Firstly, I am not a great expert on architecture, quite far from it, but I love the topic and today I wanted to get started on reporting on a certain topic that is of great interest to me: prefabrication. Now for some of you, this may ring a bell if you had visited the Museum of Modern Art in New York, sometime during August of this year. So yes, if you saw the MoMA’s fabulous exhibit called Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling, I will be digging and dwelling on this shared topic with you for the next couple of weeks. 

However, some of you might already be asking, what is prefabrication? Well, prefabrication is the process of building the components of structure at one site (i.e. a factory), and then transporting it to the building site. Yes, prefabrication is that simple. So what's so great about it? Well, the great part is the process of prefabrication. In theory, prefabrication is the reduction of time and cost for building a certain structure by having a majority of the components used to construct the structure being built already then shipped to the construction site and then having all the parts bolted together. This reduces the amount of time used to build the components of the structure and the structure itself and also reduces the cost of labour too. 

Prefabrication, however, is not only about keeping cost and time low, it's also about sustainability. Since prefabricated or modular building's components are not built on site, but are provided through an external source, prefab structures are inexpensive to build but reduce the amount of energy and waste generated on site. Unfortunately, however, prefabrication has its cons as well. Since the components of a prefab structure are not built on site, the components of a prefabricated structure have to be transported to the site from the factory. These built components will be quite large, not only requiring careful handling but decreasing the amount of space a transportation vehicle has to carry these components unlike the transportation of raw materials to the construction site. This decrease in space in the transportation vehicle means a higher cost in hiring trucks or other transports to carry the parts of a prefab structure, and with the price of oil climbing, it may be hard to find many engineers and architects who will be willing to put sustainability in front of climbing costs.

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Articles and blogs on Prefabrication:
- http://www.momahomedelivery.org/
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefabrication
- http://www.fabprefab.blogspot.com/
- http://prefabcosm.com/blog/2007/07/23/prefabrication-laboratory/