Putting the FAB in prefabricated
Smaller carbon footprints, luxury designs changing ready-made market
If your first thoughts are of cookie cutter design and quick, cheap construction when someone mentions prefabricated housing you’re not alone.
But things are changing, and architects’ long fascination with systemizing and simplifying building construction (by doing it off-site in a factory-controlled environment) has resulted in prefab homes that offer a level of quality that’s hard to match with site-built construction and have a smaller carbon footprint.
“You save money in construction time and risk in exposure (materials not being exposed to the elements while building) and reduce waste significantly,” says Oliver Lang of Vancouver’s Lang Wilson Practice in Architecture Culture.
“You get precision and tolerances that you can’t get on a normal site, which increases the performance of the building envelope and therefore the building.”
Lang and his wife and business partner Cynthia Wilson decided to put their prefabricated home system to the test a few years ago by making their Monad prototype their home.
Constructed off-site, including the balconies, it was shipped in and slotted above their office on West 4th Avenue so fast it caused a neighbour taking out the trash to do a double-take at the building that appeared overnight.
Wilson refers to it as “the sky home” and indeed it feels like you are up among the clouds — or better still, clear blue skies — with two single apartments sitting above the office and then Lang and Wilson’s double storey penthouse on top.
Light and airy, the feeling is all glass and yet on one of Vancouver’s warmest June afternoons this year it feels comfortably cool.
The approach the pair took in developing their sky home model addresses Vancouver’s need for urban infill housing, with natural ventilation and light being key. Their prefabricated system is being used to build 14 homes on a single family section in Vancouver.
“Most urban densification in our cities will happen along arteries and that’s just because the arteries are really commercial so you don’t get the political resistance of single family owners,” says Lang.
The problem with this, says Lang, is that most will have units facing south onto a noisy environment, and these units heat up in summer because residents cannot comfortably open windows.
“How do you convince people not to commute out into the suburbs, with aspirations of a larger home that’s quiet, when all you offer are really poorly conceived homes?” he says.
Lang and Wilson’s system places the bedroom away from the road, no matter what size the home, facing onto a courtyard to allow for cross ventilation yearround.
Incorporating prefabricated panels into the construction of their custom homes has proved key for Lanefab Design/Build founders Bryn Davidson and Mat Turner.
“You get a more energy-efficient place,” says Davidson. “All of our projects for the last five or six years have been built well beyond the building code, our standard wall is about 13-inches thick and we’ve been doing that on all projects, even the basic rental units, so we try to save energy wherever we can and the prefab components are a big part of that.”
Energy savings don’t get much more remarkable than homes built to the Passive House (Passivhaus) standard set in Germany and adopted by local companies like Pemberton’s BC Passive House, who prefabricate panels for a home’s exterior envelope and middle floors.
More demanding than meeting LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) standards, Passive House certification forces designers to optimize their building envelope, insulation, quality and fit of windows and use passive heat and cooling systems.
“It defines the total amount of energy that you’re allowed to use for heating and cooling and it defines the total amount of energy you’re allowed to use for everything else,” says Lydia Hunter of BC Passive House.
An example of a Passive House in action is Whistler’s Austria House, built for Vancouver’s 2010 Olympic Games, which at 2,700 square feet and used yearround as a café and for skiing and bike rentals costs less than $280 annually, says Hunter.
Just to prove prefabs are no longer the stuff of temporary workers huts and mobile homes, Okanagan Falls company Karoleena is building “designer pre-fab homes” with price tags of just over $1 million, which are LEED gold certified and include all the latest technologies. They were also picked to design and build this year’s prize home in the PNE Prize Home Lottery.
“We’ve built the entire thing out of a steel skeleton — we call it a Karoleena core,” says Karoleena co-founder Kurt Goodjohn. “That gives us the strength and integrity of these homes. They’re going to last forever.”