MoMA’s Prefab-Housing Project

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The New York Sun

Inside a 20,000-square-foot warehouse space in Brooklyn’s Gowanus neighborhood, about two dozen people gather most weekday mornings to work on a giant plywood puzzle. There are square-shaped pieces with oval holes in their midsection and jagged ones, resembling enormous saw blades. When they complete the 1,200-piece puzzle, they will have built a house — or at least the skeleton of one.

Next week, that residence — collapsed into three accordion-like pieces — will be loaded onto a flatbed truck and taken to a vacant lot abutting the Museum of Modern Art. There, the design of the New York architects Jeremy Edmiston and Douglas Gauthier will rise in June, alongside four other modern dwellings, for the museum’s forthcoming show “Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling.”

The houses are the centerpieces of the show, which examines the history of prefabricated dwellings, from 1833 to the present, and explores the potential uses for factory-produced architecture. “Home Delivery,” which opens July 20, marks the first time in more than a half-century that MoMA is exhibiting full-scale houses as part of a show.

The exhibit comes amid a burgeoning interest in structures made from factory-produced parts. These prefab dwellings are being discussed both as a time- and cost-effective solution to address urgent global housing needs, and as a way to build upscale, client-customized homes, while limiting material waste.

Mr. Gauthier said that the concept of factory-fabricated dwellings is now being redefined by innovative architects and complex technology. It’s no longer about giving everyone the same house, but “creating different houses that are made in the same way.”

Initially, hundreds of architects and firms were considered to take part in “Home Delivery.” Culling those, MoMA solicited 21 proposals from around the world. Five winners were selected — including Messrs. Edmiston and Gauthier’s plan for the 1,060-square-foot home they call “Burst*008.” It is a rethinking of the former business partners’ design for a house on stilts, which was built three years ago in the coastal town of North Haven, Australia.

To construct the house for the museum project, the design duo solicited the help of architecture students and recent graduates from Columbia University, City College, Parsons the New School for Design, and the New Jersey Institute of Technology. For the past few weeks, they have been working nine-hour days, sorting, painting, and fastening each of the factory-made plywood pieces in place using metal clips and screws. “The hardest part is just keeping everything organized,” a recent graduate of the New Jersey Institute of Technology working on the project, Kevin Field, said. “If you’re missing one piece, you have to stop until you find it.”

But Mr. Field said the excitement outweighs the frustrations: “It’s the first project that I’ve ever worked on that’s being built. After years of working in school on fantasy projects, it’s nice to see something come to reality.”

Once the house is moved to Manhattan, the design and construction team will spend the next four to six weeks working on site at MoMA. That’s where “Burst” will be set in steel frames, and given floor, wall, and roof panels. Finally, the “skin” — made of a white polymer resin and embellished with large, raised pieces in the shape of sunbursts — will be affixed to its exterior walls. Like the beach house on which “Burst” is based, the MoMA incarnation will sit on stilts that raise the structure up to 9 feet off the ground.

“Today people are assessing their relationship with nature, and this house mediates between what happens inside your house, and what happens outside of it,” Mr. Edmiston said, noting the home features a south-facing wall of windows.

The “Burst” house, which has three main living areas, will share the MoMA space with a 76-square-foot aluminum-clad residence, designed as a dormitory-like space by the London- and Munich-based architect Richard Horden, as well as glassy four-story house made from recycled materials, a project of a Philadelphia-based firm, KieranTimberlake Associates. Also on the site will be an austere, blocklike residence, whose building materials can fit inside a standard shipping container from the Austrian team of Oskar Leo Kaufmann and Albert Rüf, and the “House for New Orleans,” designed by Cambridge, Mass., architect Lawrence Sass as a housing solution for those displaced by Hurricane Katrina. Its laser-cut plywood panels are outfitted with grooves and joints, so the pieces fit together without the use of nails or hinges.

“Our houses will wink at the other houses,” Mr. Gauthier said. “It will engage them.”

MoMA gave each design team funding to bring their concept to fruition. Messrs. Edmiston and Gauthier placed the number in the low six figures, but the museum would not confirm that amount. “Burst” and the other commissioned houses will remain at MoMA through October, after which the architects are free to sell their projects to private buyers. The progress of the houses is being tracked at www.momahomedelivery.org.

In a statement, the show’s curator, Barry Bergdoll of MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design, spoke of a renaissance in modern prefabricated dwellings, and said he hoped the exhibit would serve to “foster new alliances and dialogues between innovative architecture, innovative marketing, and the innovative clients.”

“Home Delivery” opens July 20 at MoMA (11 W. 53rd St., between Fifth and Sixth avenues, 212-708-9400).


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