07-BS1-003 Interview ARev.indd

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ArchitectureBoston
Published by the Boston Society of Architects
52 Broad Street, Boston, MA 02130
617.951.1433
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www.architectureboston.com
March/April 2006, Vol. 10 No. 2, “Home Economics”
“Not Your Grandfather's Prefab”
Pages 48-53
Not Your
Grandfather’s
Prefab
A 48-year-old company in Massachusetts
is re-engineering the idea of the pre-engineered house
Jhaelen Eli talks with Jeff Stein AIA
48 ab ❘ ArchitectureBoston
Jhaelen Eli is the consulting
designer for the Empyrean
Design Partnership (Empyrean
International, LLC) in Acton,
Massachusetts, where he has
worked with firms such as Kaehler
Moore Architects, Toshiko Mori
Architect, Office dA, Ruhl Walker Architects, and
Hutker Architects. He received an M.Arch. from the
Harvard Graduate School of Design and a BA in
architecture from University of California, Berkeley.
Jeff Stein AIA is head of the School
of Architecture at the Boston
Architectural College
and is the architecture critic
for Banker & Tradesman.
Jeff Stein: Empyrean International is the new name
of a company that has long been familiar to many
architects and many New Englanders. Your office,
in a model Deck House, is the first clue. Deck House
— the company — was started in 1959 by William
Berkes, a graduate of the Harvard Graduate School
of Design and a student of Walter Gropius. Its
longtime sibling firm is Acorn Structures, which was
started a decade earlier by John Bemis of MIT, whom
Carl Koch called “the grandfather of prefabrication.”
They’ve recently been joined under the Empyrean
umbrella with a new, third sibling known as The
Dwell Homes by Empyrean, which is the focus of your
own work. Do you feel the presence of those earlier
Modernists who started this business that you’re now
helping to carry on?
Jhaelen Eli: I don’t feel the legacy of those individuals
as much as the sense that we are at last seeing the
realization of prefabrication for architects. That
hasn’t been easy. There’s a wonderful book written
by Colin Davies called The Prefabricated Home.
It’s one of the rare books that doesn’t take a
romantic view of the history of prefab. The first
several chapters are actually a pretty scathing
critique, because he’s describing the prefab
architecture movement in America, and saying,
essentially, that all the big “A” architectural forays
into prefabrication have been failures.
Jeff Stein: Certainly all the Modernist ones were.
PHOTO: REBECCA REBER.
Studio ABK with Empyrean, 2007.
I happen to live in a prefabricated house myself, just
down the road — a Sears kit cottage built in 1913;
the Sears houses were pretty successful.
Jhaelen Eli: Exactly. Prefab has been an enormous
success in terms of small “a” architecture — which
is to say, architecture that doesn’t involve architects.
Forty percent of new houses are prefabricated in
some sense.
March•April 2007 ❘ ab
49
Jeff Stein: In fact, you could say that there is very little construction
that doesn’t have some prefabricated element to it.
to independent architecture firms, through what we call our
Design Partnership. We’re working with firms to familiarize
them with our kits before they even start drawing.
Jhaelen Eli: That’s right. The question Davies poses, and the
question that Empyrean is tackling is, why is it that architects,
who have been trained as specialists in designing physical
environments, have had the least success in deploying prefab
as a sustainable way of designing and of doing business?
Jeff Stein: What is your kit-of-parts?
Jhaelen Eli: We have two, actually — both our Deck House kit-
of-parts and our Acorn kit-of-parts. Acorn is strictly a panelized
system and Deck House is post-and-beam.
Jeff Stein: One of the answers is that the people who typically
engage the services of architects expect something that they don’t
think they’ll get from prefabrication. When they go to an architect,
they want a totally custom-designed home.
Jeff Stein: And they are presumably manufactured in certain sizes
and multiples, with the idea that any architect familiar with these
basic systems could design something that would meet a client’s
needs in different regions of this country?
Jhaelen Eli: Which is something of a paradox. Because at the
same time, many architects are looking for ways to bring highend design to more people, sort of a democratization of design.
There’s always been an apparent chasm between the cost of
high design and the desire to be able to design a “house for your
mother” — the concept of the architect’s mother’s house being
one of experimentation for a middle-class client. The promise
of prefab was that you would be able to develop a process that
could reduce labor costs and enable an architect to provide good
design for more people. But architects could not live with the
construction details that the conventional prefab business
provided, or with its operational and design culture.
Jhaelen Eli: That’s right. We ship nationally and internationally
— we have projects in California, Hawaii, Japan, Israel, and the
United Kingdom. In fact, 10 percent of our business is in the UK;
what is interesting is that the homes that we’re shipping to
England are all part of multi-family developments. We have to
deal with snow loads in Colorado and wind loads on the Florida
coast. The architect usually finds the client independently, and
maintains that design relationship with the client through
schematic design. Then the project is handed over to us and we
take it into design development and construction documents
through delivery. We have a network of 300 builders across the
country who know our systems intimately, so we add value to the
Jeff Stein: Prefabrication has been called the oldest new idea of the
20th century. Yet it does seem to hold some sway in the current
market and there has been a rebirth of interest recently, especially
among young designers.
Jhaelen Eli: Despite its history, architects haven’t totally given up
on the idea of prefab. In today’s culture, prefab, and by extension
Modernism, has shed its utopian roots. Prefab today is seen as
something that is much more trendy, representing a way of life.
It isn’t the response to postwar reconstruction that it once was.
It’s more about amenities, about the particular look of the
Modern house. Any lingering sense of the utopian lies in the
attempt to improve quality of life through the democratization,
and therefore affordability, of good design.
Dwell Home by Empyrean.
Prefab today
is seen as much
more trendy,
representing
a way of life.
–Jhaelen Eli
The story of the roots of the Dwell Homes has a wonderful
origin-myth quality to it: the CEO of Empyrean goes to Dwell
magazine to pitch a story to its editor, who was then Allison
Arieff. She shows him a photo of a prefabricated house designed
by Charlie Lazor, an architect from Minnesota who is looking for
someone who can build it. Fast-forward a couple years, and now
you’re in a partnership with Dwell, working with Lazor Office
and Resolution 4 Architecture, a firm in New York, to develop
and build housing prototypes.
Jhaelen Eli: We started the program in 2005 and now have over 50
houses that are on the boards or in production. As we’re launching
our business, we’re also making our various kits-of-parts available
50 ab ❘ ArchitectureBoston
PHOTO: JHAELEN ELI.
Jeff Stein: The Dwell Homes clearly address that change.
Acorn, 1960s.
Acorn, 1998.
process by not only delivering a kit-of-parts but also coordinating with an experienced builder.
architects a different way to think about building.
Jhaelen Eli: That’s right. Traditionally, architects are not focused
Jeff Stein: Two early Modernists who tried to make prefab work
were Gropius and his partner Konrad Wachsmann — they developed a prefab house design for General Panel Corporation in 1942.
They built a few and that was that. Why couldn’t they make a go of it?
Jhaelen Eli: They really got into the details and kept refining
them over and over again, but when it came time to go to market,
the system was so expensive that nobody could afford it, and it
was so time-consuming to build that it was no longer relevant.
What was missing was an alignment of all the elements that were
necessary to make it work. When architects talk about prefab,
they tend to focus on the very big idea of democratizing design,
but they usually have no business plan, a limited understanding
of relevant manufacturing and operations, and a vague sense of
the market.
Jeff Stein: How does your own role as “design consultant” fit into
Empyrean’s business plan? And how did you find your way into
this role?
PHOTOS: COURTESY OF EMPYREAN.
Jhaelen Eli: My job is to introduce architects to our systems and
help them understand the rules of the games, so to speak, so they
can capture the economy of the system. And in turn, we try to
find ways in which the system can facilitate their design goals.
I had been working at Office dA in Boston, where we were
investigating the idea of doing a prefab house. I was given the task
of getting in touch with Empyrean. Later, Empyrean invited me
on board. The offer came at a time when I was thinking about all
sorts of career-related questions: from a social standpoint, how
do you make the most difference possible in your given trade?
Why do architects design so little of the built environment? Can
we counter that with alternative business models and practices
and be better compensated?
Jeff Stein: So now you are working with a company that is offering
on means and methods in terms of constructing and assembling
the house — that’s the contractor’s responsibility. What’s different
about this process is that we are thinking about means and
methods. We’re thinking about sub-assemblies, the economy of,
say, using cranes to offload our materials from the trucks to the
site so they can be quickly assembled. That means that there’s an
interesting convergence in our partnership with architects —
thinking about the efficiency of means and methods becomes
part of the conversation and is integral to the design itself.
Jeff Stein: There is a cozy quality to the Dwell Homes, even though
they feature Modernist expanses of glass. Some of that has to do
with the size of the buildings, which is actually pretty small.
Jhaelen Eli: Some of it has to do with the sensibility of the
Dwell brand. The magazine’s mission is to present Modernism
as accessible, something that people can live in comfortably.
If you look at mid-century images by Julius Schulman, the iconic
architecture photographer, you’ll notice that there are no people
in his photographs. You open up Dwell, and there’s nothing
but barefoot people inhabiting this cozy Modern architecture.
It begins to move Modernism in a direction that Deck House
and Acorn were already suggesting — a meshing of the
Modern sensibility and the inhabitable home.
Jeff Stein: When I talk to people about Empyrean, the term
“mass customization” comes up. There is in fact a whole vocabulary around your industry: “modular”; “precut”; “panelized.”
Jhaelen Eli: Modular refers to one subset of prefab construction;
precut and panelized are two other subsets. We would describe a
modular unit as a pre-assembled box that comes on a truck and is
set onto a slab or foundation. Our systems are either panelized —
a complete wall assembly, for example — or pre-cut , meaning the
“sticks” in post-and-beam construction; they are shipped flat or in
March•April 2007 ❘ ab
51
Deck House, 2006.
bundles to the site and then assembled. A lot of modular firms also
use the phrase “mass customization.” But I would argue that they
simply provide mass production because their degree of customization is essentially bound by the rules of highway design —
transportation engineers have already determined the widest
module you can use.
In a tectonic system using panels or pre-cut components, the
constraints involve the law of gravity and the nature of the tectonic
system: what’s the longest cantilever you can get? What’s the
maximum span? Or: I’m trying to turn a corner in this particular
way, but I’ve only got these three choices. What if I combine choice
A with choice B to get choice D? A lot of architects look for
limitations, both as a way to force decisions, but also as a way to
stimulate creativity. That process ups the ante for us, too, in terms
of suggesting things that we hadn’t imagined before. We use a
phrase, “innovation is born out of constraints.” There’s incredible
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PHOTOS: LEFT, COURTESY OF EMPYREAN. RIGHT, MICHAEL CARROLL.
Deck House, 1960s.
challenge but also great reward when you view something from
that perspective. The most amazing innovations in history always
come from some kind of constraint.
maybe eight inches long, that we haven’t found a way to use. Every
once in a while we put out a big box and say, “Take this wood.”
It gets recycled.
Jeff Stein: Presumably your control of the construction process
Jeff Stein: So how energy-efficient are these buildings once
typically translates into less time and less money.
they’re built?
Jhaelen Eli: We facilitate custom design at a reasonable, but not the
Jhaelen Eli: We just did an Energy Star model home down in Annapolis.
lowest, cost. A typical custom house, using the traditional architect
and contractor models, rarely gets below $300 per square foot. We’re
certainly much less than that, but we’re not a Toll Brothers production
house, either. A lot of our market is second homes for owners who
want a custom design. But it varies. We’re doing a house in Fairfield
County, Connecticut, which is less than half the cost of what it
would have been using traditional stick-built construction, and with
better materials. That’s a high labor-cost market, and the savings from
sub-assembled panels was significant.
We have a green team in-house, which consults on our own systems and
designs and is available to architects in our Design Partnership program
who want to design in a more sustainable manner. But we’re finding
that sustainability is an embedded practice now with many of the
architects we work with. It’s moved from the “it” thing that was a
marketing gimmick to an expected aspect of everyday practice.
Jeff Stein: Is your work with Empyrean a way to move
architecture back into the world of residential design —
if indeed it ever was there?
Jeff Stein: I would think there would be other labor savings, too, that
might be harder to quantify: better health, greater safety, and presumably longer life expectancy for laborers who are working indoors.
Jhaelen Eli: The factory environment also allows us to control
material utilization, which is close to 100 percent. We use everything. After a week of production, we end up with a pile maybe a
couple feet high — basically short end-cuts of wood, less than
Jhaelen Eli: I would say that it was never there. Architects have
never had much presence in residential design. For me, the move
to Empyrean was about the dream of taking on that challenge.
Houses make up the largest component of the built environment,
in terms of the sheer number of them and the number of resources
that they consume. To make a difference in housing, you’ve got to
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March•April 2007 ❘ ab
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