The Newest Cut at Prefab

By Bill Saporito

The kit home was introduced in 1908 by Sears Roebuck, with the parts shipped by railcar. Price: $1,500 to $1,800 for the popular bungalow style. "An ideal cottage for a summer home," proclaimed the catalog copy. Since then generations of architects have taken a crack at improving on the kit concept. Among the most recent are Douglas Gauthier and Jeremy Edmiston of SYSTEMarchitects in New York City. Their take is called the Parish House, and a century after Sears, they used computer design and manufacturing. The result: a three-bedroom, two-bath, 1,000-sq.-ft. bungalow that costs $184,000 and whose structural system consists of 1,100 pieces of laser-cut plywood. Each piece is different. There are no posts, no beams--and no nails. The plywood is woven together to form the building's structural web and held together by a series of stainless-steel fasteners.

The Parish House has a complex geometry that defies traditional housing-construction methods. Its design was made possible through computer modeling. The pair sliced up the house onscreen to shape each structural piece for its role, then extracted those pieces from the model and numbered them. With another program, the pieces are arranged on plywood sheets to maximize use of the wood. "We save a lot of waste that way," says Gauthier. And a lot of time. The boards can be cut locally and shipped to the site on two flatbed trucks. No railcars needed.