The Globe and Mail

The current North American vogue for prefabricated housing has largely been a matter of cool aesthetics. What's admired by the style-conscious, affluent consumers of such residential architecture include hard industrial surfaces, machined planes and edges, a general sense of tense economy -- a kind of modernism that looks mass-produced (even though it usually isn't), and that can certainly be beautiful in its own tough, sleek way. Meanwhile, the design of the other kind of prefab housing -- rough-and-ready emergency shelter, durable low-end homes for the urban poor, and so forth -- has long been a minority activity, pursued by a handful of conscientious architects, often merely for the virtue of doing so.