Saturday, September 28, 2019

It's the world of next cubesday.



Lately there has been a lot of modular construction going on and I haven't been able to figure out if this is really the future of construction or not. So, today I went out to check out one of these companies. I expected there to be a whole of of bitching and moaning. I figured these were going to look like shipping containers, but I was actually pleasantly surprised.

The main house is made up of eight modules and was roughly 2500 square feet. They basically ship them to you and they come out with a crane to plop them on the property. The modules went together in about four hours. This is the three bed two bath two story main house. Each module I believe costs roughly 90 grand.





















The master bath was surprising large.







There is a walk in closet behind this wall. I am already image heavy so I'm not including it here.









Outside there was also a 600 square foot granny unit. It seemed remarkably large for such small square footage.

I'm still not sure if this is the future of construction - but it at least made me say - MAYBE.





6 comments:

  1. This I can actually make fun of more than a McMansion Hell ...

    Let's start with a Le Corbusier Royale with Window Cheese.

    OH BUT WAIT ... there are not enough windows in this beeetch!

    Turn up the knob to I.M. Pei!

    THAT'S TOO MANY WINDOWS FOR A HOUSE, BEEETCH!

    We've asked the original architect to dial it down a bit ...

    THAT'S TOO MANY LIVING SPACES FOR A HOUSE, BEEETCH!

    This is a smol house, will it do?

    OMG YES WHEN CAN THE NEW INTERNET PRIESTHOOD MOVE IN???

    But you and your concrete, Corbu ... we want this built out of structural steel and not so gray concrete ...

    GO ASK RENZO PIANO ABOUT THAT STUFF, AND MAYBE YOU WANT SOME BRICK ADORNMENTS TOO? CAPITALIST SWINE, GRAY CONCRETE'S NOT GOOD ENOUGH FOR YOU???

    No no, we can't actually afford brick adornments, we blew all of our cash on buying the house that was on the lot and then demolishing it, but could you find a way of making the concrete less ... brutal?

    PAINT IT WHITE AND GIVE MY REGARDS TO ROBERT STERN

    That would work ... and we'd stay in budget ...

    Sold! :-)

    ...

    If you didn't have any idea of how much I hate this kind of architecture for technical reasons, now you might have a clue.

    I think McMansion Hell Grrl actually likes this eye-burning Sooperwhite crap because it's not all Demented Dormers and Snap-In Muntins and Cabinets From The Ronald Reagan Era and A Kitchen In Your Bedroom bullshit bougie stuff.

    Why I like Seaside and why it's a great tiny little town: This guy.

    This town was built toward the end of the 20th century and not in the 18th or earlier.

    Again, that guy.

    I love Dorset in general -- it's part of the ancestral family home region that stretches up to Gloucestershire -- but this place is a bit more special.

    But I'm not supposed to like an architect who has admiration for the architecture and designs of Albert Speer and who received a commission from the Prince of Wales ... even if any city that would have been built in full to those designs would have made Paris look like an artist's shit show.

    So that's probably the real reason you don't hear about this guy.

    OMG TRACK LIGHTING IT'S GOT TRACK LIGHTING SO 1990s ALREADY
    WHEN'S THIS BEEETCH GONNA FALL DOWN ALREADY

    :-)

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  2. Not really to my taste, but I've seen worse, I don't hate it at least. On the other hand, we paid $90k for our entire house and property, 1300 square feet of house, plus garage and carport, and just short of 2 acres of property. On the 3rd hand, this isn't Cali either, which does make a difference.

    I don't have a problem with the modular concept, but some of the methods of execution definitely don't appeal.

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  3. Wow, that's close to $300/sq ft without the land.

    Doesn't seem like a big cost savings over conventional construction, despite the savings of on-site labor.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Uh, leaperman, that's not a cookie ...

    That's a technologically-enhanced ball of starch and sweeteners that's been processed somehow in order to resemble a cookie.

    I must insist on authenticity: vegan cookies should contain parts of actual vegans, and feminist cookies should contain parts of actual feminists.

    There shall be no ersatzkeks consumed here!

    But you too get a prize!

    You win ... a song about hideous towns!

    "Hideous towns ... make me throw ... up!"

    :-)

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  5. I think you guys broke me for a second. I had to look into my brain and figure to if I thought this classifies as architecture. And I don't think it does. In the way that mobile homes also do not classify as architecture. But I actually hadn't thought about it until y'all started calling it that.

    I wonder how this thing fares when the ground jiggles. Maybe better than a conventional house except at the seems?

    Mr S.'s mom lives in a house sort of like this in OH, but it wasn't constructed off site. It's a steel structure house made in the 60's. The house makes a lot of weird noises due to expansion and contraction and you can hear the wind blow through the seams. So I'm not sure if this house will be falling apart in 20 years. The structure will still be there because it's built of steel.

    I think I estimated with 8 modules the house would cost roughly a million without the land. With rounding errors of course. That's not even with the garage and granny unit in the price. So I'm not sure how much they are saving on the house either. I think this purely makes sense because there is a labor shortage. But I'm sort of wondering is history is repeating itself because of Mr S.'s mom's house.

    I'm not sure the styling is my jam either. I do love minimalism - but I also like to get rid of my houses some day. So I like hearing what other people ~don't~ like.

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  6. You actually caught on: it's ersatz architecture in the purest sense of the word ...

    Ersatz = "replacement".

    Which is why I can make fun of all of the elements of Le Corbusier, I.M. Pei, Philip Johnson, Renzo Piano, Robert A.M. Stern, and so forth in it: the students of these architects who produced this stuff probably thought they were following a "tradition" of what their professors taught them.

    Also, I'm guilty of having a lot of IKEA stuff in my office, but damn, I didn't choose every single bit to be blindingly white.

    That bedroom hurts my eyes -- I have blackout curtains so I can sleep, and they'd do this?

    "But I'm sort of wondering is history is repeating itself because of Mr S.'s mom's house ..."

    It is and it's a lot more cyclical than you'd suspect.

    Sears Roebuck houses of the 1890s through 1910s had a certain look and design sensibility.

    Prairie Modern led to a lot of flat-top houses that inevitably led to these pre-fab container houses.

    But this is really also pure Bauhaus with bougie pretensions: the existenzminimum house with socialist pre-fab construction, much of which is presumably to every eco standard that regulation code books have been written to contain, that looks like it's full of "reuse" and "sustainable materials" except that it isn't.

    OMG YES WHEN CAN THE NEW INTERNET PRIESTHOOD MOVE IN???

    That was a little joke, but there was a lot of truth behind it ...

    This is a kind of house that Google employees could love.

    Aren't the Google people themselves a kind of ersatz worker born of an extreme regime of flexibility that doesn't really exist in nature?

    These houses are a perfect fit.

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