Manufactured Home w/ Garage Barn Concept

Manufactured homes are great. Lately they've really stepped it up a notch with high grade interiors, excellent fit and finish rivaling anything you'll find in a site built home. All that remains to make manufactured a hit with the middle class - to make it a serious competitor with site built - is to doll up the landscaping and tack on some garage / workshop space.

VRT proposes to do this with lots of around 1/4 acre with high privacy fencing spanning the lot perimeter. The 'backyard' gets the full 'outdoor room' treatment with outdoor kitchen, dining, and sitting area plus spa / hot tub.

The front yard gets a generic barn - there are many companies offering kit barns - which serves as garage, storage, laundry, and mechanical room for furnace, water heater, and circuit panels, set up unfinished to be adapted later on per the needs of individual home buyers. As shown the thought was to put the living room in the upstairs portion of the barn in order to give it the enhanced scale called for by Frank Lloyd Wright, while the manufactured home contains kitchen and dining, and bed and bath.

The late architectural critic Christopher Alexander tells us in his "Pattern Language' book that outdoor rooms must function like a mini town square. Their garden walls need to be quite high to foster a sense of total privacy - 'a sense of refuge' is Alexanders term - and the space itself needs to feel bounded. I've tried to do this by adding trees, vines, and leafy ground plants along with brick terraces and steppingstones. Alexander also talked a lot about connection to the street by way of raised decks running along the street where you're elevated enough to feel like you're looking out and down. Alexander called this the 'sense of prospect' - which I've tried to incorporate in an optional raised front terrace next to the barn / garage.

To get a sense of what motivated Alexanders advocacy for prospect and refuge one need only have a look at the trailer arrangement in the more conventional mobile home community. Thanks to Anas I.'s contribution to 3DWarehouse.com, the online Sketchup model repository, the situation is strikingly if not starkly illustrated:

Many mobile home parks follow this format, the history of which admits of analysis. Sometime after the emergence of the industrial revolution it became possible to speak of a 'working class'. Now the great philosopher of the history of ideas, M. Foucault speculates that the identification of subgroups is a function of their exclusion. The working class were in effect excluded from the emerging bourgeoise ruling order. At the same time the management of the working class - Foucault's terms are 'governmentality' and 'biopolitics' - was emerging. Unfortunately the industrial revolution for all its blessings also gave birth to the surveillance state. Jeremy Bentham and his conception of the 'panopticon' society was loosed upon the industrialized world. The very architecture housing the working class itself became a kind of 'instantiation' of the panopticon where everyone is under the surveillance of everyone. This architectural order is never more apparent than in the organizational format of the traditional mobile home community. By this point this feature of auto-surveillance has crept into the body of most municipal zoning code. The rich can escape it to some degree by retreating to homes sited on large acreage. For most everyone else it means backyards devoid of privacy.

Now VRT does not 'blame' the zoning committees. To the contrary what Foucault termed 'discourse' produces the ideas the individual simply absorbs almost unconsciously and acts upon. Yet thanks to the work of philosophers like Foucault we can now become conscious of the history of when, how, and why our society became saturated in surveillance, and if we choose, turn our societies toward a more artistic aesthetic of walled gardens, private and more 'sacralized' spaces, the fashioning of a realm in which we are much more susceptible to the experience of nature and the full sense of indoor outdoor living.