KieranTimberlake has teamed up with LivingHomes, Profile Structures, and Color Design Art to create a modular show home for Builder magazine. The home will be on display at the 2009 International Builders' Show in Las Vegas, January 20-23. You can take a virtual tour of the project on the Builder website.

Boyce Thompson, Builder magazine's editorial director, writes:

Next week, four semi-trailers will leave a factory in Southern California carrying the modules and panels that make up our show home for this year's International Builders' Show in Las Vegas. The convoy will idle across the street in a parking lot, waiting for the convention floor to open for exhibitors. Then, when the doors roll up at 12:01 a.m. on the morning of the 14th, crews will race the components to the floor and begin a mad, five-day race to ready the home for visitors.

If you are going to the IBS this year, check out the Builder LivingHome. We've been working for more than a year on this super-sustainable "mod" home. The experience of navigating the nascent modular industry to line up a builder, an architect, a factory, and suppliers is an interesting story in itself. But it is sure to be eclipsed by the home itself, which speaks volumes about the trends that are likely to preoccupy builders for the next several decades. Continue reading...

Cellophane House, photo © KieranTimberlake

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.

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Cellophane House, photo © Peter Aaron/Esto

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.

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Loblolly House, photo © Peter Aaron/Esto

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.

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Illustration: Kerry Roper

WIRED MAGAZINE: 16.10

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.

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