Table of contents for December 2012-January 2013 in Dwell

This question echoes throughout our annual issue, and page by page, answers emerge via gutsy solutions from dedicated practitioners. Though their end results vary wildly, those drawn to prefab share a common viewpoint: experimentation is always a worthwhile pursuit. We salute those who chase the dream, who refine the method, and who, above all else, refuse to believe that there is only one way to build a modern home. “With proper supervision, prefab construction can provide better design control, tighter construction technique, and more economical homes now, today. As this is the case, why not?” Architect Edward Paul Haladay, page 36 “Prefab offers the promise of significantly reduced construction costs while maintaining quality: making good, modern architecture accessible to a much wider audience.” Architect Robert Swatt, FAIA, page 58 “Precast…

A new biography highlights the rich, black-and-white photography of Balthazar Korab, whose sharp imagery helped give a face to modernist architecture in mid-century America. In 1952, a Hungarian named Balthazar Korab—self-described as “just a student of architecture with a camera in his pocket”—visited his first monumental modernist building, Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, outside of Paris. Korab, who had escaped Hungary in 1949 when Budapest was under threat of Soviet occupation, was studying at the distinguished École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Within two years, his path would veer even further into what is now architectural history. After marrying a woman from Michigan, he moved to Detroit, and once there, impressed architect Eero Saarinen enough to get hired on the spot as a designer at his firm. Though he started as an…

Architect Edward Paul Haladay is one of those people who retires and immediately starts looking for work. Soon after closing the door on a practice heavy on Caribbean resorts, the Baltimore, Maryland, resident walked into Habitat for Humanity of the Chesapeake’s office in 2008 to start volunteering. The local affiliate had just bought a vacant lot in McElderry Park, where nearly 40 percent of families live below the poverty line. Haladay had recently seen the New York Museum of Modern Art’s prefab exhibit, Home Delivery, and was disappointed by its Tinkertoy mentality. “The best homes were all made like jewelry, with special joints and fittings,” he says. “There was not one thing the 99 percent could buy.” Doing research for Habitat, he discovered most modular homes cost $200 to $300…

Ventura Lounge by Jean-Marie Massaud for Poliform $2,900 and up Ten hues of drawstring stitching contrast Poliform’s multitude of fabric options, all wrapped around Massaud’s sinewy chair frame. We recommend the higher-contrast shades, from an electric blue to Giallo, pictured here. poliformusa.com Minuscule Chair by Cecilie Manz for Fritz Hansen $2,094 Understated Scandinavian style is translated to an uncomplicated yet sophisticated chair design, courtesy of Dane Cecilie Manz. The upholstered seat is hand-stitched where the leather piping meets cloth around the contours of its shell. fritzhansen.com La Mise by Luca Nichetto for Cassina $4,015 and up The deceptively slouchy seating collection by young Italian designer Luca Nichetto is meticulously pieced together and finished with black, red, yellow, or white macro zigzag stitching on one of 148 colors of upholstery. cassina.com…

“What would Eichler do?” That question clinched the deal that created Simpatico Homes, a modular-home company inspired by the work of the postwar developer Joseph Eichler. During the 1950s and ’60s, Eichler built more than 11,000 architect-designed modern homes in California. Seth Krubiner, Simpatico’s founder, lived in one during his youth and remained smitten with its mixture of everyman affordability and mid-century cool. For his part, Robert Swatt, a principal at Swatt |Miers Architects based in Emeryville, California, had long pondered a way to make his grand modernist houses more affordable. The two met when Krubiner was called upon to promote and sell one of Swatt’s urban projects; they hit it off, and both soon became convinced that if Eichler were around today, he’d be building in factories to save…

Project: Esherick Addition Architects: Kate Simonen, Benjamin Parco, and Phil Kaefer Location: Berkeley, California “She was a nice, conservative lady who wanted a new house.” That’s how 86-year-old San Francisco architect George Homsey—an assistant in famed Bay Area architect Joseph Esherick’s office in the early 1950s—remembers Louise Hewlett Nixon. But that description of Nixon barely flicks at the whole story behind the redwood-shingled marvel Esherick would design for her at the crest of the Berkeley Hills. By the mid-1950s, Esherick was a rising star on the San Francisco design scene, with homes scattered across the region, and a handful of what Homsey recalls as “rustic, elegant buildings up in Lake Tahoe.” Nixon, then single and a Stanford University–trained psychiatrist, was in the market for a house in nearby Berkeley—ideally something…

5 TWEETS @kimlegocki: @dwell on @Pinterest!!! This is how I’m gonna kill my Sunday. @broadsheet360: My 8-year-old just turned me on to the @dwell app. My girl has some clear design ideas. @a_allan: @dwell retweeted me. I feel special. Mostly because I love them. @IanFurniture: @dwell Big fan of the Manhattan beach house! Gorgeous property filled with big names in vintage furniture design. Comfy-looking sofa too! @designstudioltf: Nothin’ says “Saturday” like some sun and the latest issue of @dwell. Please write to us: Dwell Letters 550 Kearny Street, Suite 710 San Francisco, CA 94108 letters@dwell.com Letters may be edited for length and clarity. As a professional event coordinator and someone who likes to entertain at home, I was thrilled to see the Open House issue (September 2012). I loved the…

The efficiency and aesthetics of prefab proved appealing to the owner of this Dwell Home, built on a rugged island off Canada’s western coast. Project: Gambier Island House Architect: Turkel Design, turkeldesign.com Interior Design and Construction: My House Design/Build/Team, myhousedesignbuild.com Building Package: Lindal Cedar Homes, lindal.com Location: Gambier Island, British Columbia When Johnny Bellas set out to construct his dream home on British Columbia’s Gambier Island, he knew that building prefab would clear the logistic hurdles his plot of land posed. The qualities that made it desirable—a steep slope draped in trees overlooking a waterfront panorama of Howe Sound—are also a builder’s night-mare. However, Bellas was confident that Lindal’s TD3 2490 model, part of the Dwell Homes Collection, would rise to the challenge. He fell in love with its mid-century…

Formerly of Marmol Radziner Prefab, Connect:Homes founders Jared Levy and Gordon Stott have made their careers in making building methods more efficient, from price to preconstruction. Levy shares some of his new company’s strategies and philosophy. Portrait by Riccardo Vecchio What are the major flaws in prefab, and how did those prompt you to create Connect:Homes? Housing is one of the few remaining regionally constrained industries in this globalized economy. For prefab to be a viable alternative, it needs to deliver on the promise that it can be affordable and available wherever you are. Why doesn’t Connect offer a kit of parts or panelized homes? Our goal is to minimize the work that gets done on-site—where there are a whole host of variables—and to maximize the work that gets done…

Project: R.House Designer: Rural Design, ruraldesign.co.uk Location: Isle of Skye, Scotland The Isle of Skye is a remote sprawl of rock, covered in heather and pocked with dark lochs, off the western coast of Scotland. It is rain-scoured, lashed by wind, and jaw-droppingly scenic. “It’s a beautiful part of the world,” says architect Alan Dickson of the Skye-based firm Rural Design. “The downside of that beauty is that land is expensive and very difficult for young people to afford, so they’re leaving the island.” In 2010, Dickson and local builder James MacQueen came up with a solution: a small timber-frame prefab design called the R.House, which can be constructed quickly and tucked onto less expensive lots that don’t appeal to well-heeled holiday homeowners. “We proved to local authorities that not…

Project: The Risom Residence Designer: Jens Risom Location: Block Island, Rhode Island “The popular magazines were all saying that one couldn’t build a summer home for less than $25,000,” recalls Jens Risom, seated comfortably in a chair of his own design inside his home in New Canaan, Connecticut. “So I contacted Life magazine and said, ‘well, I have one.’” Life magazine was impressed, not just with the project but with Risom himself—at that point, the designer had already won decades of accolades in modern furniture circles. The resulting article, a lushly photographed ode to Risom’s customized A-frame that he sourced from a catalog and had delivered in pieces to his remote island site off Rhode Island, helped to raise the aesthetic profile of modular construction. At the time, prefab suffered…

Project: Pentimento House Architect: Jose María Sáez and David Barragán Location: Quito, Ecuador Prefab construction is often compared to building with Legos. In the case of the Pentimento House, located on the outskirts of Quito, the metaphor is unusually apt. Overlooking the Ilaló volcano and Andes mountain range, Pentimento comprises hundreds of identical stacked concrete modules. As in a Lego model, the blocks simultaneously form “the structural and formal systems of the house,” as architect Jose María Sáez puts it, as well as both the interior and exterior walls. Thanks to the region’s mild climate, there’s no need for insulation, and “you don’t have to build in a perfect way,” says Sáez. “It’s like Adam and Eve, working in paradise. You almost don’t need architecture at all, just shelter from…

Caren Alpert For the past two years, Caren Alpert has been working on a fine art series, terra cibus, photographing food through an electron microscope. In this issue, she shot “Family Heirloom” (p. 84). The San Francisco–based photographer’s work has appeared in Condé Nast Traveler, Departures, Anthology, San Francisco magazine, Luxe, and the New York Times. João Canziani Originally hailing from Lima, Peru, frequent Dwell contributor João Canziani now calls New York City home. He traveled to Ecuador to shoot “Quito Parts” (p. 96) and marveled at the hospitality he experienced. “Peru and Ecuador used to be at war, but on this day, we were good friends who hadn’t seen each other in a long time,” he recounts. Floto + Warner “Shooting the cabin [“The Answer Is Risom,” p. 66]…

As creative director of Muji since 2001, retail impresario Kenya Hara is in the business of adding shibusa—the Japanese ideal of simple, unobtrusive beauty—to homes the world over. Now he’s shifting his focus to a different target: dogs. “I started with the idea of applying architectural ideals to something the average person could relate to,” says Hara, who is “very fond” of man’s best friend, though he doesn’t own one currently. Architecture for Dogs is a project that goes way beyond the typical doghouse: Hara has engaged 11 top architects and designers to create interactive structures on a canine scale. Each designer—like architects Atelier Bow-Wow, Shigeru Ban, and industrial designer Konstantin Grcic—was paired with a particular dog breed (dachshund, papillon, and toy poodle, respectively). Hara explains, “Dogs spend most of…

Project: Hybrid Home Architect: Cavco Industries, cavco.com Location: Olancha, California Impressed by by the Rudolf M. Schindler house in West Hollywood and Craig Ellwood’s Case Study house, water feature choreographer and technology developer Scott Palamar wanted to build a minimalist prototype of his own. And despite his lack of architectural training, he jumped at the opportunity to experiment with a modular structure when he purchased a $5,000 parcel of land in the Eastern Sierra in 2004. “It was around the time prefab was undergoing a revival but was no longer pitched as an inexpensive option,” Palamar says. “Still, I felt it could be affordable if done the right way and I enjoyed the challenge of sticking to a limited budget.” From Cavco Industries, Palamar ordered a $35,158 customized model with…

Project: Lake Iosco House Architect: Resolution: 4 Architecture Location: Bloomingdale, New Jersey Debbi Gibbs first encountered Lake Iosco more than a decade ago, when she started visiting the home of family friend Florent Morellet, proprietor of the legendary, now-departed diner Florent in New York City. The lake is part of a private neighborhood in New Jersey with an unconventional cooperative arrangement: Each person who purchases property actually buys into a group of shareholders and is granted a 100-year lease on the land. Gibbs loved the seeming wilderness of the area, especially considering its relative proximity to her New York apartment. She bought a ramshackle cabin with plans to tear it down and start fresh, then bided her time until she found just the right architects. Enter Joseph Tanney and Robert…

Project: Peart-Weisgerber Residence/Architect: Moshe Safdie/Location: Montreal, Quebec Montreal’s Old Port, lined with brawny cranes and fine 18th-and 19th-century facades, offers the perfect tableau of a traditional river city. But a glimpse across the St. Lawrence River reveals Habitat ’67, towering in the distance like the building blocks of a playful young god. The building stands equally tall in the city’s architectural history: Conceived by architect Moshe Safdie when he was a 23-year-old student as a model of prefab housing, the residential complex was a standout at the city’s 1967 world’s fair, known as Expo ’67, and is now a landmark of architecture in Canada. Designer Byron Peart, originally from Ottawa and cofounder of the leather goods and accessories brand Want Les Essentiels de la Vie, had wanted to live there…

Product developer Eric Chu was thrilled with his West L.A. town houses, which were recently built by architect Whitney Sander from his custom Hybrid House system. But there was one problem: Though the narrow lot allowed for two buildings (one for Chu and the other to rent out), the only way to site them was back to back, with both living areas and upstairs master bedrooms squarely facing one another across the small courtyard, and little more than a young Chinese pistache tree between them. Sander and Chu found the solution at wall coverings firm Astek Inc., in Van By Aaron Britt Nuys, California: bus graphics. Chu ran a couple of photos he had taken of the tree through some Photoshop filters for what he calls “a painterly effect,” sent…