By: Johnny Hartsfield

The System3 prototype house has been installed outside of MoMA and is ready for your visit. 

There are only 18 days left until the opening of Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling, MoMA’s new exhibition on the past, present and future of prefabricated homes.  The installation consists of the selected works of five international architects and will display full-scale prefabricated homes in the outdoor space to the west of the Museum’s main building.  Each home is currently in a different stage of assembly on site - Read more to see installation progress

“SYSTEM3″ by Oskar Leo Kaufmann and Albert Ruf

 

“The SYSTEM3 prototype house is ready for your visit.

Our assembly crew is back to Austria, the great people on site from FJ Sciame and Budco are working on the other projects and everybody from MoMA is working hard in the last two weeks before the exhibition opens.

For me, there is some free space to explain what you can expect when you visit the show:

The house is 47 square meters, which is around 470 square feet, and is fully equipped with a kitchen, bath, and lighting. It has a staircase to access the roof, which can serve to connect floors in the case of a vertical expansion of the units. Since the staircases (as the installation shafts) are always located at the same fixed position, you can easily stack the Serving Units.

In addition, we will show some specially designed furniture: a table, a chair, and a bed. This furniture’s design is also based on the idea of prefabrication. To be honest, we love this furniture so much we would happily do another exhibition with it…

Finally we will show on three monitors animated graphics, film, and explanations about SYSTEM3.

Next week I will describe in detail what we are going to present on these screens…”  READ MORE

 

“BURST*008″ By Jeremy Edmiston and Douglas Gauthier’s

“The electrical work was started this week. (The house will have electricity but no plumbing.) The electrical has to be completed before the interior walls can be finished because the wiring is hidden behind the walls-also made of plywood.

The four exterior walls of the house are made of SIP panels. The interior side is grooved to accommodate the ribs; the other sides are angled to fit into the folded façade of the house. That is, the folds are already embedded in the SIPs so they follow the geometry of the house. Once the SIPs are connected by an interior beam, they are also structural.

As the walls are constructed, the skylights have begun to emerge. They serve to let in light but not ventilation (we have clerestories for that), and will be closed in with acrylic. The original Bursts, after which the house got its name, were decorative, made of strips of a foam-like substance applied to the exterior of the house. They confused the local birds, who tried to eat them. The current Bursts actually serve a purpose and will be articulated with stripes in the acrylic.”  READ MORE

 

 ”CELLOPHANE HOUSE” by KieranTimberlake

“All of the chunks have been delivered to the west lot and are currently being assembled on-site. As of today the house has been built up to the third story with delivery of the fourth and fifth floors continuing. The last chunks to arrive were the roof and canopy, which include

Danpalon skylight panels, installed by Sky King Skylights. The infill line at Kullman was cleared in less than one week.”  READ MORE

 

 ”HOUSING FOR NEW ORLEANS” by Larry Sass

“After a few stops and starts, the bottom section is in. With traditional construction, the framing is first. A digitally fabricated house is assembled in layers, one set of connected layers at a time. First, we snap base blocks made of layers of plastic and plywood to the ground with bolts (Figure 1). Ribs are snapped onto the base blocks, followed by a few panels (Figure 2). Dan and Dennis have installed the floor and underbelly using plastic pins cut on the CNC machine and corners that turn the wall geometry up into a wall.

Factories depend not only on tools but on the reliability of component manufacturing and the precision of each object. In product manufacturing, a product starts as a base object on a conveyor belt and ends as an assembled artifact. Assembly-line balancing and the timing of the belt are critical; even more critical is the precision of the component as it is assembled.  We have predrilled holes for the window frames, door frames, and ornamentation. Every hole must be in the right place; we cannot afford to have one hole off point, hence error detection with laser cutting is crucial.”  READ MORE

 

 

“MICRO COMPACT HOME” by Horden Cherry Lee Architects / Haack + Höpfner Architects

“Breakfast in the micro compact home is just a press of the button on the Nespresso machine… no waste to worry about, hopefully one day micro compact home birchemeusli with be like that too!

The lighting in the micro compact home is enhanced by the beautifully designed (from Hugo Peters’ shop in Zurich) folding Zed lights, which are 4 watts each. I consume a total of 80 watts of power for the LED lighting in the m-ch 007 with 20 downlight fittings and including the three Zed lights.”  READ MORE

 

GreenFab will continue to post entries on the progress of this unique exhibit that will run from July 20-October 20, 2008.  I will also be flying out to New York to see first hand what some of best names in modern prefab are doing.

Stay tuned!

Source: MoMA.org

 

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