Precedents Congress Passes HUD Code

Paul Rudolph
Oriental Masonic Gardens, New Haven, Connecticut
1968-1971



Sarah Radding
Built by the Prince Hall Masons with a HUD mortgage for 3.5 million dollars, Oriental Masonic Gardens consists of 148 units on 12.5 acres. Residences are grouped in fours around a utility core. In every home, a lower module contains living spaces. A second module above it houses two or three bedrooms. And a third module may be added, parallel to the lowest one, for additional bedrooms. This stacking organization creates a sheltered outdoor space for each unit. The units are factory assembled with plumbing, wiring and finishes, then trucked to the site.

Each module, 12 feet wide by 27, 39 or 51 feet long, cost $17.16 per square foot. Masonic Gardens units sold for between $21,000 and $23,000, close to the cost of a site built house, due to setbacks a series of setbacks. Subjected to local building codes, these modular units could not be produced with the cost efficiency of mobile homes. At the time of the project, building mobile homes was more lucrative so few companies were interested in taking on the risk of modular housing. Costly problems were also encountered when the homes were inspected on site, after being produced and transported to New Haven.

Architectural Record 148:3 (Sept. 1970)


The issue of modularity has always delighted architects, whose work always addresses standardized materials (2x4's) and elements (plug-in windows). In the Masonic Gardens project, Paul Rudolph, tried to design with room-sized modular elements, only to discover that this intermediate scale (between the element and the house) proved to be neither affordable nor generic.

Over the past ten years the manufactured housing has shifted to more modular styles of building in its use of the double wide (whose construction is governed by the HUD code), as well as spawning an entire industry of "factory-built" housing, which is not transported on a chassis and is therefore subjected to local building codes.