2 Professors’ Houses to Be Part of MoMA Prefab Exhibit

When New York City’s Museum of Modern Art takes over a vacant lot on West 53rd Street to exhibit five prefabricated houses, one will be a cube that its designers — including an architecture professor from Munich — say could serve as student housing, among other uses. Another will be the work of a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who designed prefab houses to replace New Orleans homes destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. The exhibit, according to The New York Times, will open in July.

The cube, designed by Richard Horden of the London firm Horden Cherry Lee Architects, is a 76-square-foot unit that can generate its own electricity (right). Called the Micro Compact Home, it is already available in Europe. A village of seven of the units houses students at the Technical University of Munich, where Mr. Horden teaches.

The houses for New Orleans were designed by Larry Sass, an assistant professor of architecture at MIT who directs the institute’s Digital Design Fabrication Group. Among the group’s projects is a prefabricated Instant Cabin designed to be assembled using only “muscle and a rubber mallet.” The cabin project relies on computer-controlled routers to cut plywood sheets into forms that fit together without nails or glue, eliminating expensive tools, skilled labor, and one-time-only designs from the construction process.