The Prefabricated Home (review)

In Britain and North America, basic misconceptions persist about the technology and culture of house building. Many writers still assume that the building industry is inefficient and slow to innovate, and that greater efficiency requires prefabrication and standardization. Illuminating more than its title suggests, The Prefabricated Home dispels some of these myths.

A British professor of architecture, Colin Davies explores the past, present, and potential of prefabricated housing. He seeks to illuminate the links between prefabrication and the architectural profession, but he accomplishes more than that. The first section of the book offers capsule histories of designs that architects from Le Corbusier to Walter Gropius and Frank Lloyd Wright to the modern proponents of High Tech have offered for prefabricated housing. He counterpoints these with commercial efforts, including General Houses, Lustron, AIROH, and Frameform, which have been ignored or dismissed by the architectural fraternity but have been more successful in the marketplace—in some cases (kit houses, mobile homes) spectacularly so.

In the second, theoretical section, Davies argues that the architect's concept of authorship is irrelevant to popular housing; that the profession's insistence on "honesty" in the relationship between materials and designs is inappropriate and unhistorical; that factory prefabrication does not require a standardization of parts or designs; and that pattern books have an established, useful, and honorable role to play in the marketing of popular houses.

Throughout, Davies cites many examples, and in the third section he undertakes a more sustained examination of some current efforts at mass customization. These combine the traditional with new materials and methods. He compares some small-scale operations, such as those of Border Oak, a Herefordshire company that builds for specific clients, with the larger-scale schemes of house manufacturers in Sweden and Japan. The implication is that these could be more widely deployed elsewhere, notably in Britain, where on-site production using structural brick is still dominant.

There is much to welcome and praise in this book. Davies writes with exceptional clarity, explaining technical issues with deft strokes; his judgments are sound; he has an uncanny ability to highlight the important features of each example he discusses. He strikes a nice balance between general argument and local details. There are abundant illustrations—not lavish, but precisely effective. He has read widely and makes good use of examples from several countries. Above all, as Adrian Forty notes in a dust-jacket blurb, Davies is unusual in having an excellent understanding of both the architectural/design aspects of house building and also the technical details. For this reason, what might have been a study of interest only to devotees of prefabrication, or to architects disenchanted with their profession, becomes in effect a meditation on the larger connections among authorship, design, and mass production. Davies undersells this dimension to his argument, but it is clearly there.

It is both a strength and a limitation of the book that it may leave readers wishing for more. Compact, well-illustrated, and well-written, The Prefabricated Home is very accessible, but the referencing is limited and some arguments cry out for development. Davies does not always cite his sources; he does not tell us where to go for more information on the modern Swedish building system, some intriguing aspects of which were unfamiliar to me and are important for his argument. His endnotes include most basic references, but omit others that an interested reader might wish to pursue. For example, neither of the two books on Lustron—one is admittedly very recent—is cited. The discussion of architect as author is tantalizingly brief and neglects the analogy of occupant as reader.

More substantially, it would have been interesting to hear more about Davies's views of conventional site production. He acknowledges that balloon framing, which originated as a site-based method and that in modified form (platform framing) still dominates house...