Pickle Barrel
FIRST OF ALL, Lloyd Alter wants to clear up one misconception: there certainly is such a thing as well-built, well-engineered, beautifully designed prefabricated housing. In fact, Alter is in the real estate business precisely to design and develop prefab architecture and to promote it over traditional forms of real estate. Now more than ever, the eco-friendly modular option seems to be the way of the future.
Alter has been ahead of the game since architecture school when his first-year project was a design that folded out of a recycled steel shipping container.
Today he works with Royal Homes, the largest builder of modular housing in the country, and also contributes to Treehugger.com, an online news magazine dedicated to all things green.
Always keen to maximize efficiency and quality, Alter was dissatisfied with conventional real estate development. “I was frustrated with the quality that you get out in the field,” he explains. “Minor circumstantial issues — a rainfall, for example — would make inspections impossible and cause so many problems. I felt there had to be a better way to build.”
Prefab turned out to be that better way.
Hiring an architect for a residential project is extremely pricey, which partially explains why developers build the majority of housing in Canada.
“Every house has to be a one-off, and it’s an expensive process,” says Alter. “That’s why good architects can’t do small houses.”
For a developer like Alter, who prizes minimalism and aims to diminish waste, the challenge is to massproduce an affordable, quality house design. Prefab gets him out of this muddle.
“We can go to a good architect and get him to create one design that can be modified, changed and stretched, and that’s the design we use for multiple houses,” Alter says.
Voila: affordable, aesthetically pleasing architecture that can be customized.
Moreover, since the design is produced multiple times, the developers can work through kinks and continuously better the house quality. So how did the stigma about shoddy prefab arise in the first place? It was more out of the layman’s assumptions about factory-produced goods than from genuine architectural knowledge.
With an excellent designer and top-quality construction materials, factory-assembled housing is not merely a viable alternative. It is the lowest-impact, most ecoefficient way to create residential housing.
“In the standard onsite building of a house, 30 per cent of the building materials get wasted,” says Alter. “Wood is stolen, thrown out, wrecked by water … any number of things.”
By contrast, the factory construction process produces zero waste. In addition, studies have indicated that prefab generates half the amount of fossil fuels throughout its construction process. Lastly, modular housing is incredibly heat efficient.
“Our houses are essentially built from the inside out in the factory, and they are completely airtight,” Alter notes.
Yet even with all these ecobenefits, Alter prefers to focus on the design attributes. He knows too much about the environment for his own good and acknowledges that modular building has a way to go.
“I’m frustrated with the eco stuff because there are still a lot more things that could be done,” he says, beginning to list off the practices that would make prefab even more eco-friendly, “but all those things are costly, and clients are not yet willing to pay.”
What consumers are eager to purchase, however, are small and innovative modern houses, such as Royal Homes’ newly unveiled Q Series by Kohn Shnier Architects.
“I wanted the Q to have a very small environmental footprint,” explains Alter. At 620 square feet, the small pre-engineered home is praiseworthy for both its energy efficiency and its design. Alter is hoping that it helps the prefab market build momentum.
“We are way behind, considering only three per cent of our housing is prefab, but I think we are making progress.”
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