Five full-scale prefabricated houses open their doors to the public July 20 as part of the Museum of Modern Art?s exhibition “Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling,” on view through October 20. The fully realized designs—displayed on a vacant lot next to the museum’s West 53rd Street home—were conceived by emerging American and European architects. Among the disparate examples are Burst *008, New York–based Jeremy Edmiston and Douglas Gauthier?s box-shaped residence raised on piers, built with the aid of a computer program, and KieranTimberlake Associates? Cellophane House, a self-consciously impermanent four-story structure consisting of an aluminum frame on which materials are “collected,” rather than connected, to encourage their future recycling. (Weekly reports charting the houses’ construction before their museum debut have been archived on momahomedelivery.org.) Inside the museum are gathered plans, models and film on 58 other notable prefabricated projects.Although housing made in this way is seldom appreciated for qualities beyond its cost-effectiveness, Barry Bergdoll hopes the show, his first since joining MOMA as its chief curatorfor architecture and design in January 2007, will highlight the process’s potential for innovative aesthetics—a trait that may prompt future generations of home buyers to shed their prefab preconceptions.

"Ab Fab Prefab" originally appeared in the July 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from the July issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's July 2008 Table of Contents.