I have written about Koto a few times before (check here and here). They design and fabricate beautiful modular homes and cabins that are designed to connect you back to nature.

One location where you can already find these cabins is on Fritton Lake, which is about 2 hours and 45 minutes outside of London. The way it works is that you buy a plot of land in the Fritton Lake community and then you choose which Koto home you would like.

There are two models available -- Ki and Miru -- and they can be customized as either 2 or 3-bedroom cabins. Apparently it then takes somewhere between 4 and 6 months for your new cabin to be fabricated and delivered to site.

Prefabrication is, of course, not a new idea. But it does feel like we are finally starting to see some meaningful traction. As recent as 2016, only about 2% of new single-family homes constructed in the US were prefab or modular.

But today it's perhaps easy to imagine a world where only the top end of the market builds on-site and custom. Koto is also evidence that these homes can be just as, if not more, beautiful and sustainable.

FYI: The Koto team is having an "open day" on Saturday, October 1, 2022 at Fritton Lake. If you happen to be in the area and would like to check out the cabins (and do things like swim in the lake), drop them a note to book a spot.

Image: Koto

Witold Rybczynski's recent blog post about architecture's "curious business model" gets at one of the core challenges of new construction: "Every project is, in effect, a custom job; there are no real economies of scale." There are also no reoccurring cash flows for the architect, Witold explains, unlike a writer who might earn ongoing royalties or a business owner whose wealth will grow as the business grows.

There are two items to discuss here: (1) The "curious business model" used in the practice of architecture and (2) the inefficiencies of construction.

The first one is not unique to architecture. You could say the same thing about the planning and real estate lawyers who also work on new buildings. But I take Witold's point in that even a painter's work could appreciate in value after it's done, whereas there's typically no mechanism for any of this to accrue (to the architect) in the world of architecture.

When I was young, I was told that there are two ways to make money. You can either trade your time for money or you can own assets that make you money. An example of the latter might be a farm where the tenant farmer pays you rent every month. You're not trading your time by actually doing the farming, you just own the asset.

This may seem obvious, but it's fundamental. And it's one of the reasons why, when I was in architecture school, I admired the practices of people like Jonathan Segal out of San Diego. Jonathan is one of the pioneers of the "architect as developer" approach. He simply became his own client and started building his own projects.

Moving on to topic number two.

Everyone in the business of building new buildings is looking for repeatable methodologies. Many have thought: How do we make the construction of buildings more like the assembly of cars? How do we create a standardized kit of parts? And that has lead to longstanding efforts around prefabrication. Today, as you know, we are also looking at how 3D printing might make this easier/cheaper.

In some ways, that is happening. There are examples of prefabrication and panelization, and there are developers who are using this approach. (See H+ME Technology.) But for the most part, we still build on site and it's still a messy process with lots of waste and inefficiencies. If there was a cheaper and more effective way to do it, the industry would certainly move in that direction. Eventually that will happen.

In the meantime, we will continue building our prototypes.

Photo by Ivan Bandura on Unsplash

In this month’s issue of Monocle magazine (#80) they profile an interesting prefabricated and affordable housing project in Knivsta, Sweden.

A collaboration between architect Andreas Martin-Löf and developer Junior Living, the project contains 124 single occupancy units, each of which has 32 square meters of interior space (that’s about 344 square feet).

The way it was built is quite simple. The modular housing units were fabricated off-site and then inserted on-site into a prefabricated concrete frame. Think bottles going into a wine rack. Here’s a diagram showing how it works:

What’s truly amazing about this project though is how quickly it was built and how cost effective it actually was for end users. Construction started in January 2014 and residents started moving in about 3 months later. The sale prices ranged from €50,000 to €87,000 per unit. That’s roughly $62,000 to $98,000 in US dollars.

Finally, here’s a shot of one of the interiors:

What do you all think of this project?

Photography by Åke E:son Lindman via Andreas Martin-Löf Arkitekter

I have written about Koto a few times before (check here and here). They design and fabricate beautiful modular homes and cabins that are designed to connect you back to nature.

One location where you can already find these cabins is on Fritton Lake, which is about 2 hours and 45 minutes outside of London. The way it works is that you buy a plot of land in the Fritton Lake community and then you choose which Koto home you would like.

There are two models available -- Ki and Miru -- and they can be customized as either 2 or 3-bedroom cabins. Apparently it then takes somewhere between 4 and 6 months for your new cabin to be fabricated and delivered to site.

Prefabrication is, of course, not a new idea. But it does feel like we are finally starting to see some meaningful traction. As recent as 2016, only about 2% of new single-family homes constructed in the US were prefab or modular.

But today it's perhaps easy to imagine a world where only the top end of the market builds on-site and custom. Koto is also evidence that these homes can be just as, if not more, beautiful and sustainable.

FYI: The Koto team is having an "open day" on Saturday, October 1, 2022 at Fritton Lake. If you happen to be in the area and would like to check out the cabins (and do things like swim in the lake), drop them a note to book a spot.

Image: Koto

Witold Rybczynski's recent blog post about architecture's "curious business model" gets at one of the core challenges of new construction: "Every project is, in effect, a custom job; there are no real economies of scale." There are also no reoccurring cash flows for the architect, Witold explains, unlike a writer who might earn ongoing royalties or a business owner whose wealth will grow as the business grows.

There are two items to discuss here: (1) The "curious business model" used in the practice of architecture and (2) the inefficiencies of construction.

The first one is not unique to architecture. You could say the same thing about the planning and real estate lawyers who also work on new buildings. But I take Witold's point in that even a painter's work could appreciate in value after it's done, whereas there's typically no mechanism for any of this to accrue (to the architect) in the world of architecture.

When I was young, I was told that there are two ways to make money. You can either trade your time for money or you can own assets that make you money. An example of the latter might be a farm where the tenant farmer pays you rent every month. You're not trading your time by actually doing the farming, you just own the asset.

This may seem obvious, but it's fundamental. And it's one of the reasons why, when I was in architecture school, I admired the practices of people like Jonathan Segal out of San Diego. Jonathan is one of the pioneers of the "architect as developer" approach. He simply became his own client and started building his own projects.

Moving on to topic number two.

Everyone in the business of building new buildings is looking for repeatable methodologies. Many have thought: How do we make the construction of buildings more like the assembly of cars? How do we create a standardized kit of parts? And that has lead to longstanding efforts around prefabrication. Today, as you know, we are also looking at how 3D printing might make this easier/cheaper.

In some ways, that is happening. There are examples of prefabrication and panelization, and there are developers who are using this approach. (See H+ME Technology.) But for the most part, we still build on site and it's still a messy process with lots of waste and inefficiencies. If there was a cheaper and more effective way to do it, the industry would certainly move in that direction. Eventually that will happen.

In the meantime, we will continue building our prototypes.

Photo by Ivan Bandura on Unsplash

In this month’s issue of Monocle magazine (#80) they profile an interesting prefabricated and affordable housing project in Knivsta, Sweden.

A collaboration between architect Andreas Martin-Löf and developer Junior Living, the project contains 124 single occupancy units, each of which has 32 square meters of interior space (that’s about 344 square feet).

The way it was built is quite simple. The modular housing units were fabricated off-site and then inserted on-site into a prefabricated concrete frame. Think bottles going into a wine rack. Here’s a diagram showing how it works:

What’s truly amazing about this project though is how quickly it was built and how cost effective it actually was for end users. Construction started in January 2014 and residents started moving in about 3 months later. The sale prices ranged from €50,000 to €87,000 per unit. That’s roughly $62,000 to $98,000 in US dollars.

Finally, here’s a shot of one of the interiors:

What do you all think of this project?

Photography by Åke E:son Lindman via Andreas Martin-Löf Arkitekter