ALATOWN

This is my last post about the Muji House….for good.

…for those who may be interested in the photos I took inside the Muji House mock-up home.

Apologies for the quality, they are snaps taken covertly to document finishes, details, etc.

Overall, nice and simple throughout - what you’d expect. There are some nice features, but construction was a little sloppy in a couple places (particularly for Japanese standards). Perhaps this is because it was a mock-up. Nonetheless, the upstairs certainly feels a bit pokey, but the downstairs living room/kitchen arrangmeent works well, particularly in regard to the massive storage wall and cleanly resolved kitchen counter. I also like the exposed portion of slab where you kick-off your shoes.

Muji has recently started offering a new design via their Japanese MUJI + INFILL website. I have to admit being a little disappointed that the new version is so much more conventional. Modern design aspirations have been scrapped for a suburban pictogram. Although the new house is called something like ‘Window House’ in Japanese, the windows (yes, now with windows!) seem pretty stingy (more like ‘Pin Hole House’).

Continue reading ‘MUJI HOUSE v2.0′

The benefits of modern chemistry in the home are obvious. For most of us the parts of the home with which we have direct contact (carpets under foot, paints on the wall, plastic in furniture, etc) are chemically synthesized materials. David Ewing Duncan submitted his blood for this month’s National Geographic and the results of its analysis make it clear that an alarming amount of harmful synthetic molecules are entering the body, but not leaving. Over a lifetime they can invisibly accumulate to levels that are considered critical, but direct implications for human health seem understudied.

When one considers how much of our lives we spend in our homes in direct contact with its constituent materials and furnishings it’s obviously important to consider what materials the home is constructed from and what is brought into it. This form of pollution gets little attention despite having such a direct and widespread impact on our health. This is invisible contamination that enters the body very slowly, over the length of one’s lifetime. The absorbed compounds are measured in the parts per billion or trillion so they are hardly detectable without a specialised blood screening of the type Duncan paid $15,000 for. Furthermore, their scarcity has made it difficult to regulate manufacturers who incorporate the chemicals into the products we depend upon. These chemicals are often there for good reason. Flame-retardant compounds, for instance, are in everything from furniture to computer circuitry to decrease the risk of humans perishing in fire.

“… even though many health statistics have been improving over the past few decades, a few illnesses are rising mysteriously. From the early 1980s through the late 1990s, autism increased tenfold; from the early 1970s through the mid-1990s, one type of leukemia was up 62 percent, male birth defects doubled, and childhood brain cancer was up 40 percent. Some experts suspect a link to the man-made chemicals that pervade our food, water, and air. There’s little firm evidence. But over the years, one chemical after another that was thought to be harmless turned out otherwise once the facts were in.”

London Architects DRMM are currently exhibiting their ‘Naked House’ in Oslo’s Norsk Design og Arkitektursenter. Not to be confused with the famous house by Shigeru Ban of the same name, this solid timber house plays with the possibilities of CNC cutting solid engineered laminated timber as easily as laser-cutting thin plywood for the model. Basically, the processes of manufacturing these 150mm + panels from a CAD drawing is the same, just scaled up – bigger sheets of wood, bigger machines (saws not lasers).

While not exactly a house yet, it’s an interesting exemplar of potential innovation in a sustainable material: engineered timber. The ‘naked’-ness presumably refers to the starkly undressed timber panels inside and out. However, delivering this house as a feasible prefab will require that DRMM puts some clothes (cladding) on…

Find out more at this upcoming lecture.

More photos after the jump…

Continue reading ‘DRMM - The Naked House’

The LA Times has recently dealt the US burgeoning prefab scene a bit of a reality check. Journalist Christopher Hawthorne points out that although the Ray Kappe designed Living Home is big, spacious, and yes, maybe even green, it may not be ‘Such a deal?’. Overcoming the sales hype and getting down to hard costs proves that these prefabs are not so affordable (particular when site preparation on tricky sites is involved). After all, if you undermine the affordability of the prefab, don’t you undermine its biggest selling point?  Living Homes is obviously targetting the luxury end of the market.  Question is, does it exist?

“Which brings us to a stubborn contradiction at the heart of the high-design prefab business. Prefab construction lends itself to flat, accessible sites, so that the trucks and cranes that bring the shell of the house to the lot can easily do their work. And the parts of America where flat lots are readily available tend to be places where you can still buy a handsome three-bedroom house for $350,000, leaving few buyers clamoring for a high-design prefab that might cost twice that.

In the regions where the market is expensive enough to make prefab such an enticing option — Los Angeles, the Bay Area, Seattle, Boston or Washington, D.C., for example — most of the remaining vacant lots are steep or inaccessible, or have already been rejected by speculative builders for some other reason. On a lot like that, a pricey foundation, retaining walls or other site work is often required, cutting into the potential savings that draw customers to modular design in the first place.” - Christopher Hawthorne, LA Times

FYI: The house above reportedly “cost about $600,000 to build, not including the site work, foundation, sunken garage or land.” (source: LA Times)

The story of Palm Springs’ Alexander Homes is one of those rare profitable collaborations in which a developer invested in an architect’s vision. Architect William Krisel designed and coordinated the construction of more than 2,500 homes for housing developer Robert Alexander.

Palm Springs was the desert playground for Los Angeles’ cultural elite. Just as it was the refuge from the conservative social norms and scrutiny of Los Angeles, Robert Alexander and William Krisel found it a liberating environment to experiment in a popular modernist idiom. Although the tract homes were designed from standard layouts to be affordable for the growing number of middleclass families, each home was adapted to give the community variety and identity. The homes all have a signature low profile folded, gently pitched roofs.

Today Palms Springs seems partially frozen in a time warp. It’s the undisputed Mecca for 50’s era nostalgia – from vintage kitsch hunters to design aficionados and their Eames chairs. Perhaps this is understandable. America has never since produced such a contemporary vision of housing, much less on such a largely affordable scale. In mass-housing terms, American design steadily regresses to this day.

Remaining Alexander homes have a coveted status, selling for upwards of $800,000. Obviously there is a limited supply of genuine modernist homes, driving up prices. Thus it’s somewhat sad but inevitable to see that a far less visionary developer than Robert Alexander is attempting to flog Alexander home repros (apparently with Krisel’s consent). Get all the details from this website designed to simulate a 50’s Cadillac dashboard. Another company is planning entire developments of Alexander knock-offs called Alexander Country Club, Alexander Vista Estates, etc.

Sadly, the Alexander family is no longer around to shed scorn on such take-offs. The entire family was tragically killed in a plane crash in 1965. If they were still alive, perhaps they would be employing the leading lights of today’s generation of architects to design homes with modern methods and construction.

more photos ->

Continue reading ‘ALEXANDER HOMES’

You can hardly find a more concise synopsis of the current state of play in the US prefab housing industry than this piece entitled ‘Prefabrication and Sustainability’ written by architect Kevin Pratt of KieranTimberlake Associates LLP.

Pratt clearly highlights the benefits of prefabrication vs. traditional homebuilding. He forecasts a similar fate for US housing manufacturers to that which the auto industry suffered in the 80-90s. Lack of innovation in technology and production methods left US companies vulnerable to their more-efficient foreign competitors. Did we mention that Toyota also builds houses….

Synopsis:

It appears that the residential construction market is approaching a moment where cultural, economic and technological conditions may well empower a revolution in housing production. Research conducted by the Urban Land Institute has shown that consumer demand for greener housing has been growing rapidly in recent years, and that buyers are willing to pay a premium for environmentally conscious housing. Creative financing methodologies abound in the residential lending sector, including energy efficient mortgages from Fannie Mae that apply savings in energy costs towards income requirements for prospective homebuyers. This, coupled with both a growing awareness of global warming, rising energy costs, and consumer worries about the adverse health consequences of many normative construction practices, is driving a change in the nature of consumer demand that is, at the moment, poorly understood by most builders.

Some of London’s most progressive housing projects have been commissioned not by trendy new artists, celebrities, investment bankers, or fashionable developers, but by a 150-year-old social housing association… the Peabody Trust.

Here are two of the most notable schemes the Trust has built within the last couple of years:

PROJECT: Silvertown Housing (aka Evelyn Road), East London
ARCHITECT: Niall McGaughlin Architects

PROJECT: Boxley Street Housing, East London
ARCHITECT: Ash Sakula

Continue reading ‘THE PEABODY TRUST: THE DESIGN-CONSCIOUS HOUSING ASSOCIATION’

Last January Tokyo’s Gallery Ma held an exhibition called ‘Contemporary Japanese Houses, 1985-2006’. The premise is simple: take the best examples of Japanese houses from that period and build white card models of them. Essentially this is a ‘best of’ collection from the pages of ‘JA’ and ‘Shinkenchiku’ (two of the most important architectural magazines in Japan). The houses are all familiar favorites, but being able to scrutinize them in this way, one after the other, was an architectural delight.

The replicas were each presented in one of two formats: sectional models hung from suspended metal panels within the gallery’s interior or small-scale models encapsulated in glowing white cubicles recessed within a wall in the courtyard. Wandering through the hall of panels allowed you peer into the cut-away interior of each house and then go to the other side to inspect its interior. Outside in the courtyard visitors peeked into each small box to adore the tiny models sitting there preciously like miniature ornaments.

It cannot be stressed how meticulously these models had been crafted. Only the Japanese could devise and follow a stark minimalist formula to produce an exhibition that was as overwhelmingly rich in the minute details of great architecture. The shear scale of the undertaking (several hundred models made specifically for the exhibition) was also baffling. Later I learned that the models had been made buy Japanese architectural students. Ingenious! What better way to make use of their free labor!

The exhibitions over and I’m not sure that it’s touring anywhere outside Japan (although it should!).

Luckily, a book was published which is probably as thorough an introduction as you’re going to get on Japanese Contemporary Housing.

Well, sorry to disappoint, but it looks like Muji houses will be staying in Japan for the foreseeable future…

I called Muji’s store on Tottenham Ct. Rd.and spoke to a saleswoman. When she looked at the catalogue neither she nor her manager seemed to know anything about Muji+infill. She was puzzled as to why they would even include it in their catalogue. She guessed that Muji are just trying to show off a bit and let the UK how BIG the Japanese business is becoming - even expanding to manufacturing entire homes. It’s not exactly false advertising, but it seems like careless copy editing on the publishers’ part. Let us know if it succeeded in getting your hopes up…

It would be interesting to see if Muji’s housing would even meet US or UK building regs for fire, balustrades (I don’t think so), Part L legislation, etc… It justs seems to be alot easier and more fun to get a house built in Japan than over here…
Continue reading ‘MUJI+infill FOR THE UK UPDATE’