In an earlier post we described the initial stages of the Cellophane House disassembly. Since then, we have successfully lowered all of the chunks to the ground and have been disassembling and organizing the parts from each chunk in preparation for loading onto flatbed trucks. Jason Niebish and Elizabeth Kahley have been on site overseeing the disassembly effort for KieranTimberlake. They have collectively labeled the parts, transferred gussets from cardboard boxes to plastic crates and palletized parts in preparation for fork lifting to flatbed trucks.
Cellophane House was designed for ease of assembly, disassembly and reassembly. With the conclusion of the Home Delivery show at The Museum of Modern Art on October 26, the next phase of our experiment is beginning. Our intention is to disassemble and rebuild the house on a new location, helping to offset the millions of tons of construction and demolition debris generated in the United States each year.
It was announced last week that Loblolly House is a winner of the second annual Lifecycle Building Challenge 2 (LBC2) competition, sponsored by the United States Environmental Protection Agency.
Instant Suburb of Prefabs Hits New York
By Andrew Blum
Tourists press up against the construction fence on the corner of 53rd and Sixth, staring speechless as a giant crane lifts an entire bathroom into the air and deposits it in what will be a master bedroom. Cellophane House is five stories tall, with floor-to-ceiling windows, translucent polycarbonate steps embedded with LEDs, and exterior walls made of NextGen SmartWrap, an experimental plastic laminated with photovoltaic cells. Its aluminum frame was cut from off-the-shelf components in Europe, assembled in New Jersey, then snapped together in 16 days on a vacant lot next to the Museum of Modern Art — joining four other full-size houses onsite through October as part of the exhibit Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling. It looks as if a suburban cul-de-sac took a wrong turn at the Holland Tunnel.
Last Friday, the entire KieranTimberlake team piled into two charter buses and trekked up the New Jersey Turnpike to see the Home Delivery, Fabricating the Modern Dwelling exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art. This movie was taken with a handheld camera and shows the interior spaces from the top down. Indeed, the experience of walking through the house is quite different from seeing it on a computer screen.
