Frank Lloyd Wright And The Modular House

Frank Lloyd Wright was an early advocate and early adopter of modular construction. From 1911 to 1918 Wright collaborated with Wisconsin lumber dealer Arthur Richards to market a line of modular homes called The American System-Built Homes. These homes were supplied as kits with every component pre cut and were among the first homes to incorporate plywood. Wright hired Russell Williamson to draft detailed construction documents showing how each of the numbered elements fit together to form the whole. Think IKEA but on the scale of a house.

Some 100 years on a mature modular building industry now offers a wide array of kit buildings and manufactured houses along with accessory structures such as decks, carports, and garages. VRT proposes to create homes composed entirely from these modular elements - specifically to offer a 4 bed 4 bath 2,500 sq ft doublewide outfitted with a supplementary storage unit of some 600 sq ft, a combination 3 car carport and raised deck - all to be delivered as private courtyard homes sited on lots of a little less than 9,000 sq ft or approximately 5 units per acre.

The advantage of the all modular approach, so it seems to me, is that costs are much better managed while construction is almost entirely handled by others. For the developer it becomes a question of finding suitable property, arranging for grading, site prep, and utilities, adding in the quotes for doublewide, garage, deck, and possibly pool and spa, and determining if the 'comparable housing sales' leave room for an adequate profit.

The images above are more on the schematic side coming directly from the CAD drawing program. Below are AI generated images giving a better sense of 'look and feel'.

Finally the following are images showing a method for building a hybrid carport with deck above fitted with a below deck fiberglass roof system for waterproofing the carport.