Maybe the area is hilly and the lot slopes downward from back to front, so you want to build on the flatter front portion because it's easier, and there's adequate drainage so that's OK. Or maybe there isn't adequate drainage so you'd be better off putting the house on the higher part of the lot.
Maybe there's a two-story house next door and if you put windows in the wrong places, they can look right down into your bedroom. Or maybe there isn't and you need all the windows you can get on that side of the house because that's south-facing so it's the best place to have them from an energy efficiency point of view.
If there's an alley behind the house, you probably want the garage to back up to that. If there isn't, you'll have to put the driveway on the front. Unless it's a corner lot, in which case you might want it on the side if the street on the front has heavier traffic or bad visibility.
Maybe there's a view so you want the living room on the back of the house so everyone can enjoy that view. Or maybe the view is to the side so you want the living room there.
You get the idea. The best house you can build on a piece of land depends on a lot of factors specific to that piece of land. So customized designs help you achieve that.
Complete bespoke design can be wonderful, but comes with high cost and time.
Fixed designs can also be wonderful, and much more accessible.
Check out https://www.acre.co as an example.
Disclaimer - I'm a founder.
We did that with our new house, flipped where the kitchen/livingroom would be so the good view out of the back of the house is much more usable. Super easy to do with a stick-built house, probably a fair bit harder with modular.
Stick-and-frame is still the most prevalent way to build homes for numerous other reasons though, like ease of available materials, roads being non-ideal for transporting large, heavy edifices, and the general perception of prefabricated homes being... not so great... due to seeing prefabbed mobile homes and the lack of quality that's incredibly common in that industry, amongst numerous other reasons.
What has seemed to really change things recently are "SIPs" - Structural Insulated Panels - essentially prefabbed wall segments that you can then jinga together to make a home. They've become wildly popular in some parts of the country as they are easy to transport on the back of an 18-wheeler, easy to install with or without a construction crane, and take care of multiple construction steps at once, greatly reducing build times. They can often be more energy efficient too, as they have fewer seams and the insulation is applied more evenly (often an expanding foam is used instead of fiberglass, which also boosts the R value by quite a bit).
But isn't it weird that there aren't more copy-and-paste condo buildings? Maybe not even in the same city—you don't want a Brasilia[1]. But, once you've gotten an architect to design a large building, why not get N times the materials, and then build the same building in as many cities as are compatible with the building codes it was designed under?
I found many cities in China in particular look very similar to one another in a not great way because of similar architectural choices including copy paste buildings, which apparently the government has noticed—I can't find the article about it but the central government is making moves to get Chinese cities to stop being built in exactly the same way/destroy and replace too much of their historic buildings with culturally diverse architecture.
Not to say we shouldn't do what you're saying, but if we do it we should probably do it in a way that doesn't make all our cities too generic.
Ugly as sin, but they're cheap housing.
edit: I'll go farther than this. My own house is over 100 years old, in a "bungalow neighborhood" of Minneapolis. Most of the houses were built over a period of a few decades, with more or less the same design. There's a T structure, leading to three sections on the first floor. The entrance is a living/dining area separated by an arch, on the other side of the back wall is the kitchen, and on the other side of the interior side wall is a hallway leading to two bedrooms and a bathroom. They're all like this. And these were built by hand, with the most sophisticated factory parts being two-by-fours and hinges. They might have a porch, or an extension (my house has a back extension built in the 1950s), and the attic might be finished into a single room, or even expanded into multiple rooms with a large dormer. Many/most have been modified over the years. But the basic form? Consistent as a pup tent.
These things are the result of available technology. The bungalows are a product of factory-made nails, which made balloon frame construction viable. In the South, you'll find shotgun shacks, which are what happens when you build a bungalow but don't need or want a basement.
This is nothing new. My neighborhood might look varigaeted, but it's not.
The sort of copy-paste condos you see all in one place are still a single development project by a single property developer. They're all signed off on as one job-lot, and then the materials are allocated to build all of them, a pool of workers are hired and reused between all the projects (where they might be working on condo #14 one day, and then condo #26 the next), etc. Maybe some more are added a few years later, and maybe those are across town—but this is still the same ongoing "project", by the same architect, the same construction firm, under the umbrella of the same sign-off from the same urban planners and engineers.
Whereas, what doesn't seem to exist, is a sort of approach to architecture that resembles software engineering. One where "a building blueprint" is like "a software library": a reusable thing, sold or shared between different companies, or maybe even open-sourced. A world where your first condo project, as a developer, might involve constructing a building to a blueprint that existed long before your company did, even a blueprint your rival firms are also using.
In such a world, you'd expect the components that go into such "common blueprints" to become standardized. You'd see a separation-of-concerns where these components get prefabricated not by the development company's contractors (as part of a "house in a box" or "condo in a box", the way you see today) but as part of an ecosystem of parts that enable these separate development-companies working off the same plans to work more quickly/efficiently. You'd have the Apples of the construction world buying full kitchen-assemblies or pre-plumbed-and-electrified-and-insulated-walls or whatever from the Samsungs of the construction world.
There is a ton of prefabrication in construction already. There are also large libraries of shared details.
Most of the bits that are not already prefabricated are the bits that don't have simple interfaces. Either to each other or to their surrounding environment.
There is a stigma to owning them in lots of places though.
Regarding the article, pre-fabricated buildings have been a thing for decades. For example in my area Quadrant Homes contracts out framing to a local builder that assembles interior and exterior walls in a factory on a gantry and then ships the entire wall package out to the house to be assembled.
Build all the plumbing into those walls.
Build all the wiring into those walls.
Build all the windows and doors and other openings into those walls.
Then try to put those walls together in a way that connects all the plumbing and all the wiring.
Now, let's look at the real world, at least here in the US.
Yes, there is a national electrical code that covers many parts that aspect, but lots of other codes vary on a city by city or even neighborhood by neighborhood basis. And your HOA can have some of their own codes that you're also required to honor.
How can you have a single central location that can build all those prefab walls according to all those different codes, and have them all pre-approved?
But if it's just the problem of connecting various kinds of pre-built conduit in lego-like walls, yes it would be a hard problem but it seems solvable in itself. Especially, you don't to have just fixed pieces. rather you can have pieces whose routining "logic" is adjustable after that fact (switch the flow of pipes from an internal panel of the wall). And you could have an app for verifying a given arrangement could work, before you ordered your "lego" set.
Your service life is also going to take a hit due to having a lot more of the most unreliable aspects in construction - a joint.
Is there no "one best way" that is compatible with all local codes?
Anything else falls into the dreaded "modular home" category. You know, just one step above a single-wide trailer, at least in the minds of some. Never mind the fact that the only thing separating my ungodly expensive house in Redmond, which sits on a slab, from a modular home is that it was built onsite. "Bespoke"? phhhffft, I can find you a dozen houses within the radius of our daily dog walk that are exactly the same.
Personally, I think the status quo is equivalent to Ford dropping a box of parts at your local dealership, and you have to wait for the mechanic to assemble it. Why aren't robots framing my house in a factory somewhere?
I think it's mostly a cost/benefit tradeoff. My hunch is that the overhead of building on-site isn't that great when you have to figure in the overhead of shipping/designing something in a modular way. Pretty much everything is 8ft long in terms of building materials which makes it much easier to transport.
Houses, or even rooms, don't.
The status quo is a home depot and it all gets figured out on the fly. We would be in a much better place with engineered kit as you describe Ford doing.
make that a 100 years easily. (atleast in my country).
Heck, some houses don't even have architectural drawings because of their age.
You can find plenty of poorly constructed 100+ year old homes in the US, with original innards put together every which way in a shoddy fashion before there were building codes and standardization of construction. And yet there they are, still going with basic maintenance.
I live in Denver. Houses last way longer than 50 years here. Old houses here are quite desirable due to many of these neighborhoods proximity to downtown. The last two houses I rented were from the 1929 and 1943. They were in great shape. They were not the "old house" on the block either, both neighborhoods dated to that era.
Of course they have had several roofs in that time, but roofs don't last much longer than 15-20 years here due to hail. Siding has a limited life, but Hardie Plank which most new builds I see around here has a very long life. Brick will last basically forever along with plaster walls and hard wood floors. The foundation, framing, and plywood basically last forever if you keep it dry.
I have asphalt roll roofing which is cheap but needs to be replaced every 5-8 years.
As long as the roof and exterior walls hold up, there's not much to it. And the roof you change every dozen years or so.
Even if the home is habitable there are other reasons they are removed. After a certain point it makes more sense financially to tear a home down and rebuild than to continue to renovate it. Also markets change over time, and homes are not always built in a way that maximizes the use of the land. An area that was mostly bungalows and ranches can have homes replaced with larger homes or multifamily buildings.
A house should last 150 years at least, provided it's maintained.
What is gaining ground, apparently, is prefabricating components of houses, which are then assembled on site rather than doing everything on site from plain lumber. Stairs, for example, are often made from kits.
Basically on paper, a lot of these off-site manufactured and local assembled homes sound like double wides and lower income housing options and the gains get erased in insurance premiums because you get lumped in with high risk owners despite buying a $500k+ custom home basically.
Well, IKEA does have a joint venture with a construction company to make prefab apartments.
https://www.boklok.com/about-the-BoKlok-concept/ https://medium.com/@bartholomewhearn/the-flat-pack-taken-to-... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwvvcgoHC9w
> Manual labor is too costly for such a bespoke approach.
Not in the US were there are always people willing to swing a nail gun to feed thier family.
One big factor preventing us from doing the same thing as the article for homes is the need to support customization. With a large apartment complex there's enough of the exact same sets of rooms being created that building them all out then shipping out makes sense, trying the same thing for homes (without a change to people accepting much more identical housing) would require stocking and setting up a lot of different tile and hardwood and loosing scale efficiencies.
So there's still a lot of pre-built components that are used when building multiple houses.
I know very little about building construction but we just bought a new-built in Vienna and very little of that seems bespoke. The entire construction is largely made from standardized prefab elements (I think there are around 130 units in here).
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/540916/robots-lay-three-t...
Building houses fits a few of those. So it's foreseeable that eventually someone will be able to build a house with an app, for fairly low money, fairly quickly, fairly automated, but it might be many years until it's really that cheap/easy.
A potential stop gap would be like an app that told you every single step how-to build your house: buying, delivering, cutting, etc etc etc, for the millions of edge cases of construction.
I first saw them on Grand Designs where they put up a beautiful house in 7 days. (only thing that had to be done on site was groundworks, the house turned up on a couple of lorries and efficient germans (tautology possibly) put it together, cleaned up and left.
Expensive though.