Despite the touted economy of off-site, prefabricated housing, the building methodology has made limited inroads in New York, stunted for decades by a wary local bureaucracy and a public that seemed to prefer flashy one-off condominiums.
Following a 2008 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, however, interest in the potential that prefab offers for the dense urban environment was renewed. That interest only grew more urgent after Hurricane Sandy devastated parts of New York in 2012, leading officials to re-examine prefab prototype disaster-housing schemes.
This summer, the interest in prefab is yielding its first real fruits: The Stack, a seven-story, 28-unit apartment building in the Inwood section of Upper Manhattan. The 38,000-square-foot project is the product of a partnership between Peter Gluck, of design/build firm Gluck+, and independent developer Jeffrey Brown, who turned to Berwick, Pa.–based DeLuxe Building Systems to turn out the building’s structural modules.
“We took some inordinate risks,” Brown says. The results are fairly astounding: a contemporary, upscale-looking project with reported cost savings greater than comparable buildings of between 15 percent and 20 percent.
Video courtesy of Gluck+. Still photographs by Christopher Payne.