It’s early June, and the house going up near Cedar Lake is still weeks from being completed. Already, however, its roof needs replacing. The new roof has just been dropped off at the construction site: It consists of metal-encased foam panels bundled into large, rectangular plastic-bound packages—kind of like a giant, shrink-wrapped twenty-four-pack of Kleenex from Costco. The old roof is not cracked or leaky or flimsy; rather, it’s what you might call dishonest. Its panels (which double as the home’s upstairs ceiling—there’s no attic) are finished with a white, mottled texture—an imitation of sorts of the coating on certain types of drywall, which in turn vaguely imitates stucco or plaster, or whatever might camouflage the inherently flimsy nature of drywall. The new roof panels, with their perfectly smooth finish, don’t evoke or refer to anything other than their own whiteness and smoothness.
This is what Charlie Lazor, the genial and boyish architect of the house, is getting at when he talks about “truth in materials.” Picky? Perhaps, but it’s warranted. This house, where Lazor will live with his wife and their two children, is the prototype for a system of “manufactured architecture” that he’s been developing since early 2003. That’s when he set up an architectural practice, Lazor Office, next door to Blu Dot, the thriving furniture design firm that he co-founded in 1996 (and where he continues to work as a designer). Lazor is still dealing with panel finishes and working out a host of other kinks from his manufactured architecture system. But several variations on the “Flatpak House,” as it’s been christened, are on order already, and if all goes according to plan, lots more people will soon be building them. There’s even a catalog with a stickers-and-worksheet “game” to help them make their own designs. “I wanted to re-think in a quiet way how things are put together, how industry makes things,” Lazor says. That’s kind of a humble way of saying that he’d like to revolutionize the home-building industry.
It’s no secret that this is one trade that’s ripe for change. A century of unprecedented technological progress, including the constant developments in materials and manufacturing systems, has improved virtually every commonplace object under the sun, from cars to toothbrushes. But most any architect will tell you that the business of “stick-built” homes is shamefully backward. “It really hasn’t changed significantly since Jesus’ time,” says Lazor. “The industry is totally fractured. There are no standards, unlike in Europe. That’s why building houses is incredibly inefficient, and expensive, for what you get.”
There are a couple of exceptions, however. Sears had success with its kit homes in the first half of the twentieth century, a business that gave way to a small but steady market for mobile homes. But there’s no contemporary version of a kit home (how many people today would take on the seventy-five-page assembly manual?), and mobile homes are pretty much permanently relegated to trailer parks. Old, even ancient ways of building the average home persist. What’s worse is that once-commonplace but labor-intensive features—stone fireplaces, brick facades, mullioned windows, built-in cabinetry—are now prohibitively expensive, so cheap imitations and poor substitutes abound, all in order to serve a diehard domestic dream.
That hasn’t stopped architects in their perennial quest to build the perfect home for the masses. Le Corbusier described his Villa Savoye as a “machine for living,” and Frank Lloyd Wright imagined his Usonian homes sprouting all over the American landscape in the forties and fifties. On the more quixotic side are Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes, and the ongoing efforts of Paolo Soleri (a student of Wright’s) and his disciples at Arcosanti, a utopian community in Arizona. Now, a younger generation of architects is avidly taking up the challenge, armed with new materials and manufacturing methods. Many were no doubt inspired by Dwell, the influential shelter magazine, and its recent prefab design competition (which in turn was likely inspired by Arts & Architecture magazine’s landmark Case Study House Program from the 1940s). Among a host of designs for prefabricated or modular homes, Alchemy, a firm in St. Paul, offers “weeHouse” steel-and-glass modules. One can serve as a 336-square-foot studio or office, or several can be aligned to create a one- or two-story, one- or two-bedroom home. Rocio Romero is now taking delivery on her sleek, silvery, 1,150-square-foot “LV Home”; and this past May, Sunset magazine unveiled the “Glidehouse,” billed as an eco-friendly modular system by its architect, Michelle Kaufman. These and other models, all designed to be built quickly and at a relatively modest cost, are getting fawning “next big thing” coverage from design and lifestyle magazines, and even Time (which goes to show how “good design” has gone mainstream).
Prefab and modular designs, however, come with a basic requirement: Their components can be no wider than twelve to fourteen feet, or what can fit on a flatbed truck (thus the twenty-four-foot “double wide” mobile home, which comes in two pieces). The Flatpak House, as its name indicates, gets around that constraint with panels, not modules. Made of glass, concrete, metal, wood, or cement fiberboard, with different colors and finishes, the Flatpak panels are basically sheet goods, which are manufactured in the U.S. to a standard eight-foot width. The cedar cladding panels on the Flatpak prototype, for instance, are more commonly used for high-end garage doors, says Lazor.
The main advantage of the Flatpak House over prefab or modular designs, then, is that it maximizes flexibility. Like sectional sofas, modular wall or storage units, workstation components—or Legos, for that matter—the Flatpak House can be configured in any number of combinations to suit both a homeowner’s needs and the particular demands of a site. This flexibility is why Lazor calls his house “manufactured architecture” rather than prefab. (Also, like any good designer, he knows that naming, packaging, and marketing are essential to the success of a product.) “This way of designing is all about finding an answer to a problem,” he says, “rather than expressing the will of an architect. It’s the opposite of the individual genius model.”
In other words, Lazor is merging good design with good business sense, seeking to accommodate a wide range of buyers while keeping costs relatively low. In this sense, the Flatpak house has a strong affinity with Ikea, notwithstanding Lazor’s Blu Dot pedigree. The Swedish behemoth revolutionized household goods by taking advantage of efficiencies in manufacturing, storage, transportation, and distribution, and by developing the “flatpack” concept for furniture. (Incidentally, it is now in the home-building business, too, with prefab developments in several Scandinavian towns.) The Flatpak House also seeks to maximize those efficiencies, with its prototype costing about $130 per square foot. Eventually, Lazor aims to get the square-foot cost down to $100 or so.
The 2,600-square-foot Flatpak prototype sits on a long, narrow lot right alongside the Kenilworth Trail, and hard by Cedar Lake’s Hidden Beach. Because of its proximity to those public areas, the west façade of the house is mainly comprised of an eight-foot concrete wall, with wood panels and large windows on the second story. One portion of the concrete is perforated with portholes to allow views outside while limiting views into the house. “That’s not because I don’t like people,” says Lazor. “But there’s a lot of traffic on the trail—more than on the street. We realized that people will probably always be stopping to look at the house, but that doesn’t mean that we always have to be looking at them.” For views, Lazor opted for floor-to-ceiling windows looking out on thick stands of trees on the short ends of the house. “On a typical city lot, which is fifty by one hundred and twenty feet, you’d lay things out differently,” says Lazor, “because you’d have neighbors.”
Like most modernist designs, the layout of the Flatpak House is basic and wide open: Downstairs, the living room, kitchen, and dining room flow from one to the other; upstairs, there are three bedrooms and two baths. A bridge and a courtyard connect the main house to a smaller structure with an office on the ground level and a guest room/common area above. Lazor points out another “truth in materials” issue when it comes to the Flatpak’s windows and walls. Their design was inspired by homes by Louis Kahn and Richard Neutra, which had fixed windows and used wall panels for ventilation. “When the panels open out, they catch the air and draw it right into the house, much better than a window does,” he says. “So the windows serve their essential function, providing light and views, and don’t have to be more complicated, or more costly, by being operable. This is also re-thinking the wall so that it can actually perform a function, rather than just be this object that’s taken for granted.” (Maybe I’m a diehard in this regard, but I’d argue that windows are for leaning out of too, not just looking out of.)
Extraordinarily ordinary, the Flatpak House is part of Lazor’s mission to design what he calls a “contemporary vernacular.” (Not to be confused with “soft contemporary,” an abhorrent residential style apparently devised for homebuyers who think they might want modern architecture but aren’t quite sure.) Contemporary vernacular is not so much a style as a condition of design, one that Lazor explores in work with his Blu Dot partners, and with students in his U of M classes in furniture design and manufactured architecture. “The Flatpak house is not going to be like your neighbors’ house, of course, but there is a simplicity and regularity to it that makes it seem rather normal. That’s because its design is completely of its time,” he says. “The vernacular is what you get when the solution to a problem makes so much sense that it’s totally obvious.”
Lazor’s manufactured architecture also harks back intriguingly to the work of Charles and Ray Eames. Like Lazor, the Eameses made comfort, ease of use, and affordability their chief concerns; their cheerful, curious manner contradicted the designer stereotype of severity, egotism, and attention-getting spectacles. Moreover, as the first “nice modernists,” to borrow a phrase coined by Dwell, they found great success—as Lazor has—in designing furniture and an array of other goods. The Eames House, their entry for the Case Study House Program, was built in 1949 in Pacific Palisades, California, and quickly became an icon of modern architecture. One of their goals was to put the manufacturing power created during World War II to a peaceful use, by designing a home whose materials—wall panels, steel beams, factory-made windows—could be ordered from a catalog.
Appropriating materials and technologies that have only become more accessible, wide-ranging, and sophisticated—such as those foam panels for the roof—Lazor is updating that basic idea. So if Flatpak House takes cues from the Eames House, it’s more out of pragmatism than nostalgia (for one thing, Lazor had to account for the Minnesota climate). In other words, Lazor’s 2004 Flatpak house has more in common with the fifty-five-year-old Eames House than the Eames House would with any 1890s-era dwelling, however radical. That’s because the proliferation of new technologies altered the average person’s daily life more drastically in the first half of the twentieth century than in the second. Charles and Ray Eames rode the crest of that revolution in the forties and fifties, and became folksy giants of twentieth-century design. Could Lazor, picking up where they left off, make his own mark on the twenty-first?
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