FACTORY-BUILT HOMES: HOLY GRAIL OR FOOL’S GOLD?

Some notes and observations on ‘Modern Methods of Construction’.

July 2024 (Original Version January 2005)

WHY DON’T WE BUILD HOUSES LIKE WE BUILD CARS?

Since the first Model-Ts rolled off the Ford production line at the dawn of the last century, architects have been hypnotised by a vision of the future where cheap yet technologically advanced homes would be assembled in factories just like cars. In fact, the history of off-the-shelf housing is even older than the history of automobiles. During the latter half of the nineteenth century – the age of empire-building and colonial wars – there was a steady demand for portable, temporary buildings for barracks, agricultural buildings and housing. There were a number of large producers in England and Germany, but with the opening up of a new continent, the largest and most developed market was the United States. Alongside its ranges of homewares and the latest east-coast fashions, the Sears catalogue offered flat-packed timber buildings that could be shipped west and erected with simple hand-tools.

MASS-PRODUCED HOMES

In first decades of the twentieth century, the Modern Movement saw the mass-production of homes as a route to a better world where even the poorest in society would be provided with spacious well-equipped accommodation, with a strong sub-text that the standardisation of houses would promote equality amongst men in a socialist utopia. Le Corbusier, undoubtedly the most eloquent architectural polemicist of his era – perhaps ever – opined in 1923:

We must create the mass-production spirit

The spirit of constructing mass-production houses

The spirit of living in mass-production houses

The spirit of conceiving mass-production houses.

It is worth pointing out that ‘mass produced’ houses were already a key part of the urban landscape by the time he wrote this. The Georgians pioneered the ‘industrialised’ production of luxury townhouses, and the Victorians ‘rolled out’ huge swathes of standardised middle-class homes and terraced workers’ cottages in the wake of the Public Health Act of 1875 and the ensuing ‘Model Bylaws’. Key features of these early mass-produced homes were highly repetitive design, based on a small range of plan types, construction from cheap, widely available and easy-to-assemble materials, and minimal intervention (or complete absence of) architects in the process of production. ‘Architectural features’, such as decorative ironwork and classical mouldings were used to enrich the appearance of the street elevations and interiors, and these were available off the shelf from the brochures and pattern-books of specialist suppliers.

The lineage of the mass-produced house is in fact un-broken down to the present day. In the UK the dense terraces of the Victorian city were re-invented in the inter-war period as ‘Homes For Heroes’, with the tree-planted verges of the Garden City Movement, which in turn became the serried ranks of identical semi-detached homes of 1930s suburbia. Bypassed by the fervour of the Modern Movement the large house-builders were left to develop their product into the private, cul-de-sac estates we are familiar with today.

‘MODERN’ METHODS OF CONSTRUCTION

Throughout the early history of mass-produced buildings, architects were inclined to design ingenious (read ‘over-complicated’), ‘closed’ systems of components, that tended to be expensive to produce and difficult to assemble, or they pursued the idea of factory built, fully finished homes. Perhaps the most influential thinker in this field was American engineer Richard Buckminster-Fuller, who envisioned aluminium and glass houses air-lifted fully-finished onto their sites by helicopters or airships, and built several full-scale prototypes – most notably his Dymaxion House projects from 1927. He also developed and patented the earliest fully integrated prefabricated bathroom modules. It is possible to view post-war streamlined aluminium caravans and trailer homes as the descendants of this line of thinking – perhaps the closest we have yet come to the ideal of mass-produced, highly designed factory-made housing.

In Europe, between the two world wars, experiments in the improvement of construction systems were more conventionally site-based, and included the early development of large panel concrete systems, in Germany. Massive post-war reconstruction programmes then put pre-fabrication – ‘industrialised construction’ – firmly centre-stage. Alongside small-panel concrete and steel-framed ‘prefabs’ of the late 1940s, produced under government-backed R&D programmes, the volume house-builders experimented with ‘rationalised traditional’ construction – familiar with its low-pitched concrete-tiled roofs, brick cross-walls and white weatherboard cladding. But it was in the massive government-backed programmes of slum-clearance and school building during the 1960s that modern construction techniques were given their best chance to ‘break through’. Large-panel concrete systems were developed for high-rise apartment buildings – the must-have symbol of progress for the Local Authorities across the country – and a number of steel-framed systems emerged for building schools – CLASP, for example.

At first this mass-produced factory-built housing was regarded as a miracle of the industrial age, but quite quickly inadequate investment in management and maintenance started to cause problems. The ‘progressive collapse’ of a large part of a concrete panelled apartment-block – Ronan Point – in 1968 is usually cited as the beginning of the end for high-rise living and system building in Britain. It has been documented that even at the peak of government backing, off-site manufacture of homes never became cheaper than traditional construction, and it certainly tainted the public’s view of architects and town planners for a generation. Many of the big names of the system-building boom disappeared into history, but a few survived – notably Yorkon, whose modular steel framed buildings found a market in temporary accommodation for building sites and classrooms and more recently for the production of drive-through fast-food restaurants.

IT’S LIKE DEJA VUE…ALL OVER AGAIN

When I was starting my career in the early 1990s, I worked on several timber ‘platform frame’ housing projects, but I was aware of MMC mainly through the documented failures (technical and management) of the mass housing of the 1960s and 70s. The first resurgence of interest in MMC took off during the late 1990s driven by the recurrence of two key factors familiar in the 1960s: a shortage of homes and a shortage of skilled construction labour. At the start of 2003 the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM) announced a ￡22bn programme of investment in housing for the period 2003-2006, under the banner of ‘The Sustainable Communities Plan’. The initial report emphasised the importance of adopting ‘modern methods of construction’ (MMC) to create a ‘step-change’ in the volume of delivery of new homes. In April of 2003, the ODPM set for the Housing Corporation a new target that 25% of new homes it funded from 2004/5 should use MMC.

This cycle of interest in MMC probably culminated in 2005 in the ODPM’s ‘Design for Manufacture’ competition, also known as the ‘￡60k House’ competition, after the target cost of a 2-bed house which competing teams were challenged to meet. Many well-known housing developers took part, with notable ‘winners’ including Barratt, Wimpey and Crest Nicholson. Several sites were eventually built out by MMC-consortia selected as a result of the competition. One of these – 145 new homes at Oxley Park in Milton Keynes, designed by high-tech supremo architect Richard Rogers – was widely covered as a successful outcome of the competition during 2008. Many commentators were suspicious of the numbers behind some of the ‘￡60k’ proposals, and the legacy of the competition seems to have been rather limited. And if Oxley Park was a high, it was perhaps also the end of a chapter in 2011, with developer Barratt eventually abandoning the second phase of Oxley Park in preference for something altogether more ‘normal’ – both technically and aesthetically.

The next wave of enthusiasm for MMC I have experienced in full started slowly during the 2010s, initially without so much government encouragement – one bitten, twice shy, perhaps. Much of the interest and knowledge generated by the ￡60k House project seems to have rumbled around the commercial and government property circles, with protagonists such as Mark Farmer leading the charge. A number of private-sector developers such as First Base, Igloo and Urban Splash, explored various types of non-traditional construction, often as a way of delivering enhanced thermal performance. A number of high-profile announcements lent momentum to the movement, particularly Urban Splash’s joint venture with Japanese factory-home manufacturer Sekisui, and Legal and General setting up a huge facility at Selby in Yorkshire to produce CLT ‘modular’ homes. With less of a splash, Homes England invested in and continued to support Ilke Homes as part of renewed government efforts to help MMC ‘cross-over’ into the mainstream. Around the margins there were experiments with 3D printed concrete and innovative ‘open-source’ flat-pack systems like Wiki-House, and it started to feel like maybe this time it would be different.

But by the early 2020’s things seemed to be heading in the opposite direction again. L&G’s factory, Urban Splash’s venture with Sekisui and Ilke Homes all went bust, and the buzz around Wiki-House and 3D-printing subsided. Given the level of financial commitment to MMC by the UK government over a twenty-year period, questions are now being asked about what has been achieved. The Built Environment Committee’s enquiry opened in October 2023 is entitled ‘Modern Means of Construction – What has Gone Wrong?’

SO, WILL WE EVER BUILD HOUSES LIKE WE BUILD CARS?

Despite a century of effort, MMC seems set to continue as a relatively small part of the house-building market, with the longed-for break-through to the promised land of low-cost, mass-produced and technologically advanced housing seemingly as far away as ever. Why is this? Is there a fundamental problem? Well, standing back a bit there are two huge differences between houses and cars:

Volume: In a 14-year run of production, over 15 million virtually identical Model T Fords were produced (‘Any colour you like, so long as it’s black’) and modern cars are geared up for similarly huge production numbers: the initial prioduction-run of the Ford Ka in Europe had a target of 250,000 essentially identical units. Houses, by contrast, are currently ordered and produced generally in hundreds – perhaps only dozens – rather than tens or hundreds of thousands. Indeed for the last 30 years the TOTAL number of new homes in the UK has hovered around the 200,000 mark. At such levels of production, R&D and pre-production costs of a factory-built house are proportionally much higher. If all the UK’s new homes were identical (and black!) then the analogy with car-production would be more useful.

Land: This is probably the crunch issue. Cars are mobile and can be parked anywhere; houses, virtually by definition, are fixed to plots of land. The scarcity of land with permission to build probably has as big an impact on the construction industry’s ability, or perhaps desire to increase production as does a shortage of traditional building skills. By limiting supply, the national house-builders can maintain a level of consumer demand which all but obviates the need for innovation in the sector.

My ‘lay-man’s conclusion is that barriers to MMC are those of production and industry economics, rather than of design or 'innovation'. And it is important to bear in mind a distinction between fully finished 'car-like' houses (Class 1 MMC) and 'flat-pack' homes delivered to, or manufactured on site as a series of flat panels (Class 2). A recent article by Brian Green in the RIBA Journal points to a stealthy increase in the use of MMC by the PLC housebuilders including Persimmon, Barratt and Taylor Wimpey. This is focussed on (Class 2) timber frame, which he admits 'might look a bit old hat'...not the bold new vision of the future which continues to mesmerise architects and politicians.

A longer version of this article, including a review of materials and methods, and a summary of potential strangths and weaknesses of MMC is on Mudium, here.