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Another modern house slowly joins the re-modern community.
A few more construction photos were forwarded to me.
And as before the new pictures are posted on the Plat House photo set at Flickr.
Technorati Tags: house plans, modern design, modern house, Plat House
Continue reading "0242 Plat House Construction update"The carpenters are moving quickly through the rough framing.
This portion of the work always seems to go quickly and it is very gratifying.
There are more new pictures posted on the Plat House photo set at our web site.
Technorati Tags: house plans, modern design, modern house, Plat House
Continue reading "0242 Plat House takes shape"The framing has begun for the Arkansas Plat House.
After watching a hole in the ground for weeks the progress of sharp carpenters can be fast, surprising, and very satisfying for an owner waiting to see their Plat House take shape.
For the first time you can begin to get a feel for the volume of your house, and the views from its windows. Well what do you think? Can you see it in the design rendering?
As before the progress photos will be posted on the photo set for this design.
Technorati Tags: house plans, modern design, modern house, Plat House
Continue reading "0242 Plat House Construction moving along"seems like everybody is setting modules these days
Technorati Tags: modern design, modern house, modular house, prefab house
Continue reading "another visit to Gableville"After a winter delay construction has resumed on the first 0242 Plat House
I just received a couple of photos from the customer building the first 0242 Plat House at a location in Arkansas.
All the progress photos will be posted on the photo set for this design.
Technorati Tags: house plans, modern design, modern house, Plat House
Continue reading "0242 Plat House Construction continues"Renderings never show how our crazy quilt of windows look when they are open.
Our current designs in our line of stock plans, and the coming prefab house products typically have large blocks of standard window units with operable windows woven into the pattern. I've done many a drawings showing these configurations, often with the operable windows in different color to make them jump. I like the logic and the fun of this approach. You get the benefit of working with affordable standard sizes, and combine them to create large window openings. The drawings give you a feel for what it looks like but the real fun however begins when the windows are open!
We had a really nice day yesterday, warm and breezy. I think it was the first time we cranked every one of them open.
Technorati Tags: house plans, modern design, modern house
Continue reading "Windows Open"in progress floor plans of the 6030 House design
The plans are still evolving each day. Most of the design decisions have been made but technological issues of the building system shove the plan around a bit each day as things are studied in more detail.
The design is a melding of the 6040 House prototype plan and the 6040 House design study plan. If you compare the three of them you will see what I mean.
The ground floor eliminates one parking space in the garage, and moves the master bedroom upstairs. This leaves a good amount of living space on the ground floor, and breaks it down into areas of different volume and light quality.
Upstairs the master bedroom remains a large suite with a master bathroom with potential to be very luxurious. Along with the other bedrooms these spaces form a buffer between the master bedroom and the public side of the house. Perhaps the most interesting part of this design is the porch room on the upper level. This is a modern 3 season room brought into the volume of the house. From here it can take in a great view or be up among the trees. An alternate living room it greatly expands the living space of the house and still leaves the areas below with a high ceiling. This very rough section shows the vertical relationship of these rooms.
The ability to create voluminous spaces like this affordably lies with the EcoSteel building system.
Technorati Tags: 6030 House, ecosteel, modern design, modern house, prefab house
Continue reading "6030 House floor plans"These are the first images of the 6030 House.
This is a new design based on the 6040 House and the EcoSteel building system by Northern Steel.
The floor plan is a variation on the original 6040 House , and the 6040 Design Study . I'll try to post floor plans sketches soon, they need to be developed a bit more first.
Technorati Tags: modern design, modern house, prefab house, 6030 House
Continue reading "6030 House first images"...was what we called them when we were kids
Is it good form to follow up a rant with some good humor?
Continue reading "funny pages"Today is the day - time to make the market grow up.
Next week I am going to be making a visit to a container maker/modifier in Tampa Florida, a division of TAW who creates specialty shelters based on the ISO standards for inter-modal transport, otherwise known commonly as shipping containers. You have to realize that there is a whole industry revolving around this, and its not run of the mill shipping containers that they are daily involved with. The military and other entities routinely deploy any variety of field shelters which get to where they are going by the usual channels of shipping cargo, and hence they conform to the standards set for handling shipping containers for dimensions, so they work with the universal stacking, and for strength, so that they can be handled in the usual manner. But aside from these concerns for "standards" their usual product could be something as sophisticated as an electronic field control center or as simple as a bunk room. So their routine business is fabricating inter-modal shelters for these varied purposes. But they also have a strong interest in seeing their business expand into day to day dwellings. Here is where the interests converge - there is a large group of modernists who are interested in using containers to create cool modern houses.
So we are meeting next week, for two reasons. First because I want to see first hand the work they do with these inter-modal shelters. Second because we want to talk about the big picture - how do we take this notion of building a house with containers out of this realm of fringe ideas, and set it on a course to being a mainstream option. We want container homes to "grow up."
Part of this is going to be establishing a common terminology. I have been talking to David Cross of TAW about this. Readers of Fabprefab will know David from his postings over there. The ideas I am going to pitch here are based on my talks with David and terms he has introduced.
Right now there is no way to talk about this except to say you are building a house of "shipping containers" which I can tell you first hand is not going to engender you to anybody. I witnessed a planning board vote to define a shipping container as a trailer in order to enable them to reject it as trailers were not allowed. Never mind that the object in question has no axles, wheels, or tires. We need to begin at a point which does not contain the prejudices built up from images of rusting hulks of shipping containers piled on top of freight vessels.
Generically what we are talking about is a modus of modular construction that uses heavy gauge steel, rather than the wood stick framing that is common in residential construction. Wow - why build something as light as a house with heavy gauge steel? There are very good reasons. Heavy gauge steel construction makes the modules immensely strong. The continuous wall footings that common houses require in order to prevent them from collapsing under their own weight are not necessary - heavy gauge steel modules can support themselves while spanning between supports at their four corners. In fact, to place them on continuous support is almost a squandering of their inherent strength, a waste of resources. But isn't it going to be expensive to overbuild like this, to make a house with such a strong structure? The answer is no. The resources are plentiful and cheap, and a sustainable factor of building with these is the fact that it represents a direct recycling of an otherwise neglected resource. That's because the raw materials for these houses are the cheap, pre-used ISO shipping containers accumulating in our ports thanks to our long standing trade imbalance.
So this is the foundation of this movement. The term is Heavy Gauge Modular construction, or HGM. I recommend you make this part of your vocabulary and start using it now if you ever want to see a "container home" in your future. Also, its time to start putting quotes around "container home", in your writing and your speech. Whenever you need to describe this to somebody make sure you always proceed the term with a phrase like "so called" or follow it with a phrase like "in concept". You get it - time to marginalize that term.
Now the next step in this is to talk about some specific characteristics of these Heavy Gauge Modules - HGMs. The modular industry is not standardized. Any readers of LiveModern and Fabprefab know that modules come in different widths depending on the factory space that builds them, the states that they will be moving through, the access to the site, and the special permits they require to transport. Sure we can build HGMs like this, and we will face the same restrictions to the market that the current Modular industry faces. Unh - Unh, no way, who needs that. We want a module that we can take anywhere, on almost any road, using standard trucks and trailers, no special permits required. While we're at it, lets make it possible to load it on a freight train, how about a cargo ship, lets make it work with the largest material handling infrastructure in the world. Lets make an HGM that conforms to the ISO standards for inter-modal transport. Lets call this HGM an Inter-modal Steel Building Unit, or ISBU - IBU for short.
Again, I advise you to adopt this language immediately. Today is the day we cross the threshold. Yesterday is the day of "container houses", Tomorrow is the day of HGM/IBU construction.
So now we are not talking about so called "container houses". We are talking about a new modular building method consisting of Heavy Gauge Modular construction utilizing Inter-modal Building Units. Coming to a planning board in your town. Soon.
Technorati Tags: modern design, modern house, prefab house, container house
Continue reading "So Called "Container Houses""The cold climate version of the Steel Case House is complete.
Design Prints and Construction Prints of the new cold climate version of the Steel Case House are complete. The design now has its own page on our catalog site. The primary change from the original is the replacement of the masonry wall with a SIPs panel wall of the same thickness. This 8" thick SIPs panel greatly raises the average U value of the envelope offsetting the large window area. In northern and mountain climates we may still need to reduce the window area, but along with advanced glazing this provides more options for balancing windows with energy efficiency.
Technorati Tags: house plans, modern design, modern house, Steel Case House
Continue reading "0357 Steel Case SIPs version complete"Years after being introduced the 0242 Deck House gets a new name: The Plat House
This design was posted on our site the day it went live in Nov 2002. It was a design I knew we were going to eventually develop into a stock plan so I decided to include a thumbnail sketch on the catalog page. But before I could post it a name had to be given. We did not take much time with it - something obvious - The Deck House! It has lots of deck space so great, that will do. I never really thought it was great, but it worked and so up it went. It also led to the precedent of naming the Porch House after its prominent feature - its screened porch. However early in 2005 in an effort to avoid any confusion with timberframe house manufacturer Deck House llc we have chosen a new name for this design.
So to the dictionary and the thesaurus to do a little research. Platform was my first thought - shorten it to "Plat"? I checked the translator, deck from english to italian yeilded "piattaforma" - hmmm, german yielded "plattform". Into the dictionary for "Plat" and found n : a map showing planned or actual features of an area, and the thesaurus turned up Definition: map Synonyms: blueprint, diagram, graph, outline, plan, plat, plot, rough draft, scheme, sketch, table, tabulation
I like that. I can live with that.
Technorati Tags: house plans, modern design, modern house, Plat House
Continue reading "New name, same great taste!"A setback on the site approval but progress on the web site
Good News! The official web site for the 6040 House has launched and you can see it right now:
site no longer current
The site has some interesting features. There is an interactive color picker which works in the same manner as many new car web sites where you can choose a color for various parts of the house and see it update live. There is also a 360 degree interactive model of the house so you can look at it from any angle.
I have to clarify after reading some of the comments: I did not create the web site! This was done by a web author working for Northern Steel. I pitched in the artwork of the house, and the 360 piece, but all the rest is their work.
And the bad news is our prototype site has fallen through, or more specifically defeated by an unsympathetic HOA. Northern felt it was better to back off than to build bad will with neighbors so we are back to looking for a site. There are several strong leads with potential customers right now so we are not sure if the original prototype will be the first in the ground. We'll see.
Continue reading "6040 House gets a Web Site!"
The cold climate version of the Steel Case House is taking shape
the renderings are done, Design Prints prepared, and the web page coming together.
Technorati Tags: house plans, modern design, modern house, Steel Case House
Continue reading "Steel Case cold climate"Construction has begun on the first 0242 Plat House
After rain delays the site has been cleared and the construction of the first 0242 Plat House seems ready to begin in earnest.
I have started a new photo set for this design, but all you will find there at this stage is another photo of the view from the site. It looks quite nice. Updates will follow.
Technorati Tags: house plans, modern design, modern house, Plat House
Continue reading "0242 Plat House Construction Photos"
