Visionary Venice designer Jennifer Siegal imagines a thriving market for environmentally friendly prefab housing. But in the real world, will her vision prove…unsustainable?
By Eryn Brown
Jennifer Siegal’s stomach is grumbling, which is causing audio problems for a TV crew that has invaded her sunny Venice office. “We’ve got an anomaly!” the sound guy shouts. Siegal, a 39-year-old designer, has already been answering a producer’s questions for an hour. She sits in a vintage Steelcase desk chair and fiddles impatiently with her mike. “TV is incredibly weird,” she says.
She should know. Her grand scheme for plopping $99,000 Modernist homes onto vacant lots most anywhere is making the phone ringÔø?and not just with calls from extremists in the shelter media subculture. Publications from Esquire to the New York Times want to hear about her plan to bring a historically upscale design aesthetic to the eco-attuned masses.
Once they wrap up in the office, the crew du jour, from the Fine Living Network cable channel, plans to tail Siegal to a factory in the wind-swept Inland Empire where a contractor is building her first Portable House of steel, lots of glass and sustainable materials such as Plyboo (bamboo flooring) and Biofiber Composite (sunflower seed-based interior walls). Buyers will provide the land and the foundation, pick colors from a short list of options and, four weeks later, watch a crane pluck their 720-square-foot house off a flatbed trailer.
Prefabrication is hardly novel. For many decades architects and designers have tried to emulate the auto industry by making houses on assembly lines. What’s new, or rather newly in vogue, is the high design/environmentally conscious/prefab combo. Siegal’s concept illustrates the potential for housing, particularly on modest parcels in the urban cores of Southern California.
Except there’s a problem. For all of the Portable House’s adaptability, simplicity and affordability on the computer screen, it shares with other “pretty fab” projects nationwide a propensity for being difficult and pricey to build. It’s not housing for people seeking an inexpensive alternative to conventional tract-home design. At least not yet.
But no one is worrying about that today. The TV crew loads its gear into a truck and follows Siegal from Abbot Kinney Boulevard to a place she calls Ecoville.
A New Hampshire native, Siegal developed her own architecture major at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in upstate New York. After graduating in 1987, she worked in the San Francisco office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, a firm known for designing skyscrapers and airports. She eventually went back to school, pursuing a master’s degree at the freethinking Southern California Institute of Architecture in downtown Los Angeles. Her love of Southern California’s landscape, as well as the region’s diversity and artistic freedomÔø?”it’s not as much of an old boys’ club as Boston or New York,” she saysÔø?persuaded her to settle down.
Siegal began teaching at Burbank’s Woodbury University, and in 1998 started the Office of Mobile Design. It dovetailed with her passion for trucks and Airstream trailers, and promoted a philosophy she called New Nomadism. The thinking went like this: If people store their lives in devices such as cellphones and laptops, what anchors them to one place? Why can’t we take our homes or workplaces with us, building and dissolving communities as we go?
To test her ideas, the designer began creating opportunities to make mobile buildings. She and her Woodbury students teamed up with a Hollywood nonprofit to develop an environmental education vehicle called the Mobile Eco Lab. When HÔø?agen-Dazs invited her to participate in a design contest it was sponsoring, she came up with an ice cream store on wheels called the Pleasure Mobile. Siegal lectured, taught and ultimately cemented her reputation as a leader in her niche with the 2002 publication of the book “Mobile: The Art of Portable Architecture.” That same year, her work won her a Loeb Fellowship at Harvard University.
Siegal’s portable designs also caught the eye of Allison Arieff, editor in chief of San Francisco-based Dwell magazine, a shaker in the prefab housing movement. When Arieff asked Siegal in 2000 if she did prefab houses, the designer replied, “Now I do,” and plunged into the groundwork for a 12-foot-wide by 60-foot-long domicile slim enough to travel on a freeway from a factory to its destination. Three years later, Siegal followed this Portable House with the Swellhouse, which incorporated steel modules 13 feet high by 13 feet wide by 26 feet long. It too was prefab, but the client got to decide how the modules would fit together and which interior materials to use.
The two projects appeared as computer-generated renderings in Dwell and carried Siegal’s practice in a new direction. By late 2003, curiosity about prefab houses had exploded. “My phone started ringing off the hook. All these people were calling and asking, ‘Can I get one?,’ ‘What does it cost?’ ” recalls Siegal. A lot of the interest turned out to be talkÔø?developers who weren’t quite ready to move on projects, would-be homeowners who weren’t quite ready to commit to buying.
But by the time the TV crew invaded her office in early 2004, Siegal had two contracts for Swellhouses, one in Los Feliz and another in Manhattan Beach. She also was working with a developer-partner to create Ecoville, a community of 40 affordable live-work artist lofts, in the form of stacked Portable House units, on a 2.5-acre site at the corner of Main and Alameda in downtown L.A.
Who buys into the mod green concept?
Idealists mostly, including physician Lance Stone, Siegal’s first Portable House client. Bored with what he considered the sterile environs of La Jolla, Stone recently bought a home near downtown San Diego. He wants to install a Portable House behind it. “I like the modern aesthetic, and I like the idea of sustainable materials,” Stone says. “I want to make a statement about my lifestyle.”
Such statements are born, it turns out, in the Inland Empire, a mecca of prefabricated house constructionÔø?old-school prefab, that is: mobile homes with faux-wood finishes and modular houses built from factory-produced pieces.
The idea of modular housing is brilliant, Siegal says with a sigh as she drives past the facades of run-on suburban tracts en route to Riverside. “The structures can be really beautiful. But once they cover it in stucco, it loses its appeal really quickly.”
The Fine Living crew follows her to a firm called Aurora Modular, which cranks out buildings such as portable classrooms. Led by Siegal, they walk into the hangar-like factory and see a skeleton of a Portable House: a rectangle of steel girders hanging off a gigantic crane. The only recognizable architectural detail is the contour of a single-pitched sloping roof. There is no framing for doors or windows. The floor is made of plywood. “So cool!” Siegal says. She holds up swatches of Plyboo and Biofiber Composite, eager to convey how the frame will eventually look as a home.
“It makes tears well up in my eyes,” Siegal says at one point during filming. “You just want to take this home and stick it in your backyard!”
The Fine Living producer nods absently.
Flash forward six months, and one thing’s certain: a portable house will not land on Lance Stone’s property anytime soon. Unlike permanent homes, manufactured mobile homes must comply with a special set of codes that has been tailored to pass muster with every city in the state. And these regulations confound Siegal, Stone and the engineers at Penwal, the Rancho Cucamonga-based builder that manufactured the Portable House.
Even small details, such as pop-out windows for emergency exits, spawn weeks of debate with inspectors. “The state isn’t used to pop-outs,” says Scott Jones, a Penwal manager. The company spends months hammering out the initial design and engineering specs. Siegal describes these technicalities as “an ongoing mega-headache.”
Back in San Diego, even more bureaucracy ensues. To get a building permit, Stone must win the blessings of his Barrio Logan design review committee and the city of San Diego. Neither cares for the project. Some neighbors worry about the stigma of a “mobile home” in their midst. Others fear the modern design will clash with the 100-year-old bungalows around it. “You’d think people would welcome us with open arms,” Stone says. “But I think they have trouble understanding where this fits in.” Stone wonders if his new neighbors, mostly Latinos, are simply leery of gentrification. “They might be skeptical of white people coming in there, and worried about the potential that they’ll have to move out,” he says.
In the end, whipsawed by demands for too many costly changes, including a new sidewalk, Stone backs away from his plan. “It was looking like it was going to be another $50,000 to $70,000,” he says. “I just don’t see how practical prefab housing would be. At least for an urban area.” Until another potential site materializes, he decides to lease the house to Siegal, who finds a spot for it on a lot near her office.
Meanwhile, Ecoville wilts. The developer, Siegal says, doesn’t have the heart to work through the red tape, and sells the project site.
Siegal’s story raises anew the question of whether high-design prefab architecture can ever emerge from the models and the theory books. In the 2002 book “Prefab,” Dwell editor Arieff describes how Buckminster Fuller designed mass-produced housing in 1927, and how Richard Neutra, Frank Lloyd Wright and others spun prefab schemes throughout the 20th century. In each case, their ideas gained momentum, but never enough to really excite housing manufacturers or developers with deep pockets.
Even today, as well-known architects such as Leo Marmol and Rocio Romero experiment with prefab, Arieff says large-scale, architect-designed prefab developments are rare. “It’s bottom-line reasons,” she says. “If you try to build one prefab house, it’s usually not cheaper. You have to make 20 to have it be cheaper. But you have to get a stake in the ground before that can happen. Someone needs to make the financial commitment.”
Siegal hasn’t given up on large-scale prefab. She believes that Ecoville “will morph into another project.” She’s talking with a real estate developer who has sights on a housing project in Inglewood. And she is working with a business partner to start Precision Designed Homes. PDH’s factory inÔø?where elseÔø?Riverside will use robots to build prefab houses, taking advantage of just-in-time manufacturing (the inventory management method that delivered huge profits for Dell Computer in the 1990s). “This will change the face of architecture,” she promises. “It will slash the price in half.”
Siegal says that building a “high-end” house in her new factory will cost just $100 to $120 a square foot, almost half the going rate for a conventional home. It doesn’t seem doableÔø?or does it?
“Sometimes the dumber you are, the more able you are to pull something off, because you don’t know you can’t do it,” Siegal says.
The makers of Plyboo and Biofiber Composite are standing by.
Arthur Magazine 