In January, we paid a visit to Melba and Baxter Barnes, the owners of KieranTimberlake's first completed Make It Right home—a safe, sustainable, affordable home designed for the rebuilding of the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina.

KieranTimberlake has teamed up with LivingHomes, Profile Structures, and Color Design Art to create a modular show home for Builder magazine. The home will be on display at the 2009 International Builders' Show in Las Vegas, January 20-23. You can take a virtual tour of the project on the Builder website.

Boyce Thompson, Builder magazine's editorial director, writes: 
 

Next week, four semi-trailers will leave a factory in Southern California carrying the modules and panels that make up our show home for this year's International Builders' Show in Las Vegas. The convoy will idle across the street in a parking lot, waiting for the convention floor to open for exhibitors. Then, when the doors roll up at 12:01 a.m. on the morning of the 14th, crews will race the components to the floor and begin a mad, five-day race to ready the home for visitors. 
 
If you are going to the IBS this year, check out the Builder LivingHome. We've been working for more than a year on this super-sustainable ‘mod' home. The experience of navigating the nascent modular industry to line up a builder, an architect, a factory, and suppliers is an interesting story in itself. But it is sure to be eclipsed by the home itself, which speaks volumes about the trends that are likely to preoccupy builders for the next several decades.

 
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Cellophane House™ was designed for ease of assembly, disassembly and re-assembly. With the conclusion of the Home Delivery show at the Museum of Modern Art on October 26, the next phase of our experiment is beginning. Our intention is to disassemble and rebuild the house on a new location, with the aim of helping to offset the millions of tons of construction and demolition debris generated in the United States each year.

It was announced last week that Loblolly House is a winner of the second annual Lifecycle Building Challenge competition, sponsored by the United States Environmental Protection Agency.

On October 17, 2008, AIA Philadelphia held its annual Awards for Design Excellence celebration. We were honored to accept four awards that evening, including a Gold Medal for Cellophane House™, our second gold medal in a row from AIA Philadelphia.  
 
The Gold Medal recognizes only one built project of the most exemplary design quality, and is rarely given annually. Our heartfelt thanks go to the clients, design teams and consultants who made this honor possible.

Can we create a material that combines the ideal functions of a building envelope into a single product? We began exploring this question with SmartWrap™, a building envelope that has the potential to generate energy, control climate, and provide lighting and information display on a single printed substrate.

In a review of Cellophane House™ at MoMA, Andrew Blum of Wired says that “prefab's time has finally come.”  
 
Instant Suburb of Prefabs Hits New York 
By Andrew Blum 
 
Tourists press up against the construction fence on the corner of 53rd and Sixth, staring speechless as a giant crane lifts an entire bathroom into the air and deposits it in what will be a master bedroom. Cellophane House™ is five stories tall, with floor-to-ceiling windows, translucent polycarbonate steps embedded with LEDs, and exterior walls made of NextGen SmartWrap™, an experimental plastic laminated with photovoltaic cells. Its aluminum frame was cut from off-the-shelf components in Europe, assembled in New Jersey, then snapped together in 16 days on a vacant lot next to the Museum of Modern Art — joining four other full-size houses onsite through October as part of the exhibit Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling. It looks as if a suburban cul-de-sac took a wrong turn at the Holland Tunnel.

Actor Brad Pitt's Make It Right Foundation selected KieranTimberlake among thirteen architecture firms to design safe, affordable, and environmentally sensitive housing to rebuild New Orleans' Hurricane Katrina-ravaged Lower Ninth Ward. Construction at Tennessee Street, the site of our first house, began on July 1, 2008; homeowners are scheduled to move in during September. John Williams Architects of New Orleans is the Executive Architect responsible for construction documents and administration.

On September 15, NPR's Morning Edition featured a segment detailing The Museum of Modern Art exhibition Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling. A conversation with Assistant Curator Peter Christensen covers the rich history of prefabrication and the five full-scale prefab homes, including our Cellophane House™, currently on view at the Museum.

Our renovations at Wellesley College's Houghton Chapel and Multifaith Center were completed in the spring of 2008. In this article from Wellesley magazine, alumna Jana Reiss discusses students' dreams for the space, and the hum of activity happening there now.