Marmol Radziner and Dwell Debut New Skyline Series of Prefabs

Inhabitat favorites Marmol Radziner Prefab and Dwell have teamed together in a joint effort to bring “good design to everyone” with their recently debuted Skyline series of prefabs! Unveiled just this past Friday at the Dwell on Design Conference, the Skyline series comprises four interchangeable floor plans available in six modern configurations that make extensive use of recycled materials, high efficiency insulation, and offer the optional installation of solar panels. Available in sizes ranging from 1 story (1755 sq ft) to two stories (3180 sq ft), the series has been designed for installation in urban spaces and offers the privacy of a residential retreat while bringing the outdoors in through a series of floor to ceiling windows and patio spaces.

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Scrap Lab: Furniture Made of Industrial Scraps

Scrap Lab is a group of designers based out of Bangkok’s Kasetsart University’s Architecture program that creates fun and innovative furniture out discarded industrial scraps. The group makes an eclectic variety of furniture, from a funky shaggy lamp to a lounge chair with a quilt-block pattern — all masterfully re-purposing materials that were once considered waste. While their list of materials includes traditional materials such as wood and metal, it also includes less traditional items such as foam and rope. The purpose of the group’s work is to not only create physical products, but also to collect research on how discarded materials can be used effectively to design functional and aesthetically pleasing pieces.

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Froebe: Gold-Plated Shipping Container Bling Bar

The world of shipping container architecture just got a little bit more exciting. We recently heard about Froebe, a gold-plated shipping container bar from Linz, Austria which is the latest addition to the world of hip, mobile food establishments. Designed by artist Andreas Strauss, the Froebe is an upcycled, blinged-out container equipped with hydraulics and a ‘rich’ paint job — making for an eye-catching and unusual hangout spot to have a beer.

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IC Green Container Dwellings Sprout Up in California

Inhabitat loves shipping containers, whether from down under or the Great North. These self-contained quadrilateral wonders are the perfect modular building unit; easily transported, super durable, and, with over 700,000 containers being abandoned per year in U.S. ports, in need dire need of being re-purposed. That’s why we are happy to see IC Green, another innovator in the field of shipping container architecture. Check out their line of modest but sustainable and stylish container dwellings as they sprout up all over Southern California, including this weekend at Dwell on Design!

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Daniel Libeskind’s ‘Sustainable’ Prefab

Daniel Libeskind’s latest creation, The Villa, is a step back from his usual large-scale designs, and an attempt to get his foot into the prefab and sustainability design world. An impressive contemporary home, the home is touted as sustainable and energy-efficient. Unlike most humble and affordable prefabricated design, the 3-story home includes a shiny zinc facade and impressive angles — a far cry from the traditional boxy prefab we have grown so accustomed to seeing. And while Libeskind included several eco-friendly building techniques, some seem to be mighty skeptical.

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Sheds For Living: Small Practical Prefab Living Space

Small houses are the new black right now, and this practical little living space couldn’t be more in vogue. The “Shed,” designed by Manchester-based FKDA Architects, provides all the necessary amenities for living in a compact unit. Designed for those in need of affordable and practical space, the Shed is sustainably built from FSC certified wood, with a healthy interior, efficient use of interior space, and it can run off renewable energy.

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Sustain miniHome debuts the new 12 x 36 California Edition

It’s no secret that we dig Sustain miniHomes. Inhabitat has always appreciated their sustainable spin on the mobile home and have eaten up their eye candy since the beginning. But on this fabulous prefab Friday, we have some even more exciting news to report!  The Toronto-based builders are coming to Los Angeles to debut their California edition — the first of the 12 WIDE series designed with special consideration for passive cooling and ventilation in a range of California climates.

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The Sunset Magazine Modern Cottage

Known for showcasing the latest innovations in architecture, construction, design, and green-building practices on the West Coast, Sunset magazine’s Idea House program recently debuted its latest project, the Modern Cottage, this past weekend at the magazine’s annual Celebration Weekend. Created and designed by Norwegian architect Casper Mork-Ulnes, Co-Founder and Director of Design of the San Francisco-based pre-fab building company Modern Cabana and Co-Founder and Director of Building, Nick Damner, the house incorporates green design with affordable living spaces.

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Renewable Cork Eco-Furniture and Accessories by Corque

If you’re looking for unique home accessories that are environmentally friendly and have a clean and elegant design quality, you’ll want to check out Corque’s new collection crafted with - you guessed it - cork! From the fun Rolha candle holder which allows users to turn old bottles into candelabras, to funky Topography placemats, which bring rough terrain to the table, their “Designing Living Objects” line truly showcases the versatility of cork.

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PREFAB FRIDAY: Modularean Eco Prefab Dollhouse!

Every week on Inhabitat, we feature the best and the brightest in green prefab-ulous designs– so when we saw David Baker’s stunning, tiny Modularean House, we were excited to see that the joy of prefab architecture can now be appreciated even by the littlest connoisseurs. This miniature bamboo version of an …

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PREFAB FRIDAY: resPOD from “Down Under”

It’s wonderful to see the popularity of prefabricated architecture spreading everywhere, from urban metropolises to pastoral rural settings. resPOD, a conceptual prefab design by Matthew Grace Architecture who is based in Australia, is a flexible form of housing with several different eco-friendly features including passive solar design and a greywater system. Constructed from shipping containers, the homes would be retro-fitted in a factory for quick and energy-efficient production, offering prospective homeowners a greener option when it comes to purchasing a home.

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Michelle Kaufmann Designs Folds Under Terrible Economy

It is with great sadness that we recently learned of the closing of Michelle Kaufmann Designs, one of our favorite green architecture practices and close friends to Inhabitat. The groundbreaking studio blazed the path for green building and was in large part responsible for linking modern, modular prefabricated housing with sustainability. Having interviewed Michelle and followed her growing practice over the past five years the news comes as a great blow and we’re really sorry to see them go!

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PREFAB FRIDAY: $75,000 Clayton “I-house”

We love this prefab home because it’s extremely energy efficient and affordable coming in at under $75,000 for the smaller model and under $94,000 for the larger model. Clayton Homes, the largest manufacturers of mobile homes in the U.S., recently released this high tech green home that is far removed from your standard trailer park dwelling.

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Pratt Students Design For One Dollar

Far and away our favorite exhibit at this year’s International Contemporary Furniture Fair was Design For A Dollar. With one dollar to work with, students from the Pratt Institute of Design in NYC were challenged to design something worthwhile. Through the design process not only did the students from the Department of Industrial Design learn the meaning of a dollar, but many incorporated cast-off items upcycled into new and intriguing designs. 80 undergraduate and graduate students entered the contest and 15 of the best designs were chosen to exhibit at ICFF this year. Here we highlight our favorites for their eco-friendly design, creative reuse and their affordability.

DRIP PLATE by Catherine Merrick
The Drip Plate by Catherine Merrick is an ingenious reuse of an antique ceramic plate. Originally featuring a winter scene in blue, Merrick renewed the thrift store find by dripping wax onto the plate and then sandblasting the rest away to create a new design. The diner will ponder while cleaning his plate, what the design used to be. The cost depends on the price of the plate and patience of the shopper.

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Tennis Ball Chair by Hugh Hayden

What do you think of when you think “green design?” Probably not a chair made entirely of recycled tennis balls! This fun and unexpected take on recycling by furniture designer Hugh Hayden is precisely why we named his enormously playful FUNATURE Tennis Ball Chair the winner of our BKLYN Designs Most Innovative Use of Materials Award. Not only is his choice of medium (297 repurposed tennis balls) smart and simple, it’s also fun and engaging. And when it comes to getting people talking about sustainable design, the Tennis Ball Chair is the perfect eco conversation piece.

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Puma City Shipping Container Store Comes to Boston’s Fan Pier

When we first heard about Puma City, the tri-level, 11,000-square-foot retail store and event space made of 24 refurbished shipping containers, we were intrigued by the popular sportswear brand’s pre-fab initiative. The portable Puma Store, which was designed by our favorite shipping container architects LOT-EK, makes clever re-use of discarded shipping containers and has been traveling around the world as a spokes-structure for both Puma and prefabricated buildings. So when we heard that the lego-esque stack, which was recently named best retail store by Travel + Leisure, would be making a stop in nearby Boston, we had to go see it in action!

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PREFAB FRIDAY: European Influenced Hangar Prefabs

We love covering prefab homes here on Inhabitat because we think prefab is an amazingly efficient, promising and innovative way of building houses, and we find this especially true with these Hangar Prefabs from Hangar Design Group. The streamlined and contemporary design makes us believe that our lives could be just that simple and organized, if only we lived in one of these prefabs. Designed by Juan and Sara Matiz, who now live in New York City, but are Colombian and Italian respectively, these three stylish prefab homes can fit just about anyone’s tastes.

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PREFAB FRIDAY: Container Homes for the Tropics

Inhabitat’s Prefab Friday column has seen its fair share of shipping container homes, but we’ve never seen shipping containers paired with bamboo as a construction material before. But now, Bamboo Groves, a design and construction firm in Costa Rica, has developed some great designs for homes made from insulated shipping containers and bamboo. Developed for the tropical climate, these prefab homes are different from the designs we are accustomed to — those designed for temperate or cooler climates.  Many of these prefab and shipping container homes focus on passive heating and cooling. But in warmer climates, such as Central America, construction requires a different tactic - insulating from the heat and providing lots of natural ventilation to help cool.

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PREFAB FRIDAY: The Annie Residence

This modern and warm prefab home is a stunning example of the beauty and quality you can achieve through the efficiency of prefab construction.. Inspired by multiple cultures, this eye-catching design by Austin-based Bercy Chen Studio features outdoor living space, water features and lots of windows to create a comfortable and attractive home. The home is constructed with a modular steel frame and thermasteel panels for an efficient and waste-minimizing design. With two families living in this home, the architects divided the house, providing separate, but inter-connected living areas for each family.

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PREFAB HYBRID: Wedge Home By Studio B Architects

Not everyone wants to live in a shipping container for the sake of eco-efficiency. That’s why homes such as this half-prefab, half-custom — or prefab hybrid, if you will — might just be the solution for those still on the fence about prefab and modular architecture. This home, entitled The Wedge, was designed by Studio B Architecture and constructed by BuildSense for North Carolina couple, Scott and Vikki Metheny, and their two boys. Composed of three modular parts that were fabricated off-site in a factory and a main two-story living area that was built on-site, the home is a total of 1,829 square feet.

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PREFAB FRIDAY: Stillwater Dwellings

We all love the idea of prefab homes - the simplicity of ready-made, to-go houses, and yet most of the time when we sit down to really study the plans with respect to our own lives and dreams, there’s just something lacking. We want prefab-style homes, but designed exactly to our lives and needs. If you’re like us, then you might enjoy checking out a new prefab designer:  Stillwater Dwellings, based out of Seattle, WA. This new firm has many traditional prefab homes ready to go, but also allows you to design your own from their pre-designed modules.

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PREFAB FRIDAY: Tiny Portable Paco Unit Home

Generally speaking a home needs to have a place to sleep, eat and groom. Beyond that, everything else is just extraneous. That’s why Japanese designers Jo Nagasaka and Schemata Architecture Office teamed up to design and build this prototype Paco Unit. Their vision was to produce a new portable, compact, and independent unit that contained only the things that a person needed to live, maybe not comfortably, but practically.

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PREFAB FRIDAY: PLACE Houses

This stunning home in Kirkland, Wash. is one in a series of prefabricated homes called PLACE Houses designed by architect Heather Johnston. The home’s diverse use of sustainably-sourced materials and low-impact energy harvesting — in addition to its fresh, contemporary look — won the series a spot as one of the Top 6 Prefab Designs in the April 2006 issue of Wallpaper magazine. Built with SIP panels, this 2,800 square-foot model home was constructed on-site and has almost every green amenity you can imagine. This PLACE House has the look of a custom-built home, but can be ordered and built as though it were part of a “ready-to-wear” line — making for an easy, streamlined package.

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PREFAB FRIDAY: Casa 100K by MarioCucinella Architects

This clustered, multi-unit building is both literally and metaphorically green. Constructed with prefabricated modules that come in various hues of green, the building and each housing unit include a myriad of different eco features that make this visionary design, by MarioCucinella Architects, an example of affordable and efficient construction and design techniques. On the exterior, the building is equipped with photovoltaic panels and a rainwater harvesting system, while the interior takes advantage of passive heating and cooling techniques to lower energy use during extreme weather. And best of all, the building is designed so that each home would cost just over $100,000 US dollars.

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BUNNY LANE: Adam Kalkin’s Home Within a Home

We’re big fans of architect Adam Kalkin for his quirky and fun home designs, such as the rapidly deploying Push-Button Home and the prefab Quick House. Now we’ve just spotted another fun Adam Kalkin masterpiece called Bunny Lane. A house within another, bigger house, this design is located on 3 acres of property in Kalkin’s home state of New Jersey. The outer shell is a modern, industrial shed with unusual shaped, custom roll-up doors and 3 stories of rooms on one end. The inner home is a traditional two-story New Jersey home, white-washed and pristine, sitting on display almost as if it were being preserved in a museum.

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PREFAB FRIDAY: Thailand’s Modular Green Home

This very interesting prefab home was designed specifically for the Baan Lae Suan Fair, a home and garden expo in Bangkok, Thailand. The theme for the 2008 fair was ‘Green Home Effects’ — and the main attraction of the show was this prefab container home by Bangkok-based firms, Site-Specific and Buatalah Studios. The model home is made from four re-used shipping containers and prefabricated modules. The prototype is an attempt to re-wire the methodology behind building a comfortable and sustainably-built home while meeting the needs of a Thai family.

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PREFAB FRIDAY: B-Line Small by Hive Modular

Part of living lightly on the planet is reducing the square footage of your home and living space. We applaud home designers like Minneapolis-based Hive Modular for presenting a very practical and stylish 2-bedroom home that is only 1,410 square feet. This new home was completed on an urban infill lot and is part of Hive’s popular B-Line series. Optimally situated, this home is a great example of a solar passive home and features many green design elements that help make its environmental impact minimal.

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MOD.FAB: Stunning Prefab by the School of Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright meets modern day prefab in the stunning Mod.Fab home, developed by students at Taliesin West in collaboration with their Dean Victor Sidy and Inhabitat favorite Jennifer Siegal. The goal of the collaboration was to build a prototype prefab conducive to elegant and sustainable living within the heart of the desert landscape. It only took a single picture for us to become instantaneous fans, and from passive solar design to photovoltaic panels and SIPs we’re thoroughly impressed with the project’s sustainable elements.

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PREFAB FRIDAY: EcoCoon Retreats

Lofted high above in the trees, Mathier Collos’ EcoCoon retreats are a conceptual design for prefabricated housing. Each of the London-based architect’s cocoon-like pod is outfitted with an array of sustainable features including rainwater collection, a greywater system, and biomass heating. And depending on the type of tree used and the tree branching density, solar panels can also be integrated to help make these pods as eco-sensitive as possible. The two-story, split-level retreats can comfortably accommodate two adults or a small family and larger models may be able to act as a small, quaint hostel with several guests.

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PREFAB FRIDAY: Riken Yamamoto’s Ecoms House

Riken Yamamoto’s Ecoms House exemplifies a new kind of home economics. Constructed out of aluminum panels, this diminutive 24-foot by 24-foot box demonstrates how economy in size and fabrication can lead to surplus in style and coolness. A prototype residence for SUS Corporation, a manufacturer of aluminum precision machine parts and furniture, this home was initially an experiment to create something out of aluminum that could not be expressed with steel. The exterior is inspired by the traditional use of tatami mats in Japanese homes — each of the four sides featuring transparent, opaque, and glass-covered aluminum lattice panels.

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PREFAB FRIDAY: KT 1.5 from LivingHomes

Building Magazine, a leading resource for home building, joined up with LivingHomes to produce a modern prefab home designed by Kieran Timberlake, the 2008 AIA Firm of the Year. The result of this collaboration, called the KT 1.5, was recently debuted at the International Builders Show in Las Vegas, where the home was installed on the showroom floor in 3 days. Including many sustainable design elements, the home has been designed to meet the LEED Platinum rating.

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