Blu used the funding to first solve a conundrum that has long bedeviled prefab firms.
FORBES: Blu Homes' Apple Approach to Building Green Prefab Houses
So-called modern prefab had become a staple of home-design magazines during the housing boom.
Prefab, long the province of double-wides and, more recently, eco-friendly designer homes, is going commercial.
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Several luxury developers have caught on to the prefab trend and applied it to the high-end market.
In recent years prefab, boxy housing units with no pretense to a boating heritage have been floated onto the canals.
In green building news, architects pushed the frontier of prefab architecture by installing surprising pop-up buildings around the world.
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In North Wolfen, a collection of prefab apartment buildings put up in the 1960s, the losses seem to outweigh the gains.
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Also introduced prefab, 500- square-foot Ikea homes, targeting single-parent households in Sweden.
Cerulli compared how these prefab fund baskets fared against portfolios built by advisers who were free to move money around as they wished.
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Many luxury buyers will always associate prefab with low-end, homogeneous slabs and, for them, building a home from scratch is the preferable route.
As of last month 315, 196 persons were still living in temporary prefab housing, public apartments, and private homes that have taken these people in.
Perhaps this was because the prefab-housing business was not doing well.
While modern prefab succeeded architecturally, it mostly failed in the factory.
FORBES: Blu Homes' Apple Approach to Building Green Prefab Houses
In 2008, Zhang began experimenting with prefab construction that he says makes for buildings that are cheaper to build and consume less concrete and water.
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Attia's creation is what he calls the Roundhouse, a modular window-wrapped structure that's supposed to make up for the bad name prefab housing has gotten over the years.
We are all educated and thinking people who will not be used by either Mr. Beckel or the hijackers of Islam in order to fit into a prefab social and ideological pigeonhole.
Prefabs and modular homes have been enjoying a kitschy, modernist revival for over a decade now, but even the companies that introduced sleek new prefab designs to the industry typically emphasized affordability.
When Mr. Agarwala emailed Mr. Pardo about the possibility of putting up a prefab house he'd seen on the firm's Facebook page, Mr. Pardo suggested finding land and building from scratch instead.
The Hesses make jokes out of affectlessness and drabness the nowheresville prefab tackiness of the houses and the emptiness of a patch of country so remote that not even popular culture touches it.
"The options package just grew and grew, and economies of scale were never reached, " says Allison Arieff, former editor-in-chief of Dwell, who wrote the book on prefab in 2002 (Prefab, Gibbs Smith).
Instead of getting lumped into prefab categories of consumer, you essentially create your own custom categories that by definition create groups that you know define you (and your friends) best: biking buddies, fellow gardeners, iPhone enthusiasts.
Nomadic Resorts unveiled The Looper, an amazing new prefab pod dwelling that can pop up anywhere, and one of the world's most famous museums, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, will soon be lit up with 750, 000 new LED lights.
Zaatari is a sprawling camp made up of canvas tents and prefab shelters in the Jordanian desert, close to the Syrian border, which has tripled in size in the last three months, in order to accommodate the thousands of refugees arriving every day.
Firms often subcontracted manufacturing to different factories and achieved neither economies of scale nor the standardization necessary to mass-produce green homes, according to Allison Arieff, a former editor in chief of Dwell magazine and an influential figure in the modern prefab movement.
FORBES: Blu Homes' Apple Approach to Building Green Prefab Houses
In the Sept. 12 issue of Forbes, I write about Blu Homes, a Massachusetts startup that makes green prefab houses that fold up in the factory for shipping and are unfolded on site and bolted to a foundation in a day (see video at end of this post).
FORBES: Blu Homes' Apple Approach to Building Green Prefab Houses
This week Inhabitat shined a light on the future of high-tech architecture as we brought you 20 stunning sun-powered homes that are getting ready to battle it out in this year's Solar Decathlon - including Team New York's prefab Roof Pod, Canada's TRTL solar shell house, and China's Y Container home.
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