Omit the “pre” from prefab: There’s nothing preliminary about the term. If you have any doubt that prefab’s moment has arrived, ask the educated general audience that reads Dwell and other shelter magazines or watches HGTV—many have become passionate devotees of the idea. Hundreds, no thousands, of true believers poured through the doors of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City on July 15, drawn to the opening of a major show devoted to the subject, entitled, Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling. Five actual structures, illustrative of the most provocative ideas in house making today, offered a counterpoint to drawings and models inside the museum, which told the rich history of alternative home-building methods.

As current as it seems, ironically, the notion has attracted interest for centuries. A bit of clarification is in order, however. As curator Barry Bergdoll points out in his essay accompanying the exhibition, “The history of off-site fabrication of buildings and the history of an architectural culture of prefabrication are distinct.” The first stretches back to early recorded history, while the second gained currency after the Industrial Revolution and increased with 20th-century Modernists confronting the challenges of housing for burgeoning worker populations. Today, after economic and market-based vicissitudes, our interest has risen to fever pitch.