New York - Shoes, furniture and cars have been mass produced on assembly lines for years. Why doesn't the same apply for houses?

This question has intrigued several architects, including Walter Gropius, Frank Lloyd Wright and Marcel Breuer, all of whom experimented with the idea of building homes using modular design principles. Their part practical, part utopian ideas are part of an exhibit in New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) entitled Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling.

MoMA describes the exhibit as a survey of the past, present and future of the prefabricated home and a building project on the museum's vacant west lot. It aims to display the process of architectural design and production in equal measure with the actual end result.

The exhibit, which runs until October 20, also includes the accessible Micro Compact Home designed by the German architect team Haack & Hoepfner in its original size.

It's hard to determine exactly when when prefabricated housing began. As early as 1833, British colonists shipped industrially prefabricated homes to Australia. In 1908, one year later the Ford Motor Co. produced its famous Model T on an assembly line, and Thomas Edison, inventor of the light bulb, got a patent for the Single Pour Concrete House.

In the early 1930s all-copper homes, which could be erected by five workers within 24 hours, were all the rage.

Visitors to MoMA's Home Delivery see historical films, documents and blueprints in addition to visionary models. American Buckminster Fuller envisaged the future of living in the 1940s with his Dymaxion house. Resembling a flying saucer, the house was meant to be easily disassembled, packed up and taken along when a family moves.

Japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa designed prefabricated living units in the 1970s for his Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo. The modules could be fitted into each other as needed. But neither Fuller's nor Kurokawa's idea took hold among consumers.

While US consumers after World War II saw prefabricated houses as a quick and and easy way to achieve the dream of home ownership, contemporary architects applied other standards. Five innovative prefabricated houses are on display in their original format on the MoMA lot as part of the exhibit.

Instead of mass-manufacturing, these homes are about the utmost in individuality. The design Burst 008 by Australian architects Jeremy Edmiston and Douglas Gathier is a good example. Their selection of materials are environmentally friendly and recyclable.

Another architect team, Americans Stephen Kieran and James Timberlake, designed the five-storey Cellophane House, which is completely recyclable. Another of the homes set up on the lot is made entirely of plywood and was digitally designed by MIT students for residents of New Orleans.

Munich architect Lydia Hoepfner sees temporary construction figuring into architecture's future. Her Micro Compact Home, which she developed with John Hoepfner and British architect Richard Horden, is a seven-square-metre living cube complete with a shower, toilet, kitchen, table, bed, chair and closet. It focuses on the essentials and it can be easily transported on a trailer. Its environmental impact is therefore minimal. Several prototypes are serving as student housing in Munich. Lydia Hoepfner says they present the ultimate in mobility.

"It's a little bit like a trunk. Even if you're moving to another city, you can take everything you own with you without changing any of it around," she said. It gives a completely new meaning to the term "free house."

Internet: http://www.momahomedelivery.org (dpa)