The Globe and Mail

For the past couple of years, in these pages and elsewhere, I've been writing about prefabricated housing, and the fascination prefab holds for some contemporary architects. It would be hard to avoid such topics, even if I wanted to (which I don't). Prefab, after all, has enjoyed several moments of popularity among designers (and, less frequently, among developers and manufacturers) in the past 100 years, though its vogue has probably never been more vivid than it is right now. True, the old avant-garde idealism that dreamed of cheap, ready-made housing for the masses is thin on the ground (if not wholly absent) these days. And the factory-built houses we're seeing on the market are usually upmarket items, pitched to a sophisticated clientele with a thing for the impersonal, dumb-box look associated in the popular imagination with industrial production. But once all the differences between now and then are factored in, we're left with a remarkable outpouring of handsome designs from studios in North America and Europe, and a creative flourishing of a certain kind of architectural practice.