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Prefabrication

With regard to the history of housing, prefabrication may be considered as an invention of 19th century industrialization. It is a way to realize off-site construction of housing, where the parts and components, or entire units, are fabricated in an environmentally controlled factory. After in-factory assembly, they are transported to the building site, where the houses are erected. Such an industrialized homebuilding process can be carried out rapidly with a minimum of on-site labor efforts and under any weather or climate conditions. Dwellings built using the prefabrication process are referred to as prefabricated homes, or prefabs. Presumably, these terms have been recognized since the early 20th century, although the initial milestone dates back to 1833, when the first historically documented prefabricated homes succeeded in Great Britain.

Generally, prefabs are characterized by lower and more predictable production cost, better and more standardized product quality, and faster and more punctual construction than their site-built counterparts. At the building site, conventional housing can be rained on, with uncovered lumber, plywood, insulation, and other susceptible materials being soaked or blown around during bad weather. Such on-site construction nuisances tend to degrade the quality of site-built housing. Prefabrication of housing parts and components elevates the degree of in-factory completeness; thus, the optimum application leads to alleviation or elimination of such on-site nuisances.

In view of industrialized building systems applied to home building, prefabricated homes can be classified initially into two types: product-oriented and process-oriented. The former type includes prefabs built using proprietary industrialized building systems, such as stabilized-earth interlocking blocks, insulated wood-cement blocks, expanded polystyrene (EPS) insulated concrete forms, polyvinyl chloride (PVC) block concrete forms, PVC extrusion concrete forms, cement-base insulated sandwich panels, EPS insulation core composite concrete panels, and oriented strand board (OSB) structural insulated panels. The latter is still rooted in the practice of conventional home building methods, including balloon or platform framing. Nonetheless, process-oriented prefabs differ from site-built homes to the extent that most of the housing components are either precut or preassembled in a factory. Therefore, these houses can also be referred to as factory-built housing and further categorized broadly as pre-engineered, panelized, modular, and mobile (manufactured) homes.

Pre-Engineered Homes

A pre-engineered home implies a dwelling that is composed of a package of materials factory-cut to design specifications. These precut materials are shipped to the building site for on-site assembly. In a broad sense, log and kit homes may represent this category. The precut housing package can contain framing materials, doors, windows, roofing, siding, interior wall partitions, and subflooring. In the early 1830s, a London carpenter and builder by the name of H. John Manning published a brochure of his complete housing kit, hoping to market his prefabricated timber homes for emigrants to the Swan River Colony in West Australia. The Manning Portable Colonial Cottage was a simple box-shaped home equipped with a gable roof, doors, and windows. The house was constructed using a wooden post-and-beam frame. The precut members were designed to be assembled in a few hours after landing, bolted together on site. Nevertheless, the building system was later superseded by corrugated iron sheets, which were strong, light, durable, waterproof, and cheap. The rolling process for the volume production of curved and flat corrugated iron sheets was patented in 1844 by Thomas Edington and Sons of Glasgow. Balloon framing, dating back to 1833, was invented in Chicago. By the early 20th century, this home building process had become a common practice in the industry. Following the diffusion of the standardized construction process, mail-order homes emerged, delivered by a number of companies. Sears Roebuck and Co. has still been recognized as the largest and most famous seller of kit homes in the history of prefabricated housing. The company marketed houses through their mail-order catalogue; cut-to-measure wooden beams, facade, and roofing elements were offered for these houses built on site using the standard balloon frame. After World War II, mass housing development became more popular than ever and at the same time, the houses were designed to be more compact and efficient. Construction innovations were seen as a means to enhance affordability and productivity of housing. Capitalizing on the postwar housing crisis, an American developer, Abraham Levitt and his sons William and Alfred, started mass production of affordable homes, in which prefabrication of housing elements was enlisted to meet the needs of the returning servicemen. As a result, these Levittowns created an instant suburbia composed of homogeneous mass produced homes.

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