If you’ve been around Porter’s Square in Cambridge in the past few weeks, then you may have noticed a somewhat unusual new construction taking place on Massachusetts Avenue. Giant cranes were lifting prefabricated residential modules and assembling them into a new residential & commercial complex. The Rand, which is the name of our new development, will have 19 new condominium units and one single family home. The residential space will be accompanied with 4,000 square feet of retail space and off-street parking. Despite the obvious appeal of the brand new development, what makes the Rand truly unique is that it’s completely modular!
Believe it or not, modular construction has been around for way over a century. Perhaps, one of the best known examples of the early days of modular construction are the Sears homes. Pre- fabricated kit homes, produced by the famous Sears Roebuck Company, were sold in East Coast and Midwest states between 1908 and 1940. The homes were sold through a mail-order catalogue and then shipped to the lucky new owners via railroad boxcars. The Sears kits included everything a person needed to assemble the ordered home, which could be near 12,000 elements of buildings materials! According to the Sears catalogues, a kit home could be assembled in about 90 days! Many of those homes are still standing to this day.
While more than 70,000 Sears homes were sold by Sears Roebuck Company during its prime time, modular construction wasn’t well respected in the years that followed. However, in the more recent years, modular construction has made a well-deserved come back! The advantages of modern pre-fabricated modules are really far from trivial. First of all, as you have already learned from the Sears kit homes story, modular construction is fast. The amount of time it takes to put together a set of prefabricated modules into a single complex is significantly less than what is required in a conventional construction project. Second, modular construction is less expensive, which is particularly important in the cities like ours where demand for new housing significantly exceeds available supply. Finally, modular construction is more sustainable as it produces a lot less waste.
Next time when you pass by Porter’s square, you may want to stop and take a closer look at how modular buildings are assembled. However, you do need to hurry because unlike the never-ending Longfellow bridge construction, the Rand will be ready before you know it!