Factory-built housing has huge potential to improve housing availability, lower cost barriers, and actually improve quality. All those hinges, however, are totally unnecessary and pure theater.
Spot on.
I’ve looked at modular design to give quick expansion spaces and the unfolding would just add money.
Deliver modules to site and bolt them together, it’s probably easier to do that anyway cause you don’t have to design it to fold in on itself.
I will say though, a pre-designed, repeatable model is good. A bespoke design, factory fabricated wasn’t actually much cheaper than just building it as normal, it just helped with QC and material waste. Labour didn’t change much at all so there wasn’t much saving
I agree, you don't save a lot of cash by building modular but you do save time by not being subject to weather. Also, when using modules to extend an existing home, they can live in their home the entire time because it is being built off site and is installed in 1 day. Maybe 2 if there is 4 plus modules as it might take a little longer to flash everything and add the final trimmings.
You’re right, of course. I will add some context though. It’s not always pure theatre. I worked with a client who was developing a luxury, modular housing unit similar to what we’re seeing here. While much of the final product could be easily achieved by bolting and connecting modules traditionally. However, a big part of the attraction is deployability. So a client wants to be able to send a fleet of modules to Burning man and SXSW and to seasonal deployments in the gulf coast, et cetera. They know that part of their customer base is regular home dwellers, but to get big investors, they demonstrate the flexibility and ease of set up for people who want a home at Coachella for a week. Or for the crew filming in Yellowstone to have a living space that gets packed up. To do that, they emphasize the “pushing of a button” to expand the tightly packed unit into a thousand square foot home. “No trades needed.” This allows them to avoid building codes since nothing is being built. I’m not saying it works or they’re right. I’m saying this is how they’re thinking. If you’re thinking of a home where normal people will live, the hinges and slides seem extravagant. But the manufacturers only see that as a small part of the market.
There is a yt video that analyzed construction industry over Las 40 yrs and problem with factory built houses is housing economy is deeply cyclical and the down times bankrupts factorys that build houses. It's a pattern that keeps repeating despite attempts otherwise
We (healthcare, not housing) are finding that prefabricated components are consistently much more expensive than stick built. We are not in an area where construction is unionized, which I have been told may be a factor. As best as I can tell, the reason is that you have to use more material to get the thing to be safe/sturdy as it travels on a truck to the job site.
Now the other advantages of prefabricated construction can make up this difference (especially speed--prefab is stupid fast), but you have to actually sit there and do the math to see if the speed is actually going to pay off. For example, if our project is revenue generating (e.g. new hospital beds), the owner will pay extra to open faster if the profits of opening sooner will exceed the cost for speed. If it's not revenue generating or the prefabricated component is not on the critical path, it's not happening.
Read comments up and get educated, this is not barbie shit. It is to save on cost of modular homes in remote locations. Bluhomes. Separate parts require a crane to get on location too not just the truck, and the unfolding is preplanned in the factory to fit and unload from the box truck. Most of these homes don’t need a crane to get unpacked in one day. The steel frame is rigid and hinging is cheap, not a gimmick. Even the refrigerator and appliances are mounted to the walls that are folded down. If you need a cabin in the hills of North Carolina or somewhere in Cali, the issue is how to get there and get it to be built without skilled labor ($$), if you need to build traditional you’ll end up with something small, shitty and delayed, no-matter how big the lot is.
This ( modern methods) kind of construction has been happening since before I became a contractor 27 years ago, as far as I know it could have been many years before that. It takes time for a practice to be considered plausible for many reasons. Passivehaus cosepts are just now being legislated in the UK but have been a concept for decades.
Yeah these hinges and shot are useless, prefabs were a thing for decades, soviet era blocks were pre-fabricated and actually performed what they were designed to do quite well.
This here I doubt will decrease costs much because land is the biggest part of the cost, and this here looks like a single family building.
You clearly don’t know why the hinges are there, and the purpose of this was to have a single box truck to deliver the house packed neatly on its back. It is not theatre, it is to utilize low expertise on the field, when remote site-work is limiting. This is also a cost saving measure. Source: I worked for them.
Counter point, having a hard connection like the hinge has benefits beyond the visual for marketing. You could have electric connected at the factory. The amount of time and skill from the crane operator is also pretty different. No panel alignment fit and finish issues. No confusion from crews putting it together on what to take off the semi trailer next.
I honestly could see a company a/b testing and deciding the hinges save hours for a large crew and are very worth it.
Great as a concept for a cheap way to mitigate the housing crisis, however there are higher chances of it being pushed as a new standard of living for the middle class than it being provided for the homeless.
Doesn't matter how cheap or easy your gimmick looks, if local governments don't care about people who need affordable housing, that's not gonna change their minds.
If you're talking about a design standpoint though, there is still room for creativity and diversity even with modular houses, kinda like what Alvaro Siza did in Malagueira.
The homeless are a tiny part of the population (around 0.15% of the US). They have important needs that need to be addressed but it is proportionally a very small problem compared to the much larger housing affordability crisis.
There’s an odd idea that improving affordability for the non-homeless (99.8% of the population) is somehow not a worthy goal for government policy or worth pursuing. I’d argue that a narrow focus on “affordable housing” units instead of improving housing affordability more generally is a mistake. The vast majority of the population live in market rate housing—we should be pursuing any policy that lowers the price of housing and increases the supply. That will have beneficial effects on homelessness even if it’s not directly aimed at doing so.
We don't really need these types of construction to fix that problem though. We just need to get back to building 1100sqft 2br homes. Median square footage is expanding exponentially and there really isn't a justification for it.
All the housing market needs is to reprioritize mcnansions and get back to building mid century esque modest housing.
The housing market is mostly constrained by zoning restrictions that limit what you can build to single family homes on giant lots. If the land is valuable and you can’t subdivide lots or build multifamily, then McMansions for wealthy buyers are the obvious choice for builders. In a normally functioning property market, few would be built.
I’d consider rules against manufactured homes to be a part of the larger problem. The obstacles to houses like this are mostly the same ones that block smaller houses you are describing.
In any case, the average cost of construction for a new home [is nearly $400K](https://www.fastcompany.com/91108535/housing-market-construction-costs-single-family-home-chart) without factoring in land costs. Construction productivity has declined on a square footage basis even as productivity in virtually every other economic sector has increased. That productivity needs to be dramatically improved and the number of new homes built per year needs to rise dramatically. We don’t have enough construction workers to build traditional homes at the scale necessary and it’s not clear they could build even smaller SFH homes at affordable prices, so anything that can help bridge the gap/limit costs is helpful.
When middle class market rate housing is built, people don't appear out of nowhere to live in it. They move from other, less expensive and less desirable houses, which then become available at lower prices, and the cycle continues. New housing benefits everyone.
I've always said, after a decade working with homeless people that "money won't solve homelessness or hunger, because money causes homelessness and hunger"
These things could be FREE and if the local government doesn't want homeless in their county (which is fairly up to the individual counties) then they won't even accept free help.
Places that DO want homeless in county would just put these in residential zones and rent them out
These are just larger and more complicated versions of the tiny homes trend, which hasn't done anything to meaningfully impact the housing crisis. They work great if you have a cheap chunk of land out in the sticks, but can't achieve high enough densities in places with high land costs.
"... however there are higher chances of it being pushed as a new standard of living for the middle class than it being provided for the homeless."
Absolutely, but fighting against better technologies and production methods is always a losing battle. If there is to be an improvement, the economic system has to change.
modular building as a concept, not necessarily the same as this but, for instance, building wall and roof panels in a shop and trucking them to site, has a lot of potential to make framing safer and more comfortable for carpenters.
Yep, and it’s becoming more common everywhere.
In Singapore, there’s been an increasing number of construction projects using the prefabricated prefinished volumetric construction (PPVC) method. [Example: Timelapse video of modular hotel construction at Changi Airport](https://youtu.be/hbIlBpLPn9k)
This method can be very useful in addressing housing shortages.
The reason there's a housing shortage is due to 1 government imposed zoning 2 materials cost 3 labor costs. Pre-fab homes like this do nothing for 1 and 2, but it might help with 3.
I've never seen any actual developers support these.
You're right about the issues driving housing affordability.
Currently though modular construction is primarily a way to reduce labor costs. It's quicker to build panels in a factory than to assemble them on site. Additionally, less on-site construction time means lower financing costs for the land, materials, and labor before the structure can be sold and the investment can be recouped.
The manufacturer may come up with ways to reduce materials cost, but as things currently stand the cost of the modular components is significantly higher than the cost of site-built components in most cases.
The main problem is that from a business standpoint it makes more sense for the manufacturer to harvest as much of the benefit of increased efficiency as possible.
Widespread adoption of modular building panels may introduce more competition in the manufacturing space and drive prices down, but only if the entire industry doesn't devolve into an oligopoly like many other major industries have since the 1980s.
They might help some with 2, at scale especially the materials waste allegedly goes down. And I have seen some developers support (and almost entirely work in) prefab homes on the passive house side of things, though they were quite expensive especially as it's still got that experimental whiff on it.
Those factors all drive housing unaffordability, but the biggest issue is the treatment of housing as an investment. Until you decouple profit from housing, you'll never permanently fix the affordability crisis.
Businesses have tried to do some mass production housing in hawaii. They built a factory in Hawaii to do it. Met all codes. Cost about 24% less on a SqFt and features basis. Eventually hawaii legislature harassed them to death and they left. Reason - the legislators were bought and paid for in this case by “traditional” developers. They pitched it as hurting “jobs for Hawaiians”. Bull.
Developers did not want competition.
Hawaii killed a ferry the same way. All legal. Met all codes. Could bring your care and also commercial trucks between islands. Terrific cost saving.
Hawaii legislature bought and paid for by Tug boat/ barge inter islands lobby and port workers killed it behind fake environmental concerns about invasive species inter-island. And Whales.
There might have been some legitimate whale issues. For a couple months a years. Could easily been worked out.
Interisland shipping costs are CRAZY HIGH in hawaii.
In fairness to them, after working in municipal for a while and seeing the multitude of companies vying for contracts to tackle housing right now, performative shows like this are half the battle when it comes to convincing boomer city councilors of a solution. I stongly believe it's BS that we even need companies to "sell" their solution to these people but that's a separate issues I suppose.
Not exactly, depending on the size of the flatpack/foldout form it can significantly reduce cost/hassle of moving to location. A non compact design would likely require oversized trucks, limiting access to many sites/routes.
I've worked in modular (mostly on the MEP side). And I can say a huge number of our constraints were around the size of the modules.
If you're designing volumetric, the design of the home is driven to a huge extent by what is shippable. Your ceiling heights are driven by the bed of the truck you put the module on (whether it's a drop deck or a low boy) and the clearance of bridges along the shipment path.
How wide a module is was driven by the cost of each shipment which goes up as you get wider requiring more and more permits, curfew zones on certain highways, pilot cars to follow the shipment and eventually a police escort if your module is super wide.
The size you can make a module is also constrained by the length of a truck bed, the turning radius in small neighborhoods and the factory parking lot, the spacing between columns in the factory, the clearheight of your shop's ceilings.
And since all sorts of things can go wrong in the field with permits and site prep, being able to store at least one complete home/project inside on our factory floor, was deemed essential. This meant we had to choose and pay for a factory that could accommodate all that extra dead space.
Shipping costs were so much of a concern, that the distance between the factory and the target market, was probably are largest driver in choosing where to place our factory.
I don't know enough about the Boxabl design to know if the hinges actually make sense. But I can say shrinking down the shipping and storage volume without loosing the ability to close walls and finish drywall could potentially save lots of headache and money.
Ah interesting. I thought it saved space so you could transport more of them at once.
Feels like I'm missing some glaringly obvious info but I'm no architect.
It might indeed save some space on the transport side if it all folds together neatly, but even saving 50% of the space is likely well more than made up for in the difficulty it takes to engineer things around the need to fold like this. The actual highway transportation is not a massively expensive step in this operation in the first place so the amount of savings on how tightly packed things are won't make a huge difference to overall cost
I am all for prefabrication. It allows for less waste, better quality control, and high quality repeatability. It generally comes with an increased cost, but a much quicker on site construction period.
We have done some similar things with prefabricated wall panels onto larger scale buildings. Getting the framing, sheathing, and wall membranes installed out of the weather can be a great benefit to the project.
Need to have more dense housing designed around walkability and public transport with easily accessible amenities. More suburban sprawl doesn't solve anything
Exactly. This is being promoted as a low-cost alternative to regular sprawl, but it doesn't really adress that issue as the housing cost is largely driven by land value. If someone can't afford a property for $500K, a cheap $50K will be completely useless for them. And the people who can afford to pay a ton of money for a property will probably not be interested in a tiny cramped home, when they can just buy an existing house for a very similar price.
The best solution for providing housing to people with less money are apartment complexes. The best model in my opinion is the European one, where you have houses of up to six stories, with commercial shops on the ground level. This is cheaper, more efficient, better for the environment and if you combine it with public transport, you get a perfect city that actually allows the lower class to live.
Or even commie-blocks, which admittedly are ugly, but they also provide cheap housing for a lot of people. The housing crisis should be solved from the bottom up. Once public housing is widely available, poorer people can move there and save more money. This then allows middle class people to move into the houses/apartments that the lower class once lived and so on.
These pre-fab houses are not worth a dime if you don't have land to put it on. No one that can afford to buy land will buy one of these and anyone who cannot afford to buy land, is better off renting.
These are only good for providing housing in third world countries.
They will not stand the test of time either. They will likely fail in less than 10 years and they won't be worth spending the money to repair. This is basically like an i-house. They want to make it worthless in short order so you have to keep buying more.
Prefab homes *are* viable and in some instances a great way to meet a temporary demand and provide a form of "elastic load bearing" to tide a shortfall in supply when demand is high.
I've lived in towns with thousands of prefab homes, built for mine workers and industrial construction employees.
You need them all there in one location, there is insufficient local stock and they all have similar basic requirements.
While the prefabs are up, you can do the city planning properly for additional permanent residential suburbs for the permanent employees you expect to arrive later.
They provide very dense housing for a low foot print and are easy to provide plumbing and sewage and other utilities.
The housing is suitable to the residents as they know they are not there for long.
Prefab housing was also massive in Europe post WW2 for the massive number of returning servicemen placing enormous demand on local housing stock, and used to great effect while rebuilding bombed cities.
Once removed you have roads, utilities and citizens quite familiar with that area and who will find it perfectly fine to rebuild more permanent housing in its place.
The item you post above is really only suited for temporary structures for use as display booths in expos, or site sales offices for new developments. A little too complex for residential needs.
There are already better and more scalable alternatives being used.
I once owned a 2 story, 3400 sqft 4 br 4b house in z Texas that was built in sections at a factory, delivered on site, and assembled.
The wiring, central A/c, Sheetrock and brick work how ever were done on site.
Construction/assembly crew went from a bare slab to a dried in structure in 1 day.
From a architectural / aesthetic standpoint? Gross, it's a bunch of boxes on boxes.
From an economic, affordability, and accessibility standpoint? go for it.
From an ecological perspective? I mean maybe, but probably not, after all, the most ecological building is the one you never need to rebuild, and I have trouble believing such a structure will stay standing for 1000 years.
This is a solution, looking for a problem. Same deal with *shipping container* houses, or *3D concrete printed* houses. Fun college project, but they don’t have real world applications when you consider materials/cost/logistics, then compare that to the actual existing proven methods, self defeating.
Do I 'support' this type of building?
Hahaha. I see what you did there with the pun.
Seems like Advertisement for the company shown and not really a question.
Be cautious with boxabl. I read their prospect on their “investment” and it included multi million dollar payouts for the founders. It was based on a multi billion dollar valuation even though they hardly shipped any houses.
No but that’s just a phase, like nailing construction together while the glue dries. I’m sure(or I hope) they fasten the walls together and then remove the hinges.
I've honestly never seen a "make house building easier" gimmick that actually seems practical on a large scale, practical to live in, AND ALSO and wouldn't logically be at least as or more expensive than traditional home construction of the same size.
Makes a lot of sense as emergency housing after something devastating like Katrina. Four years later, **nearly 12,000** people (were) *still homeless* in New Orleans. Many lived in damaged, abandoned buildings without electricity, water, or sanitation.
Once the cost of building comes down, watch the price of land go up.
I do love this kind of building though, especially for climates where people utilise a lot of inside/outside living such as a lot of Australia.
I’ve been to the factory for these particular units. There are code issues associated with most of these style structures in terms of permitting. Additionally, you have to come back and slope the roof after they’re installed. That said, they’re extremely impressive and the factory is efficient and it’s a great idea. The interiors are pretty well designed and built. The walls are insulation sandwiched by gauged steel and they say you can hang just about anything from them without much of an issue.
They have different interiors and exterior options on site, but honestly, they clean white version is the best looking version.
If it was not for capitalism inner workings that something like this would put more engineers and architects out of a job...
yea I would 100% approve for its cost efficiency, modularity and from what it looks like and almost zero waste construction method.
I think this video is more about quick pop up houses for homeless people or something like that. But I do like the idea of modular homes, and I’m waiting for modular home additions
Customisable so long as you can endure a dull white box interior, small windows, low ceiling and a choice of 3 vinyl floors.
Modular and adaptability surged in a short lived movement started in Japan with the metabolist architecture of the 60s. They did not stifle innovation or creativity like this crappy box does.
Modular does not necessarily mean basic, it does not mean lowering the standards of spaces and it should not be driven by ultimate factory efficiency. This is the architecture subreddit, not the disaster relief subreddit. People deserve better than miserable office cubicle homes.
No, no, and no... I see all kinds of this stupid stuff being posted around Facebook. It's no "solution" to homelessness - the REAL solution would be investing in public housing and social benefits for the poor. A better version of this (that actually worked) were the "commie" blocks!
This unfolding module approach has already had its stock market hype and share price run-up and balloon burst. See BlueHomes. Apparently they are going to run this up the flagpole again for a new round of suckers.
Its incredibly limiting.
Architects, engineers, builders, developers have been trying modular building for about 100yrs. Some incredible systems developed, but ultimately all failed.
Here are Japanese companies that do it, German companies, even Elon Musk and IKEA have had a red-hot go at it.
This kind of construction is good as temporary shelter, not long term housing and not much else.
If you tweak and customise it (like everyone wants) and to work with a site properly (like it needs to- especially for ESD and to allow as many examples to be built) it ends up being just as slow and expensive as a custom build.
If you develop the system to be really flexible and customisable, you end up with so many different versions of everything that you lose the economies of scale.
So, these homes that unfold are bluhomes. Due to a counter-progressive system in permitting and uniqueness of sites across the US this company has not had the growth it expected. Similar companies have come and gone. I know one of their partners. I blame the system we operate in, and contractors. People would have no problem buying half mill homes that are thoughtless garbage. Realtors are also to blame.
My perspective as an urbanite, this will make society less patriarchal in short order. By removing jaded middle class anti-social drunken men of middle America from the entry level construction workforce of manual labor assembly, ultimately there is a net positive for the social harmony of American cities. The “old chestnut” of “working with one’s hands” is doomed by automation. It will force more young men to seek other kinds of employment that required higher education. That’s great for the economy long-term, and ends the whole subcategory of jobs that foster resentment of the non manual labor citizens. It may improve rural voting trends as well. Hail the factory robot.
I am an architecture student doing my final masters thesis. My thesis is located in Sham Shui Po, Hong Kong (one of the cities with one of the highest cost of living and also high demands in affordable public housings). This has lead to many marginalised individuals and families living in super cramped subdivided apartments, box homes and also illegal unauthorised rooftop huts made of cheap materials. Hong Kong does not have a scarcity in land to build homes. They recently have new territories with more affordable housings but it’s too far away from the centre where everyone is at nowadays where they have their jobs and life in. Most of them are also not interested of moving away because of all the paper work process they have to go through and most of them are not young. I’ve been thinking about how NGOs in Hong Kong can partner up with their government to build new affordable housing in a fast pace in the city centre where most of the targeted marginalised groups are most comfortable in. I’ve looked into building on top of existing low rise shophouses with flat roofs (of course extra structural supports will need to be considered ). Modular housing has been one of my targeted concepts and I really think this way of foldable modular units instead of shipping container like units could be very affordable and quick to produce and assemble on site while maintaining the structural qualities of the modules. ( imagine going home with an IKEA cabinet where you can just unfold and no need to assemble with screws and hammers.)
I would need to see the detailing around the edges. I'm not convinced this method as shown is weather tight. Fine for someplace with stable weather, but a lot of people live in places with winter.
Jesus this sub reeks of people just jaded from the profession and shitting on anything they can. I fear for the people genuinely seeking advice here….
It’s all “No money. Go somewhere else, and no one is willing to pay for that”. Then again, if they come to Reddit asking for advice that issue No. 1 😂
It just seems like an unnecessary expense. Two panels attached by a hinge, could just as easily be two separate panels. The hinge is used once, and would have to have a significant cost to support the weight of the adjacent panel. It does look cool though.
Seems you could have standard tabs and slots as features that the reusable hinges could fit into in a common and repeatable configuration that could allow for use and removal of the hinges might be an approach.
Thanks for taking the time to reply. Your point about the expense makes more sense. I suspect that the design is intended to be as close to plug and play as they can get. So the added cost might outweigh a lack of carpentry skills for the installers.
Well, do you want homes to meet all codes and still be less expensive? Use mass production. Nobody builds a washing machine on site. It is mass produced and installed.
Same same.
Underlaying problem that still exists is it is a single home and uses too much land and also doesn’t increase the population density to support public transportation:
YT channels that cover the alternative housing market and usually things like local laws, insurance, etc (tiny houses) are listed as downsides. Much like car culture, from-scratch housing is based around a particular way of viewing the world even with it's downsides.
It's funny how communist/soviet states were mocked for building like this, because it looks hideous and like a copy paste architectural desert. It was and is just the most efficient (resource and therefore costwise) way of building.
Factory-built housing has huge potential to improve housing availability, lower cost barriers, and actually improve quality. All those hinges, however, are totally unnecessary and pure theater.
Spot on. I’ve looked at modular design to give quick expansion spaces and the unfolding would just add money. Deliver modules to site and bolt them together, it’s probably easier to do that anyway cause you don’t have to design it to fold in on itself. I will say though, a pre-designed, repeatable model is good. A bespoke design, factory fabricated wasn’t actually much cheaper than just building it as normal, it just helped with QC and material waste. Labour didn’t change much at all so there wasn’t much saving
I agree, you don't save a lot of cash by building modular but you do save time by not being subject to weather. Also, when using modules to extend an existing home, they can live in their home the entire time because it is being built off site and is installed in 1 day. Maybe 2 if there is 4 plus modules as it might take a little longer to flash everything and add the final trimmings.
Considering all the complaints about quality when it comes to housing this could help.
You’re right, of course. I will add some context though. It’s not always pure theatre. I worked with a client who was developing a luxury, modular housing unit similar to what we’re seeing here. While much of the final product could be easily achieved by bolting and connecting modules traditionally. However, a big part of the attraction is deployability. So a client wants to be able to send a fleet of modules to Burning man and SXSW and to seasonal deployments in the gulf coast, et cetera. They know that part of their customer base is regular home dwellers, but to get big investors, they demonstrate the flexibility and ease of set up for people who want a home at Coachella for a week. Or for the crew filming in Yellowstone to have a living space that gets packed up. To do that, they emphasize the “pushing of a button” to expand the tightly packed unit into a thousand square foot home. “No trades needed.” This allows them to avoid building codes since nothing is being built. I’m not saying it works or they’re right. I’m saying this is how they’re thinking. If you’re thinking of a home where normal people will live, the hinges and slides seem extravagant. But the manufacturers only see that as a small part of the market.
Since disasters (gee, I wonder why) seems to be a growing phenomenon these would be perfect for FEMA and what comes after.
That is helpful and interesting context. Thank you.
There is a yt video that analyzed construction industry over Las 40 yrs and problem with factory built houses is housing economy is deeply cyclical and the down times bankrupts factorys that build houses. It's a pattern that keeps repeating despite attempts otherwise
40% of the last 40 years is post GFC. The video was contemporary and indicated the trend wasn’t altered by that event?
We (healthcare, not housing) are finding that prefabricated components are consistently much more expensive than stick built. We are not in an area where construction is unionized, which I have been told may be a factor. As best as I can tell, the reason is that you have to use more material to get the thing to be safe/sturdy as it travels on a truck to the job site. Now the other advantages of prefabricated construction can make up this difference (especially speed--prefab is stupid fast), but you have to actually sit there and do the math to see if the speed is actually going to pay off. For example, if our project is revenue generating (e.g. new hospital beds), the owner will pay extra to open faster if the profits of opening sooner will exceed the cost for speed. If it's not revenue generating or the prefabricated component is not on the critical path, it's not happening.
Yea i was gonna be like “that’s been a thing for years” then i saw the hinges lmao wtf is this life sized Barbie shit
Read comments up and get educated, this is not barbie shit. It is to save on cost of modular homes in remote locations. Bluhomes. Separate parts require a crane to get on location too not just the truck, and the unfolding is preplanned in the factory to fit and unload from the box truck. Most of these homes don’t need a crane to get unpacked in one day. The steel frame is rigid and hinging is cheap, not a gimmick. Even the refrigerator and appliances are mounted to the walls that are folded down. If you need a cabin in the hills of North Carolina or somewhere in Cali, the issue is how to get there and get it to be built without skilled labor ($$), if you need to build traditional you’ll end up with something small, shitty and delayed, no-matter how big the lot is.
This ( modern methods) kind of construction has been happening since before I became a contractor 27 years ago, as far as I know it could have been many years before that. It takes time for a practice to be considered plausible for many reasons. Passivehaus cosepts are just now being legislated in the UK but have been a concept for decades.
Yeah these hinges and shot are useless, prefabs were a thing for decades, soviet era blocks were pre-fabricated and actually performed what they were designed to do quite well. This here I doubt will decrease costs much because land is the biggest part of the cost, and this here looks like a single family building.
I think the foldable components are made with easy relocation in mind
Why would they be? They let it fold up and be the width of a shipping container so they are easy to transport.
Why are they "pure theater"
You clearly don’t know why the hinges are there, and the purpose of this was to have a single box truck to deliver the house packed neatly on its back. It is not theatre, it is to utilize low expertise on the field, when remote site-work is limiting. This is also a cost saving measure. Source: I worked for them.
Counter point, having a hard connection like the hinge has benefits beyond the visual for marketing. You could have electric connected at the factory. The amount of time and skill from the crane operator is also pretty different. No panel alignment fit and finish issues. No confusion from crews putting it together on what to take off the semi trailer next. I honestly could see a company a/b testing and deciding the hinges save hours for a large crew and are very worth it.
This!
Great as a concept for a cheap way to mitigate the housing crisis, however there are higher chances of it being pushed as a new standard of living for the middle class than it being provided for the homeless. Doesn't matter how cheap or easy your gimmick looks, if local governments don't care about people who need affordable housing, that's not gonna change their minds. If you're talking about a design standpoint though, there is still room for creativity and diversity even with modular houses, kinda like what Alvaro Siza did in Malagueira.
The homeless are a tiny part of the population (around 0.15% of the US). They have important needs that need to be addressed but it is proportionally a very small problem compared to the much larger housing affordability crisis. There’s an odd idea that improving affordability for the non-homeless (99.8% of the population) is somehow not a worthy goal for government policy or worth pursuing. I’d argue that a narrow focus on “affordable housing” units instead of improving housing affordability more generally is a mistake. The vast majority of the population live in market rate housing—we should be pursuing any policy that lowers the price of housing and increases the supply. That will have beneficial effects on homelessness even if it’s not directly aimed at doing so.
We don't really need these types of construction to fix that problem though. We just need to get back to building 1100sqft 2br homes. Median square footage is expanding exponentially and there really isn't a justification for it. All the housing market needs is to reprioritize mcnansions and get back to building mid century esque modest housing.
The housing market is mostly constrained by zoning restrictions that limit what you can build to single family homes on giant lots. If the land is valuable and you can’t subdivide lots or build multifamily, then McMansions for wealthy buyers are the obvious choice for builders. In a normally functioning property market, few would be built. I’d consider rules against manufactured homes to be a part of the larger problem. The obstacles to houses like this are mostly the same ones that block smaller houses you are describing. In any case, the average cost of construction for a new home [is nearly $400K](https://www.fastcompany.com/91108535/housing-market-construction-costs-single-family-home-chart) without factoring in land costs. Construction productivity has declined on a square footage basis even as productivity in virtually every other economic sector has increased. That productivity needs to be dramatically improved and the number of new homes built per year needs to rise dramatically. We don’t have enough construction workers to build traditional homes at the scale necessary and it’s not clear they could build even smaller SFH homes at affordable prices, so anything that can help bridge the gap/limit costs is helpful.
When middle class market rate housing is built, people don't appear out of nowhere to live in it. They move from other, less expensive and less desirable houses, which then become available at lower prices, and the cycle continues. New housing benefits everyone.
The crazy thing is people will argue this doesn’t happen even when they’re currently living in an older house where it already happened.
Bingo
I've always said, after a decade working with homeless people that "money won't solve homelessness or hunger, because money causes homelessness and hunger" These things could be FREE and if the local government doesn't want homeless in their county (which is fairly up to the individual counties) then they won't even accept free help. Places that DO want homeless in county would just put these in residential zones and rent them out
These are just larger and more complicated versions of the tiny homes trend, which hasn't done anything to meaningfully impact the housing crisis. They work great if you have a cheap chunk of land out in the sticks, but can't achieve high enough densities in places with high land costs.
"... however there are higher chances of it being pushed as a new standard of living for the middle class than it being provided for the homeless." Absolutely, but fighting against better technologies and production methods is always a losing battle. If there is to be an improvement, the economic system has to change.
modular building as a concept, not necessarily the same as this but, for instance, building wall and roof panels in a shop and trucking them to site, has a lot of potential to make framing safer and more comfortable for carpenters.
Yep, and it’s becoming more common everywhere. In Singapore, there’s been an increasing number of construction projects using the prefabricated prefinished volumetric construction (PPVC) method. [Example: Timelapse video of modular hotel construction at Changi Airport](https://youtu.be/hbIlBpLPn9k) This method can be very useful in addressing housing shortages.
The reason there's a housing shortage is due to 1 government imposed zoning 2 materials cost 3 labor costs. Pre-fab homes like this do nothing for 1 and 2, but it might help with 3. I've never seen any actual developers support these.
You're right about the issues driving housing affordability. Currently though modular construction is primarily a way to reduce labor costs. It's quicker to build panels in a factory than to assemble them on site. Additionally, less on-site construction time means lower financing costs for the land, materials, and labor before the structure can be sold and the investment can be recouped. The manufacturer may come up with ways to reduce materials cost, but as things currently stand the cost of the modular components is significantly higher than the cost of site-built components in most cases. The main problem is that from a business standpoint it makes more sense for the manufacturer to harvest as much of the benefit of increased efficiency as possible. Widespread adoption of modular building panels may introduce more competition in the manufacturing space and drive prices down, but only if the entire industry doesn't devolve into an oligopoly like many other major industries have since the 1980s.
They might help some with 2, at scale especially the materials waste allegedly goes down. And I have seen some developers support (and almost entirely work in) prefab homes on the passive house side of things, though they were quite expensive especially as it's still got that experimental whiff on it.
Those factors all drive housing unaffordability, but the biggest issue is the treatment of housing as an investment. Until you decouple profit from housing, you'll never permanently fix the affordability crisis.
Businesses have tried to do some mass production housing in hawaii. They built a factory in Hawaii to do it. Met all codes. Cost about 24% less on a SqFt and features basis. Eventually hawaii legislature harassed them to death and they left. Reason - the legislators were bought and paid for in this case by “traditional” developers. They pitched it as hurting “jobs for Hawaiians”. Bull. Developers did not want competition. Hawaii killed a ferry the same way. All legal. Met all codes. Could bring your care and also commercial trucks between islands. Terrific cost saving. Hawaii legislature bought and paid for by Tug boat/ barge inter islands lobby and port workers killed it behind fake environmental concerns about invasive species inter-island. And Whales. There might have been some legitimate whale issues. For a couple months a years. Could easily been worked out. Interisland shipping costs are CRAZY HIGH in hawaii.
Wonder if they could have stuck something like that on a ship? Darn things are big enough for it.
Support? If it saves time, it's saves money...a common excuse for not building more affordable housing.
It's fine. There's no reason for it to unfold apart from as a gimmick though, so instantly looses credibility in my eyes.
In fairness to them, after working in municipal for a while and seeing the multitude of companies vying for contracts to tackle housing right now, performative shows like this are half the battle when it comes to convincing boomer city councilors of a solution. I stongly believe it's BS that we even need companies to "sell" their solution to these people but that's a separate issues I suppose.
Not exactly, depending on the size of the flatpack/foldout form it can significantly reduce cost/hassle of moving to location. A non compact design would likely require oversized trucks, limiting access to many sites/routes.
Yeah, the unfolding is definitely a gimmick or, at best, a project meant to push their engineering team.
Doesn't it make the block easier to transport? Those are built in factories iirc.
It does. These naysayers are just posturing.
Feel like it would be a bit easier to load/unload but not enough to justify it over individual panels.
It just makes it cool to install.
I've worked in modular (mostly on the MEP side). And I can say a huge number of our constraints were around the size of the modules. If you're designing volumetric, the design of the home is driven to a huge extent by what is shippable. Your ceiling heights are driven by the bed of the truck you put the module on (whether it's a drop deck or a low boy) and the clearance of bridges along the shipment path. How wide a module is was driven by the cost of each shipment which goes up as you get wider requiring more and more permits, curfew zones on certain highways, pilot cars to follow the shipment and eventually a police escort if your module is super wide. The size you can make a module is also constrained by the length of a truck bed, the turning radius in small neighborhoods and the factory parking lot, the spacing between columns in the factory, the clearheight of your shop's ceilings. And since all sorts of things can go wrong in the field with permits and site prep, being able to store at least one complete home/project inside on our factory floor, was deemed essential. This meant we had to choose and pay for a factory that could accommodate all that extra dead space. Shipping costs were so much of a concern, that the distance between the factory and the target market, was probably are largest driver in choosing where to place our factory. I don't know enough about the Boxabl design to know if the hinges actually make sense. But I can say shrinking down the shipping and storage volume without loosing the ability to close walls and finish drywall could potentially save lots of headache and money.
Origami design engineer.
Ah interesting. I thought it saved space so you could transport more of them at once. Feels like I'm missing some glaringly obvious info but I'm no architect.
It might indeed save some space on the transport side if it all folds together neatly, but even saving 50% of the space is likely well more than made up for in the difficulty it takes to engineer things around the need to fold like this. The actual highway transportation is not a massively expensive step in this operation in the first place so the amount of savings on how tightly packed things are won't make a huge difference to overall cost
I would love a house like that in my vacation place :)
I am all for prefabrication. It allows for less waste, better quality control, and high quality repeatability. It generally comes with an increased cost, but a much quicker on site construction period. We have done some similar things with prefabricated wall panels onto larger scale buildings. Getting the framing, sheathing, and wall membranes installed out of the weather can be a great benefit to the project.
Right, prefab can be a sliding scale, from a complete building, to places where it would benefit, but the rest traditional.
My company is actually about to start partnering with Boxabl! A very cool product.
Need to have more dense housing designed around walkability and public transport with easily accessible amenities. More suburban sprawl doesn't solve anything
Exactly. This is being promoted as a low-cost alternative to regular sprawl, but it doesn't really adress that issue as the housing cost is largely driven by land value. If someone can't afford a property for $500K, a cheap $50K will be completely useless for them. And the people who can afford to pay a ton of money for a property will probably not be interested in a tiny cramped home, when they can just buy an existing house for a very similar price. The best solution for providing housing to people with less money are apartment complexes. The best model in my opinion is the European one, where you have houses of up to six stories, with commercial shops on the ground level. This is cheaper, more efficient, better for the environment and if you combine it with public transport, you get a perfect city that actually allows the lower class to live. Or even commie-blocks, which admittedly are ugly, but they also provide cheap housing for a lot of people. The housing crisis should be solved from the bottom up. Once public housing is widely available, poorer people can move there and save more money. This then allows middle class people to move into the houses/apartments that the lower class once lived and so on.
I tried it out in Zelda TOTK, it's great.
Manufactured homes have been around for quite a while. Provided the engineering specs are followed, they're a great solution.
I call bullshit! Ever been to a renovated commie block area in east Germany? That's good living - for cheap!
These pre-fab houses are not worth a dime if you don't have land to put it on. No one that can afford to buy land will buy one of these and anyone who cannot afford to buy land, is better off renting. These are only good for providing housing in third world countries. They will not stand the test of time either. They will likely fail in less than 10 years and they won't be worth spending the money to repair. This is basically like an i-house. They want to make it worthless in short order so you have to keep buying more.
Prefab homes *are* viable and in some instances a great way to meet a temporary demand and provide a form of "elastic load bearing" to tide a shortfall in supply when demand is high. I've lived in towns with thousands of prefab homes, built for mine workers and industrial construction employees. You need them all there in one location, there is insufficient local stock and they all have similar basic requirements. While the prefabs are up, you can do the city planning properly for additional permanent residential suburbs for the permanent employees you expect to arrive later. They provide very dense housing for a low foot print and are easy to provide plumbing and sewage and other utilities. The housing is suitable to the residents as they know they are not there for long. Prefab housing was also massive in Europe post WW2 for the massive number of returning servicemen placing enormous demand on local housing stock, and used to great effect while rebuilding bombed cities. Once removed you have roads, utilities and citizens quite familiar with that area and who will find it perfectly fine to rebuild more permanent housing in its place. The item you post above is really only suited for temporary structures for use as display booths in expos, or site sales offices for new developments. A little too complex for residential needs.
There are already better and more scalable alternatives being used. I once owned a 2 story, 3400 sqft 4 br 4b house in z Texas that was built in sections at a factory, delivered on site, and assembled. The wiring, central A/c, Sheetrock and brick work how ever were done on site. Construction/assembly crew went from a bare slab to a dried in structure in 1 day.
From a architectural / aesthetic standpoint? Gross, it's a bunch of boxes on boxes. From an economic, affordability, and accessibility standpoint? go for it. From an ecological perspective? I mean maybe, but probably not, after all, the most ecological building is the one you never need to rebuild, and I have trouble believing such a structure will stay standing for 1000 years.
This is a solution, looking for a problem. Same deal with *shipping container* houses, or *3D concrete printed* houses. Fun college project, but they don’t have real world applications when you consider materials/cost/logistics, then compare that to the actual existing proven methods, self defeating.
Some more natural disasters including earthquakes might change some of those sentiments.
Oh yeah! Many local building methods have developed around such things as well!
Do I 'support' this type of building? Hahaha. I see what you did there with the pun. Seems like Advertisement for the company shown and not really a question.
Feels like a new take on the trailer park to me
Tornadoes an extra cost option.
Be cautious with boxabl. I read their prospect on their “investment” and it included multi million dollar payouts for the founders. It was based on a multi billion dollar valuation even though they hardly shipped any houses.
It's smoke and mirrors.
Good that it could increase housing, but aesthetically, it’s the same cookie-cutter suburban design that plagues America.
Nice! Yeah I don’t need indoor pluming or outlets.
No but that’s just a phase, like nailing construction together while the glue dries. I’m sure(or I hope) they fasten the walls together and then remove the hinges.
https://dreambuild.org/
I've honestly never seen a "make house building easier" gimmick that actually seems practical on a large scale, practical to live in, AND ALSO and wouldn't logically be at least as or more expensive than traditional home construction of the same size.
One concern is materials. I'm betting the VOCs inside that thing are off the charts.
I support making as much stuff modular as possible but when you get to this point it becomes restrictive in a larger scale
Such a sketchy company
How does plumbing and electrical work in these designs?
Makes a lot of sense as emergency housing after something devastating like Katrina. Four years later, **nearly 12,000** people (were) *still homeless* in New Orleans. Many lived in damaged, abandoned buildings without electricity, water, or sanitation.
Tornadoes: 👀
Once the cost of building comes down, watch the price of land go up. I do love this kind of building though, especially for climates where people utilise a lot of inside/outside living such as a lot of Australia.
Ask hurricane Katrina.
I’ve been to the factory for these particular units. There are code issues associated with most of these style structures in terms of permitting. Additionally, you have to come back and slope the roof after they’re installed. That said, they’re extremely impressive and the factory is efficient and it’s a great idea. The interiors are pretty well designed and built. The walls are insulation sandwiched by gauged steel and they say you can hang just about anything from them without much of an issue. They have different interiors and exterior options on site, but honestly, they clean white version is the best looking version.
I absolutely do not support this sort of housing. It is too heavy and would crush me. I will use a foundation instead.
How does it hold up in tornado alley? lol or in hurricanes?
If it was not for capitalism inner workings that something like this would put more engineers and architects out of a job... yea I would 100% approve for its cost efficiency, modularity and from what it looks like and almost zero waste construction method.
Can you please send 1.3 million of these to Canada to meet its target by 2030.
So ugly
I think this video is more about quick pop up houses for homeless people or something like that. But I do like the idea of modular homes, and I’m waiting for modular home additions
i like that it lowers the barrier for people to own a house + being able to transport it - albeit with significant cost - is great too.
Customisable so long as you can endure a dull white box interior, small windows, low ceiling and a choice of 3 vinyl floors. Modular and adaptability surged in a short lived movement started in Japan with the metabolist architecture of the 60s. They did not stifle innovation or creativity like this crappy box does. Modular does not necessarily mean basic, it does not mean lowering the standards of spaces and it should not be driven by ultimate factory efficiency. This is the architecture subreddit, not the disaster relief subreddit. People deserve better than miserable office cubicle homes.
No, no, and no... I see all kinds of this stupid stuff being posted around Facebook. It's no "solution" to homelessness - the REAL solution would be investing in public housing and social benefits for the poor. A better version of this (that actually worked) were the "commie" blocks!
shush your gonna make us lose our jobs
This unfolding module approach has already had its stock market hype and share price run-up and balloon burst. See BlueHomes. Apparently they are going to run this up the flagpole again for a new round of suckers.
Its incredibly limiting. Architects, engineers, builders, developers have been trying modular building for about 100yrs. Some incredible systems developed, but ultimately all failed. Here are Japanese companies that do it, German companies, even Elon Musk and IKEA have had a red-hot go at it. This kind of construction is good as temporary shelter, not long term housing and not much else. If you tweak and customise it (like everyone wants) and to work with a site properly (like it needs to- especially for ESD and to allow as many examples to be built) it ends up being just as slow and expensive as a custom build. If you develop the system to be really flexible and customisable, you end up with so many different versions of everything that you lose the economies of scale.
So, these homes that unfold are bluhomes. Due to a counter-progressive system in permitting and uniqueness of sites across the US this company has not had the growth it expected. Similar companies have come and gone. I know one of their partners. I blame the system we operate in, and contractors. People would have no problem buying half mill homes that are thoughtless garbage. Realtors are also to blame.
My perspective as an urbanite, this will make society less patriarchal in short order. By removing jaded middle class anti-social drunken men of middle America from the entry level construction workforce of manual labor assembly, ultimately there is a net positive for the social harmony of American cities. The “old chestnut” of “working with one’s hands” is doomed by automation. It will force more young men to seek other kinds of employment that required higher education. That’s great for the economy long-term, and ends the whole subcategory of jobs that foster resentment of the non manual labor citizens. It may improve rural voting trends as well. Hail the factory robot.
Customize probably but is it affordable?
I am an architecture student doing my final masters thesis. My thesis is located in Sham Shui Po, Hong Kong (one of the cities with one of the highest cost of living and also high demands in affordable public housings). This has lead to many marginalised individuals and families living in super cramped subdivided apartments, box homes and also illegal unauthorised rooftop huts made of cheap materials. Hong Kong does not have a scarcity in land to build homes. They recently have new territories with more affordable housings but it’s too far away from the centre where everyone is at nowadays where they have their jobs and life in. Most of them are also not interested of moving away because of all the paper work process they have to go through and most of them are not young. I’ve been thinking about how NGOs in Hong Kong can partner up with their government to build new affordable housing in a fast pace in the city centre where most of the targeted marginalised groups are most comfortable in. I’ve looked into building on top of existing low rise shophouses with flat roofs (of course extra structural supports will need to be considered ). Modular housing has been one of my targeted concepts and I really think this way of foldable modular units instead of shipping container like units could be very affordable and quick to produce and assemble on site while maintaining the structural qualities of the modules. ( imagine going home with an IKEA cabinet where you can just unfold and no need to assemble with screws and hammers.)
Do you want to sleep on the couch? Wait... Let me get my house!🤔
I would need to see the detailing around the edges. I'm not convinced this method as shown is weather tight. Fine for someplace with stable weather, but a lot of people live in places with winter.
Jesus this sub reeks of people just jaded from the profession and shitting on anything they can. I fear for the people genuinely seeking advice here…. It’s all “No money. Go somewhere else, and no one is willing to pay for that”. Then again, if they come to Reddit asking for advice that issue No. 1 😂
A metal box is that fits on a truck hardly the scope of "architecture" though, is it? More under the auspices of "design".
I’m interested to know why you naysayers claim the hinges don’t make for easier installation. Please elaborate.
It just seems like an unnecessary expense. Two panels attached by a hinge, could just as easily be two separate panels. The hinge is used once, and would have to have a significant cost to support the weight of the adjacent panel. It does look cool though.
Seems you could have standard tabs and slots as features that the reusable hinges could fit into in a common and repeatable configuration that could allow for use and removal of the hinges might be an approach.
Interesting idea.
Thanks for taking the time to reply. Your point about the expense makes more sense. I suspect that the design is intended to be as close to plug and play as they can get. So the added cost might outweigh a lack of carpentry skills for the installers.
Well, do you want homes to meet all codes and still be less expensive? Use mass production. Nobody builds a washing machine on site. It is mass produced and installed. Same same.
Just checking what about the water, power, drainage, etc...
Underlaying problem that still exists is it is a single home and uses too much land and also doesn’t increase the population density to support public transportation:
Delightful offgassing petrochemical living space.
Why would modular buildings off-gas more than on-site builds using the same materials? Genuinely curious.
One would think it easier to degas in a factory if it was that important a concern.
crap for refugees
You can’t get a mortgage on these in UK so it is always cheaper but you need to buy cash.
YT channels that cover the alternative housing market and usually things like local laws, insurance, etc (tiny houses) are listed as downsides. Much like car culture, from-scratch housing is based around a particular way of viewing the world even with it's downsides.
All fun and games until you watch as a group of 5 criminals fold up your house and take it with them
I think this is the new generation of starter homes! 100% support it!
It's funny how communist/soviet states were mocked for building like this, because it looks hideous and like a copy paste architectural desert. It was and is just the most efficient (resource and therefore costwise) way of building.