Most architectural exhibitions are not worth seeing. In general, they consist of little more than panels whose text and illustrations are already available in book form or on the Web. Which is also to say that they are typically text-heavy. And because text is best consumed by a reader sitting with a book in hand, there is often something laborious, even backbreaking, about having to consume an abstruse argument while standing for an hour or more in front of walls of diagrams, renderings, and blocks of text.

“Home Delivery,” the Museum of Modern Art’s new exhibition devoted to prefabricated housing, is eminently exempt from any such criticism. True, it has its share of panels and texts. But it also includes a healthy amount of historical models, memorabilia, and, best of all, five fully built structures that allow you to inhabit and circulate in what, in lesser exhibitions of this sort, would be nothing more than a sequence of airily abstract assertions.

This new exhibition at MoMA is an exploration of an ancient and perennial dream, the idea of architecture that could be re-created anywhere, at any time, and with supreme speed. It may surprise some visitors to the museum that such essential Modernist hopes had ancient and medieval counterparts in the tensile architecture of military encampments.

But the earliest concerted efforts that we know to design and fabricate an inhabitable structure, and then to construct it somewhere else, dates back to the American Colonies in 1772. At that time, the team of Clarke and Hodgkin, from Portsmouth, N.H., built a three-room, 50-by-18-foot wood-frame house that was eventually set up on the island of Granada.

Six decades later came another American visionary, Augustine Taylor, who invented, around 1833, what would be called the balloon frame. This method of wood-framing made it possible for anyone with a hammer and nails, rather than only skilled craftsmen, to build a respectable dwelling in relatively short order.

The real push to develop quick and affordable housing came, of course, in the first half of the 20th century. It should come as no surprise that Thomas Edison, who invented so much, should have had a hand in this as well, with the single-pour concrete system that he devised in 1906. Two years later, 22 different models of housing were being sold via catalogs by Sears, Roebuck and Co., and a few years after that, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, and Walter Gropius, not to mention Buckminster Fuller and Jean Prouvé, were offering solutions of their own.

Around this point in the story, MoMA wheels in its first object lesson: a full re-creation of Carl G. Strandlund’s Westchester two-bedroom model house. There is something almost surreally odd about finding this warped and rusted hunk of flesh-toned aluminum siding on the sixth floor of Yoshio Taniguchi’s pristine Modernist temple. Made up of two bedrooms, a living room, a dining room, and a kitchen area, this is one of the dreariest examples of Modernist planning imaginable. The overhead lighting, as well, seems to tease out each trace of corrosion, each dent and ding, in this frankly sleazy structure. Surely the thing had to look a little better when it was first devised, and the promotional photographs attempt, almost comically, to suggest refinement and domesticity.

But for visitors with a taste for dystopian Modernist decrepitude, Strandlund’s model home is nothing less than a visual feast. Indeed, it is worth the entire show, presenting a testimonial to abjection that is simply unforgettable.

Despite their being spanking new, it is likely that the five contemporary examples of prefabricated homes, which have just been set up in a vacant lot immediately to the west of the museum, will never seem quite as lusterless as Strandlund’s example. Whatever the ultimate practicality of Micro Compact Home, by Horden Cherry Lee Architects and Haack + Hoepfner Architects, it is a visual delight, a perfect and diminutive cube of 76 square feet and 2.2 tons of timber frame clad in paneled and anodized aluminum sheets.

No less striking is the Cellophane House, by KieranTimberlake Associates, which cultivates a look every bit as ethereal as the Micro Compact Home appears solid and impenetrable. A thrilling instance of neo-Modernism, this steel structure building, clad in cellophane-like walls, rises up five stories, in luxuriously spatial modules that include a living room area on the first floor, kitchen and dining room on the second floor, bedrooms with terraces on the third and fourth floors, and finally a sun deck on the roof.

Most architectural shows are best consumed by reading the accompanying catalog. With “Home Delivery,” however, attendance is absolutely essential, and will be richly rewarded.