Even by New York City standards, it's quite a sight. On a 17,000-square-foot vacant lot just west of the Museum of Modern Art, a mini-suburb of contemporary houses is being built — practically overnight. But that's exactly the point of "Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling." The exhibition, which opens July 20, examines factory-produced, or prefab, houses from 1833 to today, through 60 projects shown inside the museum and five full-scale houses outside. These houses address issues of mass production, digital fabrication, sustainability and portability, using a variety of manufacturing techniques and aiming at several points along the price spectrum.

For Barry Bergdoll, the museum's chief curator of architecture and design, "Home Delivery" offered the perfect opportunity to bring together architects' current interest in digital fabrication with the general public's nostalgia for Modernist prefab designs, and to do an exhibition that was both contemporary and historical at the same time. (A 1948 Lustron house will be on display in the galleries, as will a partial reconstruction of a house by Jean Prouvé and a model of a 1906 prefab project by Thomas Edison.) The museum has a history of showing full-scale houses: Marcel Breuer's House in the Museum Garden was a big hit when it opened in 1949. But the houses in the vacant lot are a grittier bunch, without landscaping or decorating. As Bergdoll explains, "I'm very interested in process — how architects work, how they solve problems and how they adapt to new technologies — not just ‘Isn't this cool?' "

Oskar Leo Kaufmann and Albert Ruf's 37-by-15-foot System3 house is one of five prefab dwellings being assembled for MoMA's "Home Delivery" exhibition