The Globe and Mail

The glossy covers of today's design mags tell the story: The Modern house is a custom job for the rich. It was not supposed to be this way. As championed by Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier almost a century ago, the quintessential Modern house was supposed to be a prefabricated, comfortable, beautiful and affordable abode for the masses. But along the way to the cover of Metropolitan Home, something went terribly wrong. The genre known as "prefab" sank into the architectural subculture and festered there alongside trash-strewn trailer parks. A quixotic new exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery attempts to resurrect this noble architectural socialism. Fresh from the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Some Assembly Required shows the work of a new generation of socially minded architects who are turning prefab on its head. Exhibition curator Andrew Bauvelt acknowledges the genre's image problem. Prefab suffers from guilt by association with mobile homes and shoddy mail-order vacation units. So please, let's get this straight: Mobile homes are manufactured housing, whereas the Walker exhibit's prefab marvels are modular housing. "The stigma has been undeserved," Bauvelt says, "because consumers were confusing one industry with another."