A few months ago I wrote about the superb Modern Pre-fab home show at MoMA, Home Delivery, and marveled at the skill and artistry of the designers and of such a cool show. That show has now ended and the plan – back in the stress-free glory days of the summer, before the world went crazy – was to sell the houses off to the highest bidder, a great idea to make the designers a little bit of extra cash for all their hard work.

Fast forward now to this month, and the end of the show, and the good idea to sell the houses – not to mention the difficulty in shipping them – came up a little bit short as only one of the houses, The Micro-Compact Home, according to the blog Treehugger.com, sold at all. There were allegedly talks with a Russian billionaire about buying and transporting all five – for exhibition, possibly? For the best back yard ever, maybe? – but the market tanked during the negotiations and the talks subsequently fell through.

That left the ultra-stylish and very cool Micro-Compact as the last house standing, or rather with a buyer. The rest of the places? It saddens me to say, or at least to read via Treehugger, that they were either disassembled and returned to whence they came, or torn down altogether, which seems to me to be contrary to point of even building a 'green' pre-fab in the first place.

For my part, I would have loved to have had one of these houses, and would have loved to have a little piece of real estate in my portfolio to place it on, do it up right and use as a vacation place. Alas, I don’t have one of these houses, have no real estate and no portfolio – I also never take vacations, at least not yet – so I am out of luck twice over. A blogger can dream, though, can’t he? All you have to do is go on the MoMA site, linked to below, to refresh your memory of the exhibition and to see the cool examples the museum included in the exhibition.

I still believe in the message of the exhibition, and I believe that stylish, interchangeable Modern pre-fab houses have yet to come into their time. Another decade or two and you’ll start to see this kind of building become more affordable and hence more ubiquitous. I may well be able to help my daughter get a mortgage on one after she gets out of college and gets a job. By then I should have that mythical portfolio I wrote about above, and I should still have this passion for Modern design.

Here’s a link to Treehugger and here’s a link to the MoMA Home Delivery page.

-Noah Fleisher, Nov. 14, 2008