Architecture.com - Official site of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). The Riba Journal has a searchable archive. The Library provides access to the online catalogue. This catalogue will locate books and drawings in the library's collection, but it also serves as an index to over 300 architectural periodicals owned by the RIBA Library. A title search for Houses: prefabrication, for example, yields over 700 results and includes books and articles. Clicking on the title of the journal will give you a Table of Contents for that particular issue.
Before Buying a Prefab - By Amy Gunderson, New York Times, September 21, 2007. “With any designer, ask how many homes the firm has built and how many are in the pipeline, and arrange to visit a finished house. The growing prefab field has led many designers to jump in, but not all them actually have designs that have been built...Also ask what changes can be made to plans and how complete the house is when it arrives from the factory, a variable that can affect construction time. Some modular houses arrive 90 percent finished, with light fixtures in place; others need considerably more work from a contractor.”
Havens: Living Here: Modern Kit Houses: Thinking Inside the Box - As told to Bethany Lyttle, New York Times, October 15, 2004. "Outside, it's somewhat industrial looking, but inside it's a celebration of nature. There are bamboo floors, wooden cabinets. There's rugged stone tile in the bathroom, and when you stand in the shower, the floor feels like real ground. I used to associate contemporary with cold, impersonal spaces, but this house has completely changed that. It's like living in a Japanese garden."
House Proud: High design in a factory-made home? Michelle Kaufmann believes she holds the key - By William Booth, Smithsonian Magazine, January 2007. "So in 2006, she took the plunge and bought her own factory, 25,000 square feet east of Seattle, from a retiring modular house builder. She moved in this past October, with a goal of producing 10,000 prefabs over the next ten years."
House in a Box - By Sara Lin, Wall Street Journal, March 14, 2008. (Rocio Romero, FlatPak, NextHouse).
Instead of Trading Up, Adding a High-Style Shed - By Michael Cannell, New York Times, September 10, 2008. "Tiny, high-style prefabricated sheds like the Kithaus have received a great deal of attention over the last year, with admiring coverage in design blogs and magazines, and roughly four times more companies producing them now than five years ago."
Modern Kit Houses: Thinking Inside the Box - As told to Bethany Little, New York Times, October 15, 2004. "There are bamboo floors, wooden cabinets. There's rugged stone tile in the bathroom, and when you stand in the shower, the floor feels like real ground. I used to associate contemporary with cold, impersonal spaces, but this house has completely changed that. It's like living in a Japanese garden."
Move Over, McMansions: Microhouses Are on the Rise - By Annelena Lobb, Wall Street Journal, June 14, 2006. "The 800 square-foot dwelling, which cost around $160,000, was the second of Mr. Warner's weeHouses, multipurpose units that can be used as anything from second homes to yoga studios."
The Next Little Thing? - By Steven Kurutz, New York Times, September 10, 2008. &...Mr. Janzen spent the summer building an 80-square-foot 'tiny house' out of free stuff he found on Craigslist?"
Prefab Home Designer Bucks A Downward Trend - By Matt Sepic, NPR, January 23, 2009. "...Rocio Romero's homes - with their corrugated metal walls, huge windows and strong horizontal lines - are selling despite a dismal housing market."
Prefab Sprout - "Few prominet architects have wanted to associate themselves with the prefabricated house. Until now. Forum takes a closer look at a growing trend and draws attention to prefabs by Anders Wilhelmson, Force 4 and Arne Jacobsen." by Lars Aberg znc Fanny Stenberg, Forum AID, 4.05 (2005).
Prefabs with a Modernist Sensibility - By Karen Olsson, New York Times, March 5, 2006. "They arranged to purchase a 1,520-square-foot Glidehouse, designed by Michelle Kaufmann, a San Francisco architect, for what came to about $253,000 and also bought land on a small commuter island west of Seattle."
The Very Model of a Modern Modular House - By Daniel Akst, Wall Street Journal, May 29, 2003. "Despite a thriving New York practice whose clients include trendy ad agencies and rich people with gaping lofts, Mr. Tanney's firm, Resolution: 4 Architecture, has poured itself into a series of designs for manufactured modules that can be combined into three- or four-dozen modern homes. All are striking departures from the choices available to most home buyers today, and all, at least theoretically, are buildable in a factory for something like the price of the banal tract homes gobbling up farmland across America."
3xNielsen and Plot - Designed the Turn-key villas for M2 - "the Kip House, the Flower House, the X House, the Twist House and the Basic House, as well as the KipUp House and Trapez House summer cottages" .
Alchemy Architects - Geoffrey Warner of St. Paul is known for his WeeHouse line of modular houses.
Breckenridge Finer Living: Glassic Flat - Designed by Architect Christopher C. Deam. "This modern 400 sq. ft. dwelling features floor-to-ceiling Andersen glass doors and windows, opening the entire interior to an outdoor vista. This new concept is currently available in three floor plans."
Claesson Doivisto Rune - "Founded in Stockholm in 1995 by Marten Claesson, Eero Koivisto and Ola Rune." The Plus House is "a pre-fab two-story house with the generic proportions of a traditional Swedish barn house...This is the first house we designed for the pre-fab manufacturer Arkitekthus, in their catalgue named AH#001."
Clever Homes - San Francisco. Known for its panelized houses. The firm's top model is the CH1.
Collins and Turner - Penelope Collins and Huw Turner, Surry Hills, Australia.
FlatPak House - Charles Lazor, Minneapolis. See Design Life Now National Design Triennial 2006 podcast in which Lazor "talks about the ideas behind Flatpak House, a revolutionary pre-fabricated housing system which approaches architecture as a product that consumers can assemble and customize from a flexible kit of parts." There's also a transcript. See also Lazor's funiture company - Blu Dot and Forecast: Fast and Warmer by Julie V. Iovine, New York Times, January 6, 2005.
Modern-Shed - "People are comfortable with the idea of working from home in a way that they weren’t just a few years ago," said Ryan Grey Smith, founder of Modern-Shed, a small Seattle-based firm that has sold 130 room-size structures since it was founded in 2003, half of them in the last year." (From Instead of Trading Up, Adding a High-Style Shed by Michael Cannell, New York Times, September 10, 2008.)
Resolution: 4 Architecture - New York. Firm headed by partners Joseph Tanney and Robert Luntz designs modern modular residential housing. They designed the Dwell Home in Pittsboro, North Carolina.
Richard Wintersole - Aledo, Texas.
Rocio Romero - Designer of Luminhaus, located in Amherst, Virginia "located approximately 200 feet above the North Fork of the Buffalo River, 10 miles from the Blue Ridge Parkway and is minutes from George Washington National Forest and the Appalachian Trail." She also designed the Fish Camp. See also The Sky Line: Some Assembly Required: A modern way to make a modern house by Paul Goldberger, New Yorker, October 17, 2005.
Royal Homes - Wingham, Ontario. There are four models of the Q Series Modernist homes designed by Kohn Shnier Architects.
Toyota Home - Steel-frame prefabs manufactured in Kasugai. The 1,300 sq. ft Smart Stage is $175,000; the 1,800-sq. ft. Espacio Mezzo has three bedrooms and a garage ($225,000). Toyota also has a stake in Misawa Homes.
TrailerWrap - Project by Michael Hughes, an architect and professor at the University of Arkansas.
Tsubomi - "Aluminium space packaging system" (in Japanese).
Some Assembly Required: Contemporary Prefabricated Houses - Walker Art Center exhibition, December 8 - March 26, 2006. With Gallery Guide and Audio Tours on Pinc House, Rocio Romero LLC, Resolution: 4 Architecture, Marmol Radziner + Associates, Lazor Office, Michelle Kaufmann Designs, Steven Holl Architects, and Alchemy Architects.