As MHProNews posted Aug. 8, 2013, New York City has 17 modular housing projects currently under way. The largest of them, the 32-story, Forest City Ratner’s B2, comprised of 930 steel-framed units, will see the first modules arrive Thursday, Dec. 12, according to DNAinfo.com. Of the 363 apartment units, half will be for low and moderate income residents. The project is set for completion a year from now. Peter Gluck, of Gluck Plus, the firm that designed the Stack, a sleek seven-story, 28-unit residence in Inwood, says, “You increase the speed of construction and decrease the amount of anguish. The allure of prefabrication is you eliminate that mess of 20 different trades interfacing at different times. So, the thought of having 80 percent of the building arrive in finished condition is attractive.” James Garrison, who teaches at Pratt Institute’s architecture program, states, “Modular building is associated with cheap, substandard mobile homes. The reality of it is, it’s no more or less cheap or insubstantial than any other form of construction. The way we see it, it’s not a product; it’s an approach.” His firm won the competition to build a prototype for disaster relief housing, a four-story modular structure rising in Brooklyn.
