Marmol Radziner Prefab

This unique opportunity to experience Los Angeles prefab architecture is now open to the public. Leo Marmol, FAIA, of Marmol Radziner and Associates, along with Michael Sylvester of Dwell, will host this two-day event that includes a tour of Marmol Radziner Prefab’s Vernon factory and newly completed Palms House. Reserve your tickets now. Space is extremely limited.

The event on Saturday September 27 offers a behind-the-scenes tour of the Marmol Radziner Prefab factory in Vernon, where you will see homes built on the assembly line from steel construction and cabinetry, to appliance installation and delivery. Presentations by your guides will examine the history of prefab architecture, the current phenomenon and what makes prefab green and sustainable.On Sunday, September 28, the day-long guided bus tour will begin at 10am, taking you to the newest examples of prefab architecture on Los Angeles’ Westside, two of them so new that they are still in the process of being installed! You will be among the first to see a number of factory-built private homes including the newly finished Marmol Radziner Palms House in Venice, and the first Los Angeles project by New York based Resolution: 4 Architecture, among others. Also included is a picnic-style box lunch provided by Marmalade Cafe at the site of the Eames House in Pacific Palisades. Six projects in total are on the tour. MOCA Prefab Tour
Saturday, September 27 at 3pm– 5pm
Sunday, September 28 at 10am – 6pm
Tickets: $175 (includes bus transportation on Sunday, a boxed lunch, and cocktail reception)
For further information and to purchase tickets, please contact mbernardin@moca.org or (213) 368-8878. 

To facilitate the transition between indoor and outdoor spaces, the Palms House has a few exterior stair landings (or palettes) that stick out beyond the building envelope of the modules. Visually, these pads continue the same materials inside and out so that the entire ground level of the home has poured concrete floors. We fabricated these pads in our factory, and they were  forklifted into place during the installation a few weeks ago.

Tomorrow, Marmol Radziner Prefab will be featured on Renovation Nation, starring Steve Thomas .  Renovation Nation now calls the Planet Green channel home and provides viewers with information on green building. Our episode highlights the green features of prefab building and follows the Palms House as it traveled through our factory. The completed Palms House was installed in Venice, CA on June 3rd and 4th. 

Renovation Nation
July 24th
6 PM EST (for PST check your local listings) 
Planet Green Channel

We recently posted about Heath Ceramic’s new tapestry tile collection, so we figured an update on Heath tiles at the Palms House was due. Our factory is nearly done installing the cheery “Stone Gold” matte tiles in the kids bathroom.

The bathroom runs across two modules (one of which you can see below), so the factory installed the tiles in each module separately and then will just infill the “seam” between the modules once the house is installed on site.

For those of you not seeing Leo Marmol at DWR in Philadelphia today, fear not. Our friend Google just found this short, fun interview with Leo Marmol in our factory from late 2006.

Damien Somerset and Nicole Bassett from Shift33 produced the piece.

While most of our modules are standard rectangular sizes, California House 8 had one module that broke out of the box (so to speak). Our factory fabricated the house’s entry staircase as a standalone module (check out the photo on the right of the mod in our structural steel yard). Then last week, in a surreal, Escher-esque moment of stairs in the sky, the module was delivered and installed as a completed piece along with the other fifteen modules of the home.

The Palms House is located in a neighborhood with many clapboard cottages, so we wanted to use wood siding in our modern interpretation of an infill house. The tongue and groove wood pieces are primed on all four sides for water protection and then installed onto the modules at our factory. For the Palms House, we’ll soon put on a finish to give an aged, patina look.

We’ve already posted about pouring concrete for the ground floor of the Palms House, so we wanted to update our trusty readers on the upstairs flooring. To create a warm feel to the private bedroom spaces, we used wood floors by EcoTimber. The dark finished engineered wood combines many of our favorite things–rich colors, modern lines, easy installation, and environmental sustainability. The flooring is certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, confirming that the wood is sustainably harvested and does not off-gas nasty VOCs in your home. We installed the floors in our factory, making the process even greener since we can reuse excess materials on future homes. Once we install the floors, we cover them for protection until the modules are delivered.

Giving new meaning to the idea of a “scientific calculator,” IDC has a fantastic life cycle analysis tool that calculates the embodied energy and carbon footprint in any product. You just enter some basic data about a product’s composition and manufacture, and it works out the energy used in the product’s extraction, manufacture, transport, use, and disposal.

One of our architects recently gave the calculator a whirl by estimating the carbon footprint of Amazon’s new Kindle Wireless Reading Device. He answered a few questions and found that the Kindle has the same footprint as 30 paperbacks ordered from Amazon’s store. So if you’re going to read more than 30 books on your Kindle, it’s greener to purchase the digital reader than the paper copies.

The tool helps reveal the large role that delivery plays in the total lifecycle cost for many products, especially if the product is picked up personally. The embodied energy in a book, for example, doubles if you drive to a bookstore versus getting it delivered in the mail. With prefab homes, factory construction reduces the amount of total transportation since workers are local (some site-built contractors will work 100+ miles from their home), and equipment and basic supplies can be ordered in bulk and stockpiled for use on multiple projects.

Like our dear friend Willie Nelson says, we’re on the road again with the delivery of California House 8 to the central coast. The first batch of shrink-wrapped modules left our factory late Monday evening and arrived at the site the next morning. We have two more module shipments before the installation next week.

And for you Willie Nelson fans out there, this one’s for you.

Enjoy!