“Modern, affordable, high-design prefab is kind of the Volkswagen or Macintosh of housing,” says architect Marc Asmus. Owner of M. A. Architecture in Minneapolis, Asmus is also a founding partner of Hive Modular (hivemodular.com), based in the same offices.
“One of the things that VW through ads and Mac in design have done is to put high-design modernism in reach for more people,” Asmus says. “There’s a latent desire for that that’s been underserved.” Hive set out to achieve the same “democratization” of design, he says, a house “that people like us could afford.”
Architect-designed pre-fabricated housing puts “an emphasis on quality over quantity,” says Geoff Warner of Alchemy Architects in St. Paul, designers of the weeHouse (weehouse.com). Site-built houses of recent vintage include vast unused spaces that have become expensive to heat, Warner says. Modular prefab, on the other hand, “combines openness with a sense of intimacy in a house that’s flexible enough to meet people’s needs.”
Besides being designed to use space efficiently, the houses are environmentally friendly by the nature of their construction. The manufacture of prefab modules uses “40 to 50 percent less construction material per house” than site-built construction does, Asmus says. Materials can be measured and cut into components for more than one house, so there’s far less scrap generated. The houses “are also super energy efficient and super tight, because they have to be sturdy enough to be lifted up, trucked to a site, and craned onto a foundation.”
