Mechanizing The Manufactured Modern House

"Apart from the mobile-home industry, no one turning out houses on an assembly line has made an impact in the housing business. Most mobile homes are aluminum-sided banalities that are supposed to look like traditional suburban houses but fool nobody, and whose sole virtue is that they are cheap. Modern architecture, of course, tends to be expensive. It often looks machine-made and features the latest technology, yet modern houses are almost always built largely by hand, even when they are intended to embody the aesthetic of the computer age."

"...If you buy one of Romero’s L.V. kits, you do not get an entire house. You get the exterior walls and the floors, the roof framing, special assembly tools, and lots of instructions. It is up to builders to construct a foundation according to Romero’s plans, and to add such items as windows, doors, electricity, plumbing, and a roof, for which the architect provides exacting specifications. Buyers pay for shipping their future house on a flatbed truck, which runs roughly $2.25 per mile from Perryville."