“I’m going to say a horrible word,” warns UIC architecture professor Roberta Feldman. “Trailer trash. We link it with people we consider uprooted and mobile.” Housing built in a factory doesn’t exclusively mean double-wides, and it may offer an affordable alternative to the usual–and more expensive–practice of building homes from scratch on-site. But it’s hard for many people to get comfortable with a type of housing they usually encounter only in jokes.
Low cost was the main incentive for buyers, but design quality also played a major role. “They were all copied after popular styles,” says Elgin-based architecture historian Rebecca Hunter, who maintains a registry of mail-order houses. “In basic size, shape, and style they are no different from anything else on the block.” The most expensive Sears home between 1915 and 1920, the Magnolia, sold for up to $6,000; the house included a two-story portico with fluted columns, a sun parlor, and a “massive but graceful stairway.” By 1940, when the effects of the Depression forced Sears to discontinue its catalog houses, 75,000 had been sold. Large numbers of them remain in Elgin, Villa Park, Downers Grove, and other suburbs, but few were ever built in the city proper.
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The benefits of designs like these may eventually trickle down to the broader market, but they currently bear the stamp of playthings for the affluent. The real-world potential for manufactured housing is in alleviating the increasing shortage of affordable housing in cities like Chicago, where between November 2003 and November 2004 the median price of a single-family home increased 10.2 percent, to $246,000. North Center, not long ago a solidly working-class neighborhood, is now one of the priciest residential communities in the city: according to Appraisal Research data published in the Tribune, in October the median purchase price of a home there was almost half a million dollars.
Manufactured housing requires standardization. Because most mobile and modular homes are driven to their sites, their pieces must conform to size restrictions on highways. Modules in “Design Innovations” could not be more than 80 feet long, 18 feet wide, and 14 feet 4 inches high. Several participants found ingenious ways around the limit. In Packed House, by David Khoury, “the package, typically a disposable husk, transforms itself into an integral and permanent part of the structure upon downloading.” One half of the husk forms the walls surrounding the unit’s courtyard; the house itself is lifted out of and placed atop the other half, which becomes a carport and entry pavilion.
One installation in “Design Innovations,” Manufactured Site, thinks beyond these issues and in the process makes the others seem like a sideshow. An introduction by its creator, San Diego architect Teddy Cruz, notes that 837 million people worldwide are essentially squatters: lacking legal title to the land they live on, their homes, packed into densely overcrowded shantytowns, are makeshift structures built from whatever materials are at hand. That’s the case for half the urban residents of Africa, a third of those in Asia, and a fourth of those in Latin America and the Caribbean.
