The Premise of arKITecture

The manufactured house has achieved acceptance over the past several years for many reasons. The quality and availability of "industrialized" products has grown, and the quality and availability of skilled labor has shrunk. Because fewer and fewer people have the hands-on knowledge (and heartfelt passion) required to build a home, labor costs have skyrocketed, a simple outfall of supply and demand.

There was a time not so long ago when all villagers participated in the construction of each others' homes. Contributed labor was the price people paid to be in community. Not anymore. In this day and age, the cost of traditional craftsmanship to assemble a well built home is nearly on par with the cost of the materials, if you can even find and schedule those trades people at all. In this "hurry up and get it done now" world, time frames for delivery have also shrunk. Scheduling traditional construction for "small" projects has become a crap shoot. The variables of building outdoors add further, and potentially unbearable costs to building houses, one at a time on site. If your site is not in a development among many other homes, the odds against building efficiently rise dramatically.

Manufactured houses leverage industrial advantages practiced by Henry Ford, which increase quality, through control and efficiency, and reduce costs through volume and predictability. There are many attributes to manufactured housing that support the concept and as stated earlier, the masses have accepted them.

There is also a huge downside which I think most people (can you say CAPITALIST?) write off as a hopeless reality, that the manufacturer is in control. Sure, people get to choose from many options for their brand new manufactured house, but in my view, (and I trust, that of many others,) the assembly-line-produced-house lacks the essential elements that the neighbor-constructed home of yesteryear inherently held. Those of the HOME SPIRIT.

My dream, and the premise of arKITecture is to share a way which utilizes the advantages of manufacturing, deals with the realities of today and competes in this real world economy, so that what we propose is accessible to the common person. Let's turn the tide back to what makes the difference between a house and a home. I am confident we can do it!

I've been living this dream all of my life....and now, as surely as I'm blogging, the time is ripe to manifest my yearning. I hold many keys and as I've suggested, the paradigms are shifting, opportunities are knocking and as clearly as I see the world around me turning, it is time to shake and move.....I hope you will join me, so we can support each other on this journey....

With infinite love and gratitude.....

Kent