Want to shift from Boston to California and worried to death because you do not want to abandon the home that took every drop of your sweat to build and neither do you want to rent it to a faceless stranger? What about packing it and taking it with you? Yes sir!! You heard me correctly. That's the modular home for you

A Modular home is the distant, less-tainted cousin of the mobile house. The mobile house, though considered as the answer to America's "affordable-housing" void, faced a head-on blow when it was categorized as 'low class' and 'trailer-park'.

Modular means design based on a module (unit of measurement) which is repeated throughout the building. Thus a modular home is a house, the sections of which are transported to the building site and then joined together by local contractors.

This kind of a house has it's own advantages. To begin with, modular homes are built in such a way that they conform to any kind of geographical territory. So if one wants to shift from Bristol to Brunei, there would be no worries about the reconstruction of a house. And then, there is the question of economic viability. To test which, a two-unit modular townhouse was built in Cambridge by Epoch and the Hickory Consortium - a Cambridge Massachusetts based group. With the aim of constructing environmentally sustainable and economical houses, the group found that modular homes cost a whooping 15% less than site-built construction.

As Steve Snyder, the executive director of Modular Building Systems Association in Harrisburg puts it, "A lot of people find out that it can be inexpensive and also look the same as stick-framed houses." Since the houses are inspected at every phase of construction, there are no cost overruns because the number of contractors are less and most of the costs are fixed. What comes as an added advantage is that a well- built modular home has almost the same longevity as it's site-built counterpart - something that raises its value over time.

However, the modular home has had a difficult journey towards widespread acceptance because buyers have often had to sacrifice quality for affordability.

Such trivial issues have found their solution in Douglas Cutler, principal of Douglas Cutler Architects in Wilton. It always struck Cutler that manufacturers never sought out talented architects to "jazz up the design" - an initiative that he took in collaboration with manufacturers like Goscobec Modular Homes, SUN Building Systems and Haven Homes. As a result, we today have modular homes with an architectural flair.

And still, the best is yet to come. MIT researchers are 'studying ways' to reduce the brittleness and reinforce the cement with microspheres. Innovative metallic and adhesive bonding techniques are being worked upon to join the panels into a weather-tight shell. Combining metal fasteners with structural plastic tapes are also under consideration.

The modular home is yet to see its best days when the completed design will be sent via computer network to an automated factory where the components would be prefabricated and the entire house with roof, floor and walls would be erected - all in one day!!