The Development History of Modular Building in the United States

1. Origins of Modular Building in the United States

The first modular housing program can be traced to Buckminster Fuller's flexible housing experiments in the 1920s and 1930s—the "Dymaxion House" project—featuring a highly advanced prefabricated bathroom module.

Buckminster Fuller's prefabricated bathroom module (U.S. Patent Office)

These modules were shipped to the U.S. military for use during World War II. However, because the Dymaxion company lacked funding, Fuller's modular vision was never fully realized, and the engineers and architects he hired soon moved on to other projects.

The Winslow Ames House

This inventive house was built with help from a new exterior finish material called Cemesto—a panel made partly from sugarcane and patented by the John B. Pierce Foundation. The Winslow Ames House consisted of several room modules organized around a "service core," to which all bathrooms, kitchens, plumbing, and heating systems were attached.

In 1942, the U.S. government used a similar Cemesto prefabricated system to build the top-secret town of Oak Ridge, Tennessee—the site of the Manhattan Project.

"Flexible Space" under construction

They hired Skidmore, Owings & Merrill to propose a plan called "Flexible Space"—fully modular houses flexible enough for many families to move quickly into this secret new place. The houses were cast in discontinuous sections of concrete and assembled on site in slightly different configurations.

2. Modular Building at Scale

After World War II, the modular idea spread into fast-growing suburbs. The main housing systems were the plug-and-play panel structures of the 1940s and the Lustron and Gunnison prefabricated homes of the 1950s.

Lustron house

These popular homes used steel frames and customizable features such as varied kitchen and bathroom systems, doors and windows, and add-ons like porches, verandahs, and garages. Although only partly modular in design, the houses helped introduce the public to the modular concept.

Gunnison house

Throughout the 1950s, the modular idea attracted many people—especially architect and designer George Nelson, best known for his mid-century modern furniture. Nelson led a shift toward expressing modular structure on the exterior (unlike predecessors who tried to hide modular traits). His ongoing laboratory concepts combined new materials such as affordable plastics with the space-age futurism for which Nelson was known.

George Nelson experimental house model, 1967 (image from the George Nelson Foundation)

In the 1960s, modular building absorbed the futurist aesthetic language pioneered by Nelson and the Eameses, plus influences from television shows such as Star Trek and events including the Space Race and the Atomic Age. These elements fed into 1960s modular housing programs that focused on mounting individual dwelling units onto large structural frames—a forward-looking response to a looming overpopulation crisis.

George Nelson in a project discussion

The early-1960s modular era was opened by French architect Guy Dessauges, who designed elegant capsule dwellings on towers with panoramic views of surrounding landmarks.

Guy Dessauges modular house patent

The modular concept reached an unmatched level of complexity in 1964 with Plug-In City, a million-scale modular concept by the British experimental architecture collective Archigram. Though never built, Plug-In City brought interchangeable urban ideas onto the architectural stage and foresaw a dystopian future amid the Cold War climate of the 1960s.

Plug-In City project

Perhaps the greatest achievement of modular building experiments was Habitat 67, the prefabricated modular megastructure designed and built by Moshe Safdie for Expo 67 in Montreal.

Habitat 67 project

Habitat 67 began as Safdie's graduate project at McGill University. It comprises 12 levels and 354 identical prefabricated concrete apartments. In the context of a dense urban community prototype, the project focused on integrating light, fresh air, and open space. The apartments still stand today and sell in the USD $200,000-$900,000 range and above—rare for an experimental housing scheme.

On the other side of the world, Japan faced a postwar boom in population and manufacturing and developed the Metabolism architectural style, emphasizing flexibility, modularity, and Archigram-like interchangeable units.

Although the Metabolists were most active before the 1973 energy crisis, they strongly influenced American architects and thinkers who visited Expo 1970.

Expo 1970

Like Archigram, most Metabolism concepts remained hypothetical and never moved beyond models. Still, they did build some buildings. The most notorious and intriguing among them is the Nakagin Capsule Tower, designed by Kisho Kurokawa in 1972.

Nakagin Capsule Tower

The Nakagin Capsule Tower consisted of 140 independent prefabricated capsules, each with a bathroom, cabinets, and a built-in hi-fi set. Designed to be detachable and replaceable, each micro-capsule measured only 7.5 x 6.9 x 12 feet—a forerunner of today's increasingly popular micro-apartments.

Interior of the capsule tower

Despite its striking appearance, the tower faced demolition risk for more than a decade. Conservation efforts have since helped prevent the potential loss of such an important building.

American architect Paul Rudolph, known for Brutalist government buildings, drew inspiration from Expo modular projects and European contemporaries. While teaching architecture at Yale, Rudolph designed a large housing project in nearby New Haven, Connecticut. His concept took existing housing infrastructure—the single-wide trailer—and applied it in the manner of Habitat 67.

Orange County Government Center

Rudolph's project, Oriental Masonic Gardens, comprised 148 prefabricated units arranged in four groups around a central shared "core." Living space was based on stacked units: ground-level units held living areas, bedrooms sat in second-level units, and a third level could be added for extra living space. The project ultimately failed. As Rudolph later said in interviews: "People hated it. First of all it leaked, which is a very good reason to hate something, but I think it was much more complex. Psychologically, the people living in these houses did not like living under other people. In other words, the split-level arrangement of the dwellings did not suit their preferences."

Oriental Masonic Gardens via the Paul Rudolph Collection

As the 1970s drew to a close, unsuccessful movements like Rudolph's shifted public taste away from mass modular concepts. Resolution of the 1970s energy crisis, combined with a new era of prosperity driven by neoliberal economic theory and Green Revolution technology, fueled a consumer boom expressed in Reagan-era house-building styles. Americans were eager to leave behind two decades of social programs and upheaval—including failed social housing—and enter an era of rising private spending and private ownership.

While modular apartment concepts held up well in densely populated European cities during this period, 1980s modular housing ideas in the United States returned to 1940s–1950s thinking, focusing on individual homes rather than collective housing. In the 1980s, modular housing technology was applied to suburban homes. Firms such as Unity Homes designed modular methods as an alternative to prefabricated houses, which were often stigmatized at the time.

Unity Homes house

These new modular homes were built from factory-made components, with a steel frame used as a chassis. Houses were transported to the construction site, then lifted by crane onto foundations and assembled. The frame then returned to the factory to build the next "off-the-shelf" module. These modular methods trace directly to the early Cemesto houses at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and remain popular in residential construction today.

3. Contemporary Modular Building

Technological advances in the 1990s and early 2000s inspired a new generation of architects to return to experimental modular housing. Better computer rendering brought innovative manufacturing concepts such as Klip House, whose computer-designed parts could snap together like LEGO.

Klip House design

Klip House's flexibility was meant to attract independent households seeking homes that could adapt to changing needs. With this system, the need for more space could be met by simply attaching another module—rather than moving or building an entirely new house—thereby easing the relentless urban sprawl of the previous four decades.

The latest modular housing developments try to solve a new problem: urban housing affordability. As more wealth flows into cities, speculation in urban real estate rises, and displacement and gentrification create an urban affordability crisis.

An unexpected side effect is the displacement of young people and creative workers, who have become a new marginalized buyer group priced out of areas where their careers could grow. For those desperately seeking lower rents, new housing types have emerged: container homes and modular micro-apartments.

Container City

Container housing is a creative reuse of surplus or abandoned shipping containers as small dwellings. It entered mainstream awareness when Urban Space Management completed Container City I at Trinity Buoy Wharf in London in 2000. The project shares much with Rudolph's Oriental Masonic Gardens: several independent units combined into a private residential complex. The company has since completed 16 more projects.

Although popular in Europe, complex U.S. zoning laws have blocked the spread of container developments—even though they could be an effective affordable-housing solution.

Micro-apartments are a housing solution that began in high-density cities such as Hong Kong and has expanded to U.S. cities, with notable projects in New York and Seattle. Projects such as My Micro New York are built from prefabricated 313-square-foot modules assembled on site on steel frames.

My Micro New York project

Micro-apartments descend from projects such as the Nakagin Capsule Tower and aim to provide safer living space at lower rents—a response to illegal subdivision of bedrooms within units that were meant to be single dwellings, done to cut rent for more residents. Time will tell whether these schemes ultimately succeed, as has been true for the great majority of large-scale modular housing concepts.

Modular apartments in California

Although large-scale modular housing projects have had some successes—Habitat 67 among them—most either never left the planning stage or failed. Even so, the plug-and-play flexibility of modular structures continues to inspire forward-thinking architects. The harsh reality of our time is that a sprawling world centered on fossil fuels is temporary and unsustainable. As new forms of housing and non-nuclear living arrangements spread, together with the high-tech era, affordable modular housing can become real when planning authorities, cities, and individuals keep an open mind and conditions are right.

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