Later this winter, a truck will pick up this
prefabricated apartment from a former naval foundry in Brooklyn, carry it over
the Manhattan Bridge, and deliver it to a construction site on Manhattan’s East
Side. A crane will hoist the unit—and 54 others like it, along with segments of
stairways and elevator shafts—into the air and stack them together, creating a
nine-story building.
In a city that’s seen just about everything, the
undertaking, a collaboration between the firm nArchitects, MonadnockDevelopment, and the Actor’s Fund Housing Development Corporation, will be a
novelty twice over. For one thing, this will be the tallest building ever
constructed out of prefab modules in Manhattan ,
and one of the first such apartment buildings in the entire city. The
modules—each of which weighs the equivalent of a dozen Ford F-150s—will arrive
on East 27th Street
virtually move-in ready, with toilets, cabinets, and electrical sockets all in
place.
For another, this will be the city’s first “microunit”
building. In 2013, its design won a city-sponsored “micro-housing” competition
devoted to compact housing for single occupants. (Forty-six percent of Manhattan households are
made up of one adult.) The architects, Eric Bunge and Mimi Hoang, hope that
large windows, high ceilings, and floor plans featuring multipurpose living
areas—fold-up furniture sold separately—will make the apartments feel more
spacious than their 255 to 360 square feet.
Microunits and modular construction make a good match. “The
whole point is efficiency through repetitive, assembly-line construction,” says
Tobias Oriwol, the project developer for Monadnock. Walking along the assembly
line as workers toil on two dozen apartments in various stages of completion,
you see, as if in a flip-book, a finished home emerge from a cage of steel.
Bunge says that drafting a modular, microunit building is,
in terms of complexity and precision, something like designing a car. The
little boxes flirt with minimum-habitable-space laws as well as mandates
regarding disability access, so there is absolutely no room for error. “If we
were to … change drywall from half an inch to five-eighths,” he says, running
his fingers across some plaster, “we’re screwed.”
1 comment:
This definitely sounds like a really cool idea. My son has been working in a construction job for quite sometime now, so I'll have to ask him if he's ever worked with these. They definitely sound like they would be really nice for apartment living.
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