At MoMA`s exhibit on the history and future of prefab dwellings, five actual little homes do their parts for efficiency.Finding a design for the perfect prefabricated house is the Holy Grailof architecture. Some of the biggest names in modernism, from FrankLloyd Wright to Walter Gropius to Marcel Breuer, have tried their handsat ready-to-assemble shelter, but the promise of cheap mass productionsomehow always eluded them.That history of spectacular flops and over-budget prototypes hasn`tdiminished architects` obsession with the problem, or kept the Museumof Modern Art from earnestly probing the subject. On Sunday, MoMA debuts its latest survey on designing the prefabricatedhouse. Titled "Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling," itcomes 50 years after the museum`s celebrated exploration of the topic,in which Breuer built a full-scale, butterfly-roof suburban house inthe museum`s garden.The show was a huge popular success. Yet like so many other attempts atprefab construction, Breuer`s prototype took months to build and neverproduced any offspring. No wonder the sixth-floor exhibit opens withclips of Buster Keaton`s One Week, a 1920 satire about a quickie house.MoMA is hoping to do better this time. Along with staging an absorbinggallery exhibit featuring models, drawings and artifacts, the museumcommissioned five architects to try to crack the prefab problem, onceand for all. It was perfect timing because the museum had recentlyacquired an 18,000-square-foot lot two doors west of its 53d Streetbuilding for yet another expansion of its art compound. The land gave the architects a chance to build what MoMA curator BarryBergdoll described as "the weirdest subdivision ever" on one of thepriciest pieces of unbuilt real estate in Manhattan. Weird it is. A gingerbread-decorated, New Orleans-style shotgun house,produced by MIT students, stands shoulder-to-shoulder with ashimmering, see-through, circuitry-studded townhouse by Philadelphia`sKieranTimberlake Associates.That urbane, energy-efficient Cellophane House stares down atBURST008, a modern beach shack with wildly complex angles, plenty ofsurfboard storage, and the capacity for self-ventilation designed byNew York`s Jeremy Edmiston and Douglas Gauthier. Between them are two true quick-build exercises: the Micro Compact,which could be a sleeping car on a zealously minimalist Orient Express,and SYSTEM3, a shipping container by a couple of Austrian architectsthat offers a ski-chalet aesthetic accessorized by prison-stylebathroom fixtures. You can walk through all except the Micro Compact, which at 76 squarefeet might be taking the notion of off-site construction a little toofar. The stainless-steel cube is really a modernist version of a pop-upcamp trailer, and no more useful to daily life. Each of the five houses offers its own take on prefabrication. They`reengaged in a furious debate on the best way to make houses in a worldwhere energy consumption, sustainability and affordability are bigconcerns. The only point the five agree on is that the constructionindustry, a major spewer of carbon emissions, needs to learn to buildmore efficiently. Reading the front-page news these days, it may seem that America won`tbe erecting many houses of any sort, efficient or not, for a while. Butit`s hard not to be drawn into MoMA`s five-way conversation. There`ssomething irresistible about plopping little houses into the canyons ofMidtown, with skyscrapers like Eero Saarinen`s brooding CBS towerforming the background peaks. It`s not only architects who are attracted by the utopian idea ofbringing prefab houses to the masses. Judging by the traffic jams forIkea, which produces the furniture equivalent, the public is interestedin acquiring shelter that can be carried home in a flat pack. Inresearching the exhibition, Bergdoll discovered that the prefabricationurge is as old
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