Dwell’s Top 10 Prefabs of 2017

Called the Cyclopean House, it’s at once a home and a portfolio piece for Anton Garcia-Abril, a professor at the School of Architecture and Planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, and his wife, Débora Mesa Molina, a research scientist, also at MIT.
When the couple were hired by MIT in 2012, they bought a 30-by-40-foot cement-block garage for $320,000 from a former construction company, had it rezoned for residential use, renovated it into a three-bedroom home for $100,000, and then moved in with their four children the following year. With plans to eventually build a prefab addition, the couple honed their observations into a central inquiry: How could they make a fairly priced and lightweight yet solid house that was neither wood-framed nor made of bricks, stone, or concrete? Since 2011, the couple had been experimenting with lightweight construction technologies, partly in response to the tsunami and earthquake that had damaged 1.2 million homes in Japan’s Tōhoku region that March. The answer, they found, was to use EPS, short for expanded polystyrene foam—a common and extremely lightweight material whose composition is 98 percent air.