Prefabricated homes: Can they be the solution to the housing crisis?

Many business owners , government agencies , and architects have considered prefabrication as a way to build large quantities, quickly, and at low cost . Something we undoubtedly need. And yet, the idea of ​​"assembling" buildings in a few weeks or days, as is done in China or during postwar Europe, has not fully caught on until now. What's happening? Prefabricated housing is almost a century old , yet it has never become widespread in our country. That could be changing. The reason? It's finally paying off.

Until now, building prefabricated parts in a warehouse and then assembling them on-site required fewer but much more skilled workers, which made them significantly more expensive. It meant systematizing almost the entire design and production process, centralizing it in a single location and greatly limiting timescales. Almost with a watchmaker's precision, it represented an immense challenge to transform a traditional sector, which operates on open-plan construction sites for months with many specialized subcontractors, into an assembly line. It wasn't worth stopping laying bricks. Furthermore, for decades the result was crude and spartan. Prefabrication—as in Soviet cities and the outskirts of many cities—was associated with a gray and precarious world. The brutalist aesthetic soon went out of fashion, and modern neighborhoods became ugly and alienating, where the passage of time weighed heavily and the damage multiplied.

Today, however, in the collective housing sector, the lack of labor and the urgent need for homes are necessarily pushing the sector toward prefabrication. As in the 1960s, it doesn't matter whether the buildings are prettier or uglier; what matters is that there are buildings, not shacks. But we're not in 1960, and there are increasingly more examples of good prefabricated architecture , built with high-quality materials; because our comfort standards today are far higher than they were sixty years ago.

In many European countries, they're years ahead of us in this sector. Companies like the German company Aktiv Haus , based in Stuttgart and building its modules in affordable Poland, are a good example of what many mayors are looking for: social housing built in just a few months . Affordable buildings that are constructed like Lego bricks, but that still maintain a timeless and pleasing design . This is important if you're looking for a housing that doesn't look like the alienating blocks of the Parisian suburbs. Here in Spain, we also have very interesting examples that use three-dimensional modules, such as the two buildings with 45 and 40 social housing units and public facilities designed in Barcelona by architects César and Cristian Vivas. The assembly of the latter took just 10 days.

As I was saying, over the last few decades, countless new, durable and attractive materials have been developed that are gradually becoming affordable, starting with prefabricated wood architecture . It's common in Europe and Spain, and several public building and collective housing projects are already being built with prefabricated wood systems—with a much lower environmental impact and ecological footprint than concrete—such as the 52-unit public housing project currently being constructed by Madrid City Hall in Barajas.

Perhaps this August's fires will help us understand that investing in wood prefabrication —in the country with the fourth largest forest cover in Europe—is a way to create quality employment where there is depopulation, to keep forests cared for and productive, and to commit to much more sustainable construction systems. Through legislation, our cities could be major clients developing an entire industrial sector in several areas of rural Spain.

Alternative to homelessness

The problem is that the communal solution of collective housing is taking too long, and the "every man for himself" approach is starting to make a lot of sense. And so the number of people who will have few alternatives to the prefabricated shack will increase.

Today, they're even being sold on Amazon at ridiculous prices. There are companies selling 50 or 70 m2 wooden houses for less than €50,000 . That is, for €100,000, many people will go to the effort of buying a small plot of land 50 km from Madrid and installing a shack twice the size of one of those undignified interior apartments with a kitchen/bedroom that are sold downtown for the price of unicorn blood. These "houses"—for now without wheels—foreshadow a more than likely future, that of the perpetual caravan park that populates the remote outskirts of many American cities and is a decent alternative to shanties. But nobody gives dollars for nothing. The useful life of these "houses" is very short . Almost like a car, instead of appreciating in value, they begin to lose their value as soon as the tow truck leaves them on the lot. Often, the first defects become evident after just a few months. Dignity for today, decay and lack of services for tomorrow. Low-end prefabricated housing is a temporary solution, but for many, it will be the only solution to what's to come. Yes, what's to come, because in metropolitan areas like Madrid, in 15 years (2040), the housing shortage will exceed 400,000 , and not everyone will want to sleep under a bridge or share an apartment and refrigerator with strangers.

Should I build a normal house or a prefabricated one?

For the past two decades, the prefabricated housing sector has been accelerating along the runway, but it's already taken off. Until now, the prefabricated house was more of a shoebox, if not a 3D image on a website, than a reality. Experiments are expensive, as are skilled labor and durable materials, and all of this has for years hindered the prefabricated house's ability to be an alternative to traditional construction. As I said at the beginning, it wasn't worth it.

But since 2020, COVID -19 and geopolitical instability have been putting a strain on the transition process. Material supply chains have ground to a halt, the Houthis are blocking access to the Suez Canal for ships other than those from Chinese companies, the tariff war has made many products and materials from China containing aluminum and steel more expensive, the price of lumber has skyrocketed , and labor is becoming increasingly scarce.

As with developers of collective housing, the wealthy classes who purchase land to build a villa face enormous bottlenecks. The volatility in construction times and prices increases, and with it the need for alternatives that, while not cheaper than a traditional house, offer speed, durability, increasingly attractive designs, and (above all) fixed prices .

When the upper classes accept it

When prefabricated houses appear in fashion and design magazines, it means the time has come to "elevate what is normal on the street to the status of normal." But it's one thing to prefabricate a single house, and quite another to industrialize it . That is, to turn it into a customizable, mass-produced product.

Renew or die . Curiously, it is architects specializing in single-family homes who are launching into the creation of chalet prefabrication companies.

For example, the well-known Joaquín Torres , and the luxury modular villas of Valencians Sergio and Rubén Navarro , owners of the award-winning company inHAUS , which has built more than 160 homes since 2015, using a 3D construction system that allows the homes to be produced in their factory in Valencia, 95% finished, and installed on-site in a single day . In both cases, they have the great merit of managing to bring a little grace to those boring, cookie-cutter white shoebox designs - built with prefabricated concrete pieces - that are so widely sold online. The result is not very different from that of villas that are built in the traditional way, but that is precisely their greatest virtue, they achieve what they seek: to be fashionable without being noticeable that they are prefabricated.

And there's still a psychological component (which could be the subject of another article) to the preference for the artisanal illusion of "handmade." Whether it's a home, a Zara Home dish, or a seven-euro supermarket pizza.

Perhaps the most interesting example in Spain is Tini Living , a company run by architects Pilar Cano Lasso and Ignacio de la Vega . Not only do they create superb traditional construction projects, but they've also taken prefabrication out of its monotony , researching history and materials and reinterpreting the famous " Case Study Houses ," prefabricated houses designed in California after World War II by some of the best architects of their time. With great sensitivity, they've created a contemporary product that's already being exported to several countries. It's one that's not subject to passing fads, elegant and timeless, with materials that adapt to the environment and without sacrificing the sense of industrialized architecture. Perhaps that's why their client base includes so many architects.

In any case, prefabrication in housing is here to stay , and both multi-family and single-family homes are currently experiencing a significant acceleration. It will be in the best examples of this era that the forms, typologies, designs, and materials that will presumably be widespread for a long time to come will be established. That's why it's an interesting time to focus on them. Because today's R&D will create the standardizable products that will multiply in the future . And, with a bit of luck, they will allow us to have affordable neighborhoods, built quickly , sustainable, with reasonable prices, and, above all, pleasant to live in. They shouldn't be harsh and alienating, nor do they abandon the idea that beautiful cities are only the preserve of the most privileged.