Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling

As the world’s population swells and the need for sustainable ways of living grows ever more urgent and obvious, prefabricated architecture has taken center stage. Even before our current predicaments, the mass-produced, factory-made home had a distinguished history, having served as a vital precept in the development of Modern architecture. Today, with the digital revolution reorganizing the relationship between drafting board and factory, it continues to spur innovative manufacturing and design, and its potential has clearly not yet come to fruition. Home Delivery traces the history of prefabrication in architecture, from its early roots in colonial cottages though the work of such figures as Jean Prouvé and Buckminster Fuller, and mass-produced variants such as the Lustron house, to a group of full-scale contemporary houses commissioned specifically for the MoMA exhibition that this book accompanies. In addition to an introductory essay by Barry Bergdoll, Chief Curator in the Museum’s Department of Architecture and Design, this volume contains essays on prefabricated housing in Japan and in Nordic countries by Ken Tadashi Oshima and Rasmus Waern, respectively. It also includes focused texts on approximately 40 historical projects and five commissions, as well as a bibliography.

Barry Bergdoll is Chief Curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at The Museum of Modern Art, New York and Associate Professor in the Department of Art History at Columbia University. Ken Tadashi Oshima and Rasmus Wærn contribute on prefabricated housing in Japan and Scandinavia.