Building the Modern House - an owners tale by Dan Akst
Daniel Akst is an author and journalist who has written several articles covering the recent prefab and Re-Modern movement. His articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and he's even written about modern homes for This Old House. Most significantly he has built his own modern house and written extensively about it. These are a worthwhile read for anybody building their own modern home. Dan first offered up his story in a three part article that appeared in Money Magazine. You can read the text of these articles on his own web site here: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 He also wrote a shorter account with more of a design emphasis for Metropolis Magazine that you can read at the on their web site: link. Its interesting that at the end of this article Dan calls for the production of decent house plans for modern homes: ...If they did, they might want to use a stock plan; but here is another reason why more interesting houses don't get built, even by individuals who care about good design. Most of the house plans sold through books and on the Internet are awful; a few decent ones are available (including some in the Life magazine's "Dream House" series) but virtually none are Modern, unless what you really want is a chunky-looking "contemporary" with diagonal wood siding. The absence of good Modern stock plans means that people who want this kind of house have to hire an architect, at fees ranging from a few thousand dollars to perhaps 15 percent of the construction cost. Although Modern architecture remains suffused with the rhetoric of idealism, even relatively prosperous families who are thinking of sponsoring it will beg off unless the entire clanking apparatus of home-ownership--all of it geared to the lowest common denominator of design--can be brought around to accommodate something more interesting. Modular housing might be one answer. Another would be the publication of some first-class stock plans that specify standard materials to achieve quietly fabulous results. Incredibly this is just what we have set out to do, and our customers have in fact done. Dan's article was in the November 2002 issue of Metropolis. Our plan site went live on November 4th, 2002. He's also a good novelist - I've read a couple of his books and enjoyed them. More info about the rest of his work on his web site Akst.com.
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But the majority of prefab in the USA is in the form of modular construction. Modular construction reduces the field connections to a a few major utility connections when the boxes are placed on the foundation, but otherwise are much more complete when they arrive at the site. Granted, this is not the reason why modular is more popular in the US. Modular housing here grew out of motor-home construction, which was a more permanent version of a trailer. When the flimsy construction of motor-homes became an obvious problem in the US it was put under a nation wide spec known as a HUD Code. At that point the industry split into factories that continued to build motor homes under the new rules, and factories that adapted to building to local site built construction codes which became the modular industry. That has dominated the US prefab business ever since. Its popularity here is due to administration - not because it makes construction sense. And how could it make construction sense? Shipping a house in big pieces is tantamount to shipping air. There is a reason why Ikea ships furniture in a flat-pack. The shipping is so much more efficient for flat goods, than big boxy hollow goods. The challenge becomes how to complete as much of the house as possible while still being able to ship it flat. Whole houses arrive on two trucks rather than 4 or 5.
Next we'll get into more detail about how these houses go together.
Previously:
images from the 
What a beautiful scene! Look at that sky. There are a couple more high res shots from this day in the 
Here is the corner of the house next to the carport. Yup, that's a 
A great fish-eye view of the overlook to the living spaces from the hallway above.
The owner has explained some of the changes to me in their email. They have made the bathroom slightly larger with space taken from the master bedroom. This will even out the size of the two bedrooms which for them is fine as their masterbedroom will be in the adjacent 
You can also see at the top of the wall the sloping top plate which will allow them to gather all the rainwater at one side of the house. They say the work on the Plat House will also begin very soon, and I'll have to come up with a new title for this project!
the Kaufmann House designed by Richard Neutra, 1946, photo by Tim Street-Porter for the New York Times
Of course that notion is preposterous. It is a great benefit to be able to see that somebody else has built a given house, and that there is a photo record of construction images that you can access with your builder. It can help remove any uncertainty they may feel if they are faced with building a house that they may consider unusual. But this is an anomaly in an architects practice, that a design would be built repeatedly. Any architect must be capable of designing and documenting a house or building that has never been built before, no second chances, it must come together from the plans on the first try. They have to do that every day, as assuredly as you get up every morning, if they hope to be in business the next day. The vast majority of architects I know are very good at that.
With that in mind I'd like to report that the 
The owner is taking a series of fantastic panoramic photos which give you an expansive view of the framing - really the next best thing to being there. They are posted to 
A great view of the back of the house - it really looks like a 
The stair consists of a single steel stringer with cantilevered treads and risers. Not a completely unusual configuration, but not as often configured in a U shaped stair. The undercarriage was all exposed and visible, so we did not want to see a post coming down to the floor under the landings. So our posts are actually hidden in the adjacent wall which you can still see here as the wall framing has not received drywall yet.
The floor to floor height is high, so the stair needed to be quite long. And we could not have the bottom of the stair crowding the front door. So it found itself pushed back and leading up to a cantilevered landing which hangs off the second floor bridge. The steel work for this landing, and the undercarriage of the stair is all hanging out for view and it has really become a microcosm for the construction of the house - a place where you can get right up to the connections and lay your hands on them compared to the roof and floor beams that are high above your head.
More photos after the fold.
The site looks beautiful and we are really looking forward to seeing the house come together. Remember all the photos of this project will be 
and the latest from the site after the jump:
