what's next for michelle kaufmann?

Tuesday night I got a call from Michelle Kaufmann, AIA, LEED AP, with the "sad news," as she called it, that her company was closing up shop. Sad news, indeed. Michelle Kaufmann Designs was residential architect magazine's Top Firm for 2008. How quickly businesses can unravel in this economy. The very attributes that set Michelle's company apart from so many residential design firms—big dreams, big talent, big moves, big risk taking—are what also made it vulnerable when big problems occurred in the banking and home building industries.

"We were very busy," she told me. "I know it sounds crazy to say, but we didn't see this coming. If one problem had happened, we could have dealt with it, but all of them hit at the same time." Clients' financing fell through; a factory partner went under. For a small company just five years old and working at the bleeding edge of innovation, the setbacks proved too much to bear. "My main concern is that we see our current clients through the building of their houses. I don't have flesh-and-blood children; our houses were my children," she said.

When we named Michelle's company Top Firm last year, we did so because we admired her bravery in embracing so much of the responsibility and risk in designing, developing, and building her houses. Most of her prefab peers took on only part of this three-pronged approach, which likely still remains the best way to get the job done right. We were also impressed by Michelle's media savvy. Her company website was light-years ahead of other architects', with video, white papers, product information and suggestions, a blog, and, of course, thorough details about her prefab house collection. Essentially, she created her own de facto home design broadcast network, spreading information about sustainable living to a wider public. She was on Twitter before Oprah. And, I'm going to guess, she's had nearly as many idea houses installed in public places as Frank Lloyd Wright, an early proponent and innovator of modular houses.

Idea houses were a linchpin in Kaufmann's goal to inform the public firsthand about what good, sustainable design looks like and feels like. There's no substitute for walking through a house and discerning for oneself the quality of the space, the size and functionality of the rooms, and the overall impact of thoughtful design on one's sense of well-being. Big production builders have understood this for years—models sell houses.

Because you can't please everyone with just one plan, Kaufmann made sure she developed several different house types for a variety of building sites—urban infill, single-family suburban, multifamily. Her houses were available in small square footage versions and in expanded or expandable iterations. Although a modernist, she even had a prototype with a pitched roof, reflecting her Iowa farm girl roots and the prevailing public taste for more traditional architectural forms.

Yes, she had it all. With nearly 40 houses finished in just five years, she was clearly onto something important. The world did seem ready for her message of more affordable, sustainable, sensible design. But the world as we know it shifted on its axis, and many of us are stumbling because of it. "I think we had the right idea, that the country's ready for what we do, but we need to find another way to get there," she said the other night. Prefab, she explained, can't realize its promise until it reaches "scale," as she calls it, or a substantial number of multiples. That's when it truly becomes more affordable than custom, not to mention faster and better built, with less waste of resources and materials. Currently, she's exploring the option of working with an established big builder to deliver her designs to market: "They're in trouble too, and they need new ideas like ours."

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And most observers of the scene agree Michelle has some of the best ideas. Just this month she received the green Individual Advocate of the Year award from the National Association of Home Builders. And when I was at the AIA National Convention in San Francisco, also earlier this month, I happened to talk about Michelle with Ray Kappe, FAIA, founder of the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc)—a school known for churning out creative innovators. Ray, who's in his 80s, experimented with prefab the first time around in the 1950s and designed the first LEED Platinum modular house for LivingHomes in 2006. Michelle, he told me, "is the best out there. She's doing prefab right."

Prefab proponents still believe factory-built housing is the right way to go, and won't disappear from the scene as it once did. Jennifer Siegal, another prefab savant, told us recently, "It's a better way of producing dwellings: less waste, less time. Which potentially leads to less cost, but the only way you get there is by having more demand. In the next five years, the industry is going to move forward. It's not just a flash in the pan."

It's important to note that one of the reasons Michelle's company rose above so many on a similar path was the sheer beauty of the designs. They were handsome houses—especially the Glidehouse and Sunset Breezehouse—no matter how they were made. They demonstrated to Americans the power and potential of good design to blunt our impact on the environment, while still answering the primal desire for a satisfying, life-enhancing place to live. Green design won't win any popularity contests until there are more reasons to buy it than to pass it by. We make our home purchase decisions using 25 percent reason and 75 percent passion. Kaufmann's smart, sophisticated house designs answered both drives.

Were this any other economy, the momentum of Michelle's talent, drive, personal charisma, and vision might have carried her through. Architects in the past did their best to shelter their firms from financial risk and liability and, in doing so, abdicated their role and responsibility in housing innovation. We have all suffered for their absence. Michelle was doing much more than her part to strive for much-needed change, contributing disciplined thinking to residential design and building and offering enlightened stewardship through the whole daunting process for her clients.

Despite this considerable setback, I can't imagine the economy will keep her down for long. Meanwhile, she will decamp to her own Glidehouse—the original, stick-built prototype—and practice again as just Michelle Kaufmann. But if anyone can reinvent themselves, she can. As she wrote in her most recent blog post, "There is so much improvement and innovation to do in creating healthy, diverse, efficient and beautifully designed communities. There is more than one model of the American Dream." Most of us stop at the dream itself, but Michelle dares to make it come true. I can't wait to see what she does next.

Comments? Email: S. Claire Conroy at cconroy@hanleywood.com.