The Prefabrication of Houses (Classic Reprint) - Softcover

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Excerpt from The Prefabrication of Houses

Fourteen years ago Albert Farwell Bemis completed his important trilogy on housing, published under the general title, The Evolving House. The final volume of this work, Rational Design, was largely devoted by Mr. Bemis to exposition of his modular theory, a theory which has since found wide application in the standardization of the dimensions of building materials.

The volume also contained a long appendix which I had the privilege of putting together and which at the time of publication was perhaps the largest single compilation of the efforts of various people over the years to arrive at a design for a factory-made house.

This appendix had serious defects, and the greatest of these was one common to the times, and one from which prefabrication has not yet escaped, that is, an inordinate interest in the engineering detail of the various proposals and an inadequate interest in all the other factors which might determine success or failure.

It is true that I attempted to correct this by publishing a list of questions which a hopeful prefabricator ought conscientiously to ask himself, but even these were heavily weighted on the side of design; and, though the individual descriptions did attempt to state many facts about each proposal, these facts were obtained from the armchair, so to speak, by using the replies sent in by the sponsors themselves. Experience has shown that sponsors are universally overoptimistic.

In the process of putting together this appendix, we naturally accumulated very substantial files of information. Mr. Bemis died in 1936, while his last volume was in the press; in 1938 Mrs. Bemis and her children established the Albert Farwell Bemis Foundation for housing research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I had the honor to be the first Director. The information files came with the Foundation to M.I.T.

We had scarcely put together a working team when…

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