prefab housing in the digital age

The housing markets today are saturated with cheap affordable houses that are indistinguishable from each other. The idea of customizing your home to your particular needs or tastes does not go beyond the color of the exterior wall and the height of the hedges outside. Mass customisation in architecture, particularly housing, can currently be divided into four broad categories:

Mobile Home - Manufactured off-site, transported to the site in a largely completed state, minimal on-site labour.
Kit Home - Kit manufactured and packaged off-site assembled on-site.
Modular Home - Building designed using pre-existing modular products/systems, built on-site using modular/prefab components and "standard" materials.
Custom Home - Custom designed, custom-built on-site from "standard" materials, on-site labour-intensive.

However, mass customization of the prefab home is only now gaining momentum as a solution for housing in all markets.
Even though the prefabricated home has been around for a while it’s been slow to produce a popular home for the masses. After the Second World War there was a general effort to design, fabricate and sell homes as if they were automobiles. The Lustron home in the U.S. became a popular solution to housing with its aluminum house, and before that Matti Saarinen with his Futuro home, but their intention was plagued by high production costs and low demand. These were all moving in the same direction, but how customizable were these homes? How did they respond to their owners needs?

Recently, however, modern architects are experimenting more often with prefabrication as a means to deliver well-design and mass produced CUSTOM homes. Werner Aisslinger’s LOFTCUBE is basically a mobile home that is built off-site and later on transported and placed in any setting. Its exterior paneling is interchangeable, and there is a choice of different enclosures, and various distribution schemes. Its portability which relies on its cube shape, and size to be transported, is also the reason it is not as customizable for masses.
The Quon modular home however utilizes interchangeable spaces that connect to each other and can be arranged adapted to the owners needs. These modular cubes consisting of a living, bathroom, master bedroom, and kitchen are built off-site transported by truck and placed by crane in the desired configuration. The transportability of this house (fits into a average container) and its rapid production make it an innovative solution as a customized home. They do become homogenous after they are stack one beside the other.

In essence the idea of buying your home by parts is as customizable as you can get in the housing market, but the architects from System prove to take it one step beyond with their BURST house. Creating custom houses parting from a structural frame, cut on a CNC machine, transported to the site and assembled simply. Then applying the distinct configurations to allow sunlight and ventilation in, making the house environmentally passive. The façade of the house is designed to fit the owners tastes. In the end the house responds to a prefabricated construction system using cnc milling, responds to environmental concearns and is unique at the same time. This intention of a customizable home that meets today’s global requirements using todays technology gives an idea of the direction of the prefab home and its incursion into mass customization.