Interesting History Of The Modular Home Construction Industry

Avalon Building Systems is approaching our tenth year of building quality custom modular homes. Bud did you know that modular construction has been around for over a hundred years? Did you know that almost everyone has been inside of a modular home or modular general office building and never realized it? Modular homes design, from traditional colonial style to multi-family units are quite the extraordinary design. The history of modular homes is quite interesting as well as the evolution of modular homes keeps expanding because of new technology.
 
Modular buildings are pre-fabricated buildings taken to a new and larger scale. We avoid the term "pre-fabricated" because of the erroneous association that that term has with mobile home construction. The use of pre-fabrication goes back over a hundred years. It started gaining popularity early in the 20th century between 1910 to the mid-1940s. The end of World War II caused the modular market to truly explode and evolve. Returning soldiers came back to America looking to buy homes and start families. This drove a demand for homes greater than the marketplace could handle via the traditional building process. This led people to look for solutions to increase efficiency and lower the cost of new home construction. The modular building process answered both of these needs. There are still 1950-era modular homes in service today.
 
Over the past twenty years, the sophistication of modular home design greatly increased.  The leap in sophistication relates in part to the pioneering support of overhead cranes with the capacity to lift 100 tons or more. This allowed larger modules to be constructed and shipped cross-country. The only limitation in the size of each individual module is rode width and weight restrictions.  Today's modular buildings normally consist of 3-6 different modules.

As the size of modular homes has increased so have customization options. We deliver custom modular homes where the owners themselves participate in the design engineering. The final product is tall, wide, and as unique as the owners themselves are.

Here are a few current examples of just how widespread modular home construction is in today’s society.  Modular units are part of the construction design of the new Queen Mary 2 cruise liner. The Queen Mary 2 is the largest and most expensive cruise liner ever built. The ship owners choose to use modular passenger cabins to ensure all cabins met the higher standards possible.  Even the VIP suites utilized the modular building process. The McDonald's Corporation uses modular building design. Virtually every Americans has entered modular structures.  Since finished modular buildings look the same as traditionally constructed buildings, no one realizes they are in a modular building.  However, trained eyes surveying for structural integrity will see a marked difference between modular and non-modular construction.