If Frank Lloyd Wright Designed a Double Wide...

Frank Lloyd Wright wrote enthusiastically about the 'machine's' role in the housing industry and was a pioneer in the factory built house. In 2015, another pioneer, Katerra, set out to move the needle as never before, setting up huge, roboticized component factories to automate production of walls and floors - to reproduce in the home buidling industry the extraordinary productivity gains achieved in the automated car assembly plant. Sadly Katerra failed - perhaps because it sought not just to automate production of standardized components but to take the bold step of automating the production of customized components, so that in theory it could create whatever custom components a unique building required.

Now Wright's first fully developed building template was his 'Prairie House' design, the crescendo of which is the Little House built in Wayzata, Minnesota in 1912 for Francis W. Little, an attorney and utility company owner. The typical prairie plan was in the shape of a cross, where each arm comprised living room, dining room, kitchen, library. In this way each could have windows on all three sides. Following WWI, Wright refocused his efforts on the concrete house many of which were built in California. Following the Great Depression, Wright further simplified and scaled down his template to a two winged design he termed the Usonian by which he meant a house suited to the successful middle class American family.

The distinguishing features of the Usonian are its super-sized living room and down sized everything else. I've tried to model a design for a 3 bedroom, 2 bath double wide - 50 ft in length by 33 ft wide - on this Usonian idea:

The living room spans the full width of the house, 32 feet, and is around 16 feet across and doubles as a home theater with a large format projector screen. The notion of 'en suite' bath is dispensed with, as are walk-in closets, freeing up space for other areas including a longer dining room with long dining table. Instead of a sprawling kitchen with bar seating there is only a modest but adequate galley style kitchen. A core section contains laundry, pantry, powder room, shower and second toilet. Such design is intended for the minimalist millennial interested in practical pleasant living rather than reproducing the trappings of the site built McMansion in mobile home form.