Prefab and modular designs come with a basic requirement: Their components can be no wider than twelve to fourteen feet, or what can fit on a flatbed truck. The Flatpak House, as its name indicates, gets around that constraint with panels, not modules. Made of glass, concrete, metal, wood, or cement fiberboard, with different colors and finishes, the Flatpak panels are basically sheet goods, which are manufactured in the U.S. to a standard eight-foot width. The cedar cladding panels on the Flatpak prototype, for instance, are more commonly used for high-end garage doors, says Lazor.

The main advantage of the Flatpak House over prefab or modular designs is that it maximizes flexibility. Like sectional sofas, modular wall or storage units, workstation components—or Legos, for that matter—the Flatpak House can be configured in any number of combinations to suit both a homeowner’s needs and the particular demands of a site. This flexibility is why Lazor calls his house “manufactured architecture” rather than prefab. (Also, like any good designer, he knows that naming, packaging, and marketing are essential to the success of a product.) “This way of designing is all about finding an answer to a problem,” he says, “rather than expressing the will of an architect. It’s the opposite of the individual genius model.”

In other words, Lazor is merging good design with good business sense, seeking to accommodate a wide range of buyers while keeping costs relatively low. In this sense, the Flatpak house has a strong affinity with Ikea, notwithstanding Lazor’s Blu Dot pedigree. The Swedish behemoth revolutionized household goods by taking advantage of efficiencies in manufacturing, storage, transportation, and distribution, and by developing the “flatpack” concept for furniture. (Incidentally, it is now in the home-building business, too, with prefab developments in several Scandinavian towns.) The Flatpak House also seeks to maximize those efficiencies, with its prototype costing about $130 per square foot. Eventually, Lazor aims to get the square-foot cost down to $100 or so.

The 2,600-square-foot Flatpak prototype sits on a long, narrow lot right alongside the Kenilworth Trail, and hard by Cedar Lake’s Hidden Beach. Because of its proximity to those public areas, the west façade of the house is mainly comprised of an eight-foot concrete wall, with wood panels and large windows on the second story. One portion of the concrete is perforated with portholes to allow views outside while limiting views into the house. “That’s not because I don’t like people,” says Lazor. “But there’s a lot of traffic on the trail—more than on the street. We realized that people will probably always be stopping to look at the house, but that doesn’t mean that we always have to be looking at them.” For views, Lazor opted for floor-to-ceiling windows looking out on thick stands of trees on the short ends of the house. “On a typical city lot, which is fifty by one hundred and twenty feet, you’d lay things out differently,” says Lazor, “because you’d have neighbors.”

Like most modernist designs, the layout of the Flatpak House is basic and wide open: Downstairs, the living room, kitchen, and dining room flow from one to the other; upstairs, there are three bedrooms and two baths. A bridge and a courtyard connect the main house to a smaller structure with an office on the ground level and a guest room/common area above. Lazor points out another “truth in materials” issue when it comes to the Flatpak’s windows and walls. Their design was inspired by homes by Louis Kahn and Richard Neutra, which had fixed windows and used wall panels for ventilation. “When the panels open out, they catch the air and draw it right into the house, much better than a window does,” he says. “So the windows serve their essential function, providing light and views, and don’t have to be more complicated, or more costly, by being operable. This is also re-thinking the wall so that it can actually perform a function, rather than just be this object that’s taken for granted.” (Maybe I’m a die-hard in this regard, but I’d argue that windows are for leaning out of too, not just looking out of.)

Extraordinarily ordinary, the Flatpak House is part of Lazor’s mission to design what he calls a “contemporary vernacular.” (Not to be confused with “soft contemporary,” an abhorrent residential style apparently devised for home buyers who think they might want modern architecture but aren’t quite sure.) Contemporary vernacular is not so much a style as a condition of design, one that Lazor explores in work with his Blu Dot partners, and with students in his U of M classes in furniture design and manufactured architecture. “The Flatpak house is not going to be like your neighbors’ house, of course, but there is a simplicity and regularity to it that makes it seem rather normal. That’s because its design is completely of its time,” he says. “The vernacular is what you get when the solution to a problem makes so much sense that it’s totally obvious.”

Source: www.secretsofthecity.com