PreFab Houses [Hardcover]

Arnt Cobbers (Author), Oliver Jahn (Author), Peter Gossel (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1, 2010

Your brand new home, delivered on a trailer

A Prefab is a mass produced house, constructed in a factory and assembled on site in a few days or weeks. Once regarded as a cheap, easy solution for urgent housing problems, the prefab has evolved to become a synonym for ambitious design and sophisticated detailing solutions. The amazing history of prefabricated houses started in England in the 1830's with a building kit for emigrants moving to Australia. Even today, prefabricated houses provide a high percentage of living spaces in many countries of the world. This book covers prefabs from the USA via Europe to Asia and Africa, giving insight into the various industrially prefabricated components, the difficulties of delivery to the building site, and the intricacies of assembly and completion. As well as tracing the liaison between modernism and industrialization that evolved to produce the latest prefabricated solutions, it also features a unique compilation of one-off prefabricated houses by well known international architects, as well as successful dwellings manufactured off-site for everyday modern living. Readers will also find contact details for relevant suppliers and manufacturers.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

About the editor:
Peter Gössel runs a practice for the design of museums and exhibitions. He is the editor of TASCHEN's monographs on Julius Shulman, R. M. Schindler, John Lautner and Richard Neutra, as well as the editor of the Basic Architecture Series.

About the authors:
Arnt Cobbers studied art history, history and musicology, and did his PhD in medieval church architecture. He lives as a freelance author in Berlin, and has written several books, mainly about history and the architectural history of Berlin. His monographs about Erich Mendelsohn and Marcel Breuer were published by Taschen Verlag. He is also the editor of music magazine Concerti.

Oliver Jahn (b.1970, Frankfurt am Main) studied literature, philosophy, and linguistics. He has worked as a freelance writer for Die Welt, the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Rheinischer Merkur, as an editor at Suhrkamp Verlag, and as design and architecture editor at Monopol magazine. Currently he is director of architecture and design at Architectural Digest magazine.

 

Product Details

• Hardcover: 432 pages
• Publisher: Taschen (August 1, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 3836507536
• ISBN-13: 978-3836507530
• Product Dimensions: 10.5 x 13.3 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #451,546 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Off-site construction, July 27, 2010

By 

Robin Benson - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: PreFab Houses (Hardcover)

An interesting, essentially visual, historical overview of prefabricated housing. Looking at some of these houses I find it hard to believe that they are built from pre-made units. Page 176 features a remarkable looking house designed by Heinrich Hellmuth and on page 190 another stunning home by Manfred Adams. Both houses are in Germany and use laminated wood and extensive areas of glass for walls and the companies that manufacture the units offer plenty of choice.

The two authors write a twenty-five page illustrated introduction. This is in English, French and German, which rather limits the space so it fairly zips through the history of prefabs: Sears Roebuck houses by mail (between 70, 000 and 100,000 sold between 1908 and 1940) the Keck House at the 1933 Chicago Century of Progress Exhibition; Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion House; Quonset and Nissan huts and into this century references to CAD; Muji in Japan and BoKlok in Scandinavia; and the Quik House (using reconverted shipping containers).

I thought the Intro was just a bit too brief. Nothing about the huge number of different style of units built by the US government during the Second World War to house eight million war workers and their families. This was covered by Hugh Casson in his 1945 Penguin book: Homes by the million,: An account of the housing achievement in the U.S.A., 1940-1945,, snd still available on the net. Similarly the British experience of building over 150,00 temporary houses between 1944 and 1949 is not mentioned at all. Greg Stevenson wrote a lovely little paperback about the English prefab: Palaces for the People. Moshe Safdie's Habitat 67 at the 1967 Montreal Expo gets a mention but no photos or plans of the 354 concrete modules that created a worldwide stir among architects.

Essentially this thick chunky book is pictorial survey of fifty-nine housing solutions over the decades. The first is the 1833 to 1840 Manning portable colonial cottage designed in England for housing immigrants in Australia. Overall America gets the biggest historical coverage, followed by French and German buildings in the fifties and sixties. From the seventies onwards houses from the US, Scandinavia, Switzerland, Austria, Australia and the Muji House the only one from Japan. Each building has an intro with photos of interiors and exteriors, some with floor plans and other graphics. The landscape format works well and the photo quality throughout is excellent, as one would expect from Taschen. An index is unfortunately missing.

I thought this was an interesting look at prefab houses past and present and Taschen have published a previous book on the subject:Prefab Houses (Architecture) Another book that covers the subject which I enjoyed is: Yesterday's Houses of Tomorrow: Innovative American Homes 1850 to 1950. Not all the homes are prefabs but those that are get much more coverage than was possible in the Taschen books. Amazon list quite a few books about prefabricated houses so this seems an area of growing interest.

***LOOK INSIDE THE BOOK by clicking 'customer images' under the cover.

5.0 out of 5 stars Prefab Houses - Cobbers and Jahn (Taschen), October 13, 2010

By 

BlogOnBooks "BlogOnBooks" (Los Angeles CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: PreFab Houses (Hardcover)

From its functional beginnings as an inexpensive way for Britons to begin inhabiting Australia on a mass scale in the 1830's to the modern day, cutting edge assemblages that populate the category today, prefabricated housing has had a longer and more illustrious history than most people are aware of.

Taschen's large scale survey of the work simply titled "Prefab Houses" covers the range and breadth of the prefabricated housing movement. From ready-to-build home kits from the Sears catalog to a series of angular and futuristic designs beginning with 1931's Illuminare house, this book provides a detailed overview of every significant movement of the prefab movement.

More than just a design volume, authors Arnt Cobbers and Oliver Jahn describe the unique and myriad issues (design, fabrication, transportation and final construction) related to creating housing in a factory as opposed to on location. Examples abound from Ohio's famed Lustron homes to France's spaceship styled Bulle Six Coques to Munich's Micro-Compact Home to numerous others from Europe to Thailand.

Throughout this volume, the photos and illustrations provide one surprise after another showing example after example of modern, sleek constructions that dazzle the eye and the senses. The fact that they all come on a truck or in a crate is remarkable enough and this 387 page, heavy-weight book serves as the most complete compendium so far of this still somewhat esoteric phenomenon.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Especially recommended for college-level collections strong in architectural history and construction, October 18, 2010

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: PreFab Houses (Hardcover)

PREFAB HOUSES offers insights into the mass-produced house that's constructed in a factory and assembled on site in a few days or weeks. Unlike other coverages on the topic, this covers the entire global prefab movement from the U.S. to Asia and Africa, offering assessments not just of structure but of accessibility, delivery difficulties, and the mechanics of their assembly and construction. Lavish, full-page color photos compliment an oversized presentation especially recommended for college-level collections strong in architectural history and construction.