Remember when Sears and Roebuck sold you a house-in-a-box?

ARTICLE: "Arriving in London: Hotels Made in China," by Fred A. Bernstein, New York Times, 11 May 2008, p. BU19.

Of course you don't, because that was about a century ago.

You should recognize the Wick home, though, or the prefab houses that are built in factories and then trucked to permanent foundations. When I grew up in Wisconsin, there was (and I believe still is) a huge Wick factory on the west side of Madison. I knew more than a few people who lived in these houses, because I grew up in a part of America that featured modest households.

So now we have China cranking entire hotels like Wick homes, shipping prefab rooms to London for assembly. They're basically an adaptation of the container structures used on ships, so easy to ship and easy to stack once you get them to the construction site.

Anyone who's spent time on U.S. military bases inside the Gap is familiar with this construction technique. Just see my pictures from Djibouti and Kabul.

Hotel-in-boxes!

Comments

[William R. Cumming.]

There are reported estimates of as many as 11M homeless in China from recent earthquake. Perhaps diversion of exports to domestic use?

[EJDUBYA]

The Hilton Hotel in San Antonio, TX was built this way some years ago. Basically, it was assembled from prefab "rooms" to build the structure in a matter of a few months.