The Home Blog

The Greening of Florida

It's on a slow pace, but it's happening. The State of Florida is slowly movign to deal with some of the issues that comes with population growth and limited water and land resources. The Orlando Sentinel writes about some of the current troubles with building green

She said her first difficulty was finding an architect familiar with green standards. She couldn't locate the right one in Florida and ended up hiring one from Atlanta. The next obstacle was locating materials. She found some locally but ended up paying shipping costs for many delivered from the West Coast.

Hopefully as the trend to green grows, those problems will vanish. In fact, if anyone wanted to come up with a green modular house system that was also hurricane cat-4 rated, I'm sure they'd have more business than they could handle. Just keep the costs down around $150 sq ft installed if possible.

Futuro House on BoingBoing

For the ultimate in home kitsch be sure to visit the Futuro House a fiberglass and polyester dream home.

OMD: Office of Mobile Design

In my continual hunt for an affordable manufactured house that can withstand the hurricane force winds that we 'might' get in Central Florida I found this amazing website. They've recently announced the launch of a prefab substainable living house. Looks great for guest houses, school rooms, etc.

Sure, it's not hurricane proof but who wouldn't want to buy from someone who has their own t-shirts for sale and who builds prefab houses with dataports for the iPod built right in (warning large PDF file).

Euro Prefab!

Manufactured homes seem to be making a comeback in the realm of the Euro. This story talks about the German market warming up to new designs for 'off the rack' homes including some by famous architects such as Matteo Thun and Frank Gehry.

I'm waiting for someone to take this to the next level and design and sell prefab communities. Design habitable, workable, playful mini-cities. Each two to three blocks long with Two to three story buildings. Shops on ground one, homes and offices above. Small towns and cities could drop a couple of these into locations they want to improve economic foundations and living density. Connect them via mass transit and you have a pre-defined loop of growth.

Mea Culpa

Oh boy. I've really been meaning to post more here. But the job search and assorted visitors have globbed up the gears. I promise to start ramping up the posting level again soon. In the meantime check out this amazing collection manufactured homes you used to be able to order from the Sears catalog.

Studio 804

Via Josh Rubin's excellent Cool Hunting a link to Studio 804's latest project, an affordable modular house. Prefab houses are not just tornado bait anymore. They've grown up to become the next step in affordable, environmentally friendly living. Studio804, part of the University of Kansas School of Architecture and Urban Design, takes 5 months and some graduate students then asks them to create something new. The results this time are outstanding. (Last Year's Award winning project.)

[ ttags: home, prefab, modular, green, studio804 ]

S P A C E B O X - Modular Living

The Spacebox is a self-contained studio housing unit from The Netherlands. Perfect for downtown apartment living, college dorms, or even a motel style inn (are you listening Disney?). Made with the same composites that you find in ships and airplanes, these units are built to last and built to endure transport and relocation. You could pack up your little motel of rooms on a train and ship it anywhere its needed. Could these be coming soon to a town near you? Who knows?

[ ttags: home, house, modular, spacebox, ecofriendly, dorms ]