The Cellophance House is a five-story, off-site fabricated dwelling made of transparent, recyclable materials commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art, for the 2008 exhibition Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling. Aluminium acts as the structural frame for the 1800 sqarefoot home that was fabricated off-site in a factory over the course of thirteen weeks and erected on-site in sixteen days.
The Cellophance House is not site specific, and can therefore adapt to a range of climatic factors, solar orientations, slopes and adjacencies. Homeowners can alter the array of materials and floor plans as desired. Regardless of the changes, the method of fabrication remains the same. Conventional construction techniques, in striving for permanence, fix materials to one another in such a way that they lose the capacity to be reclaimed. By contrast, Cellophane House is assembled out of materials held in place by rapidly reversible attachment methods. Extruded aluminium framing, combined with custom steel connectors, provides the structure and the means to attach factory made elements together. Modularity enables the house to be efficiently transported. The Cellophane House disassembly/reassembly strategy successfully recovered 98.95% of the energy embodied in materials during the 38-day disassembly sequence.
The cantilevered canopy with its structural aluminium frame shaded the root terrace and harvest energy via integrated photovoltaic components.
The clearly articlulated structural aluminium frame, which is formed of standard extruded sections of the Cellophane House.