with developing ...more
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Copper Houses by Walter Gropius & Associates (1931-1942)

Due to the housing crisis in Germany during the 1920s, the Eberswalde-based firm Aron Hirsch and Son, a global player in the copper and brass industry, became interested in the business of mass-produced housing. It acquired a patent for transportable, insulated metal walls, developed by the architects Friedrich Forster and Robert Krafft, and set up a special division to manufacture prefabricated copper houses. ...more
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Stran-Steel House by O'Dell and Rowland (1933-1934)

Good Housekeeping magazine combined forces with the Stran-Steel Corporation and the Detroit-based architectural partnership of H. August O'Dell and Wirt C. Rowland to fabricate one of the more innovative houses presented at the Chicago Century of Progress Exposition's Houses of Tomorrow display in 1933. ...more
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Keck Crystal House by George Fred Keck (1933-1934)

The 1933 Century of Progress Exposition capitalized upon Chicago's reputation as the most architecturally progressive city in the United States by committing a very large portion of the mammoth exposition to contemporary architecture ...more
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Jacobs House by Frank Lloyd Wright (1936)

The Jacobs House is the most idiosyncratic yet successful example of a series of more than fifty small homes that Wright designed in the latter part of his career, collectively known as the Usonian houses. ...more
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Packaged House by Konrad Wachsmann and Walter Gropius (1941-1952)

Rather than representing a revolution in prefabrication, Konrad Wachsmann and Walter Gropius's Packaged House (General Panel System) represents the zenith of the wood-frame, panelized houses that were, by 1942, fairly common on both sides of the Atlantic. ...more
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Quonset Hut: Otto Brandenberger for the George A. Fuller Company (1941-Present)

The Quonset hut is perhaps the most ubiquitous prefabricated structure born out of a period of war. More an evolution of another wartime typology—the British-built Nissen hut of World War I—than an architectural innovation, the Quonset hut was first built at Quonset Point, Rhode Island, one of many naval bases established by the Allied forces during World War II. ...more
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