Ten years ago I heard Stephen Kieran of Kieran Timberlake Architects complain that you can drive the cheapest Hyundai into a thunderstorm at 70 MPH and it won’t leak a drop of water inside, with its double gaskets and internal drainage channels at the doors and windows. He challenged the housing industry to do as good a job.
Now Martin Holladay at the Green Building Advisor asks Do Cars Perform Better Than Houses? In many ways they do; they have so much technology, safety devices, electronic systems, are subject to all kinds of serious stresses of movement and weather changes and just keep going with generally very little maintenance. As Holladay points out, they are off-grid; when Toronto got knocked off grid by a huge storm two weeks ago, our Mayor Rob Ford was able to ride it out in his air conditioned Escalade.
Holladay says it is all about economies of scale:
This is where I think Martin’s comparison of cars and houses goes awry. Most North American prefabricated houses are built using the same technology as in a conventional house, the same wood framing and drywall and vinyl. They are not particularly high tech; the factories just have better tools and working conditions. They are not built like cars; they are built like houses in transportable pieces. They are not really mass produced; almost every one is customized.
Assembly Wichita House/ WP/CC BY 2.0
The Wichita House
There have in fact been very few attempts to really build a house the way a car or an airplane might be built, to really look at the materials and the design in terms of design and manufacturing efficiency. Buckminster Fuller tried it with the Wichita House, which was based on his earlier Dymaxion house, using the Beech Aircraft factory in Wichita. He was going to sell them for 50 cents per pound, a novel but sensible way of selling houses.
© Henry Ford museum/ Interior, Wichita House
It was a hit; Barry Bergdoll and Peter Christensen write:
All the maintenance you ever need to do to a Lustron Home/Promo image
The Lustron
Then there was the Lustron House, also built in an airplane factory out of porcelain enamelled steel. It was designed to"defy weather, wear, and time,"
Lustron Living Room/Promo image
60 years later, homeowners report that many Lustrons have never needed repainting or new roofing. Nonetheless, the company went bankrupt in 1950; it couldn’t compete with the stickbuilders.
Things organized neatly: The parts of a Lustron/via
The problem is one of scale, as Martin suggests, but not the scale of production numbers; the problem is size, the scale of square footage. Cars are small; the Lustron houses were by today’s standards, tiny. American houses are designed to be as big as possible, surrounded by as little material as possible and built as cheaply as possible, with as few expensive tools as possible, the two major ones being a nail gun and an F150 pickup truck. Most of them won’t last as long as my ‘89 Miata. Until Americans are willing to trade quantity for quality, this is what they will get.