Reinventing the mobile home

High-tech eco-friendly housing for professionals on the move The ‘Portable House’ is an American mobile home with attitude, keen to be seen as the height of style. As such, it’s a far cry from the ‘trailer trash’ image usually associated with such housing in the US. Architect Jennifer Siegal and the Office of Mobile Design company are aiming at professional people who, thanks to new technology, are more mobile than ever before. The company designs, ships and erects what are basically still prefabs, but made substantially of recycled materials and compactly designed to reduce energy needs. Floors are made of Plyboo, derived from fast-growing, sustainably sourced bamboo. Walls use Polygal, a 100% recyclable, translucent, durable polycarbonate plastic. “Resources and materials are saved along the entire production process,” according to Kevin Lair of sister firm Mod-Eco, while the compact, efficient kitchens and bathrooms require much less energy for heating and cooling than the average American home. By using simple base units with various add-on options, he says, “we can produce a wide range of architectural expression and high quality design with limited use of resources. Because units are designed to be portable or shipped, repairs, remodelling and recycling are also simplified processes.” Middle class clients are apparently queuing up to live in them. Siegal, whose pioneering work has won many awards, will unveil her first mobile home village in 2004. An artists’ community called Eco-Ville, set in a vacant lot in downtown LA, it will feature 40 homes built of two prefabricated units which fit together to allow a roof garden on one side and a shaded garage on the other. “My objectives in rethinking trailer housing,” she says, “are partly to help low income people afford nicely designed homes and partly to lessen the impact of American housing on the environment. I wanted to use environmentally sustainable materials, but beyond that I wanted to show how we could use architecture to live more lightly on the Earth.” - Polly Ghazi

28 January 2004

Polly Ghazi