Dwell's Rubbish

I love the effort of modular makers and designers have embarked on to make everyone feel stupid who doesn't buy their load of baloney about the brave new world of housing. This Month's cover "Smarter. Cheaper. Faster" -implying that their side business of making factory built homes and selling them doesn't somehow affect their ability to be unbaised. And last year Builder Magazine thought a modular was the wave of the future, although someone forgot to tell the consumer. The thing about modular prefab ready made kit homes is that the people behind these grand schemes to condescendingly force the modular into the main stream are missing the boat. HOMEBUYERS AREN'T STUPID. You can't say it's cheaper when it's not. You can't say it's faster when it's not. You can't say it's Smarter, when it's not. People talk, and I know better than anyone that a pre fab home can't be built any quicker than a stick-built home unless you conveniently neglect about half the tradesmen involved in the process. You can fool some of the people some of the time, etc... Look, pre fab is cool. I've looked into on several occasions. Pre Fab is compelling. Pre Fab is new. So I got nothing against it- I'm not some old stick-in-the-mud - I just think the Dwells, Versaci the architect and New World Homes have to come up with a better hook than faster, cheaper and smarter. It's not any of those things and modular will never win market share because some marketing machine says it makes you smarter. That's so 2007.