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Prefab, Modular, ... What does it all mean?
The terms 'pre-fab' and 'modular' are subject to a lot of confusion today. But what exactly do they mean?
A pre-fab home is one that has been built in a factory in order to take advantage of the benefits of industrial production. In the weather-sheltered environment of a factory, things can be made faster, more efficiently, and with greater precision while taking advantage of the power of large expensive machine tools that aren't easily transported from one place to another. This isn't usually 'mass production' as we associate with consumer products because the market for pre-fab homes isn't usually big enough. This still allows a home to be built faster, stronger, more efficiently, with much less labor and waste than is common with conventional home construction, and thus often more economically.
But these benefits come with big compromises. They depend on the end product always being identical so that the manufacturing process is routine and continuous. To paraphrase Henry Ford, you can get any color you want -as long as it's black. Modern manufacturing techniques allow more in-line variation in the production of things. Thus, cars today come in many colors and with a variety of options, but ultimately these variations are very limited. You can't really get a car custom made just for you in a factory and no matter what minor options might be on offer, all the cars of a given model line look identical. And to make matters worse, you are limited in the size of what you can make in a factory by what you can fit through its doors and transport on a modern roadway. This is why 'mobile homes' have always been uncomfortably small and oddly shaped compared to the average home.
On top of all this, many of the short cuts taken by builders of pre-fab homes to accommodate quick assembly of such big things make these homes difficult to repair or modify later - just as it's difficult to radically alter a factory made car and maintain its safety and precision-fit appearance. Unlike normal homes, pre-fab homes have typically depreciated in value over time. Like cars or appliances, after a certain number of repairs or changes you reach a point of diminishing returns and the structural integrity declines.
Modular housing tries to offer solutions to the limitations of pre-fab. A modular home is divided into smaller factory-made components designed for easy assembly on a home-site. Depending on the design of these modules, you can have more variations realized in that on-site assembly while still having the benefits of factory production. It can be as large as you like, even if the individual modules can still be no larger than a normal mobile home. If the individual units wearout, as pre-fab's typically do, you can -theoretically- replace them.
Unfortunately, the true potential of modular housing has never been realized because designers have never worked with modular units smaller than the largest size a factory could handle. Modular housing has typically been identical in character to pre-fab housing except that a house is composed of a few gigantic parts rather than just one. They can more easily be made to mimic the same old architecture typical of suburbia but are ultimately impractical to replace individually.
The Jeriko House building system offers all the benefits of pre-fab and modular architecture with none of their limitations. It does this by reducing its 'modules' to the scale of the very basic elements of a structure, frame, walls, windows, and all the fixtures that attach to them. This is what architects traditionally refer to as a 'kit-of-parts' building system -and one of the most sophisticated ever devised. A Jeriko House is a 'site built' home (and qualifies as such by lenders) that still enjoys the full benefits of industrial fabrication with no limits on possible variation in design. Its individual parts may be factory-made and standardized in their interconnection, but they have an infinite variety of ways they can be put together. Thus you get the fit, finish, strength and sophistication of the best a factory can produce with unlimited freedom of design and personalization.
There's another kind of product that is made in much this same way that illustrates the potential power of this concept, the computer. Computers were once made just like most houses, they were big, inefficient, primitive, and impossibly expensive. But when the computer industry realized the full benefits of using small modular interchangeable components with standardized ways to connect them a revolution occurred. Today the single-most sophisticated artifact human civilization has ever produced has become as ubiquitous as the light-bulb, can be assembled by even children in their own home, and puts the power of past super-computers into the hands of everyone. Computers are not so much products as they are platforms for using information. You might buy one whole out of a box to start with, but with everything you do using it you are personalizing it to suit your computing needs. For the serious computer user, the machine becomes a direct expression of their personality. The Jeriko House is likewise a platform for living. You might buy a home whole but over the years you have the option to modify everything in it to suit your changing needs, tastes and any technical improvements that come along. This is how a Jeriko House lives with you.
Have a closer look at the Jeriko House with the links to your left.