In a 1944 difficulty of Arts & Structure journal, the architect and designer Charles Eames sounded an alarm. “It has been estimated that a million 5 hundred thousand homes annually for a interval of 10 years shall be wanted to alleviate the pressing housing drawback of this nation,” he wrote. “The enormity of such a necessity can’t even be partially glad by constructing methods as we’ve recognized and used them previously. Massive scale trade would appear to be the one logical means by which we will obtain an enterprise of such proportion.”
All through their careers, Charles and Ray Eames explored how industrial manufacturing may impression residence constructing, most famously by way of their own Pacific Palisades residence, often known as Case Research #8. However a totally manufacturing unit constructed home was their elusive white whale. Now it’s lastly turning into a actuality by way of a collaboration between the Eames Office, a non-profit group devoted to stewarding and lengthening the couple’s work, and Kettal, a Spanish producer of furnishings and prefabricated pavilions.
At Milan Design Week, the 2 organizations are debuting The Eames Pavilions, a modular development system based mostly on the designers’ philosophy of environment friendly, versatile, and adaptable structure. A 4 meter sq. indoor pavilion, which is roughly 170 sq. ft, will begin at 45,000 Euros (about $52,000) and is predicted to go on sale worldwide in late 2026. An outside model of the identical measurement begins at 60,000 Euros (about $69,000) with an estimated availability in 2027. Clients can mix modules to create bigger pavilions and it’s doable to stack them to 2 tales, too.
For the Milan set up, on view on the Triennale Museum from April 21 to Could 10, 2026, Kettal and the Eames Workplace will present two of the myriad configurations that the system can produce. The primary is a double-height iteration, which appears so much just like the Case Research #8. It has a black-painted metallic body, floor-to-ceiling glass partitions, zig-zag trusses, hen wire–bolstered home windows, and vivid wall panels in major colours. (The value tag for this particular construct? $145,000 Euros, or about $167,000.) The second is a single module that includes wall panels adorned with geometric shapes the Eameses favored.
Whereas not a one-to-one duplicate of any earlier Eames home, the equipment of elements represents an amalgamation of the designers’ core concepts round materiality, construction, and proportion and, importantly, channels the charming spirit of their residential initiatives.
“The Eames home and their different homes, have been meant to be the start of one thing that may flip right into a system or right into a collection, however they have been experiments,” says Eckart Maise, writer of the forthcoming guide The Eames Houses and a design guide who labored intently on the product’s growth. “Charles and Ray have been very clear of their intent to mass produce.”
The housing disaster is even worse now than when Charles wrote his Arts & Structure article. According to Zillow, the housing deficit has grown to 4.7 million models in 2025. May an Eames prefab provide an answer?
An extended highway to mass manufacturing
The Eames Workplace has been exploring a solution to this query for years. In 2021, the Eames Workplace attempted to revive a never-built 1951 wood-framed prefab Charles & Ray developed with Kwikset (Kwikset went out of enterprise earlier than development may start), however realized that the regional enterprise mannequin of most prefab housing corporations restricted the dimensions at which they might work. So as a substitute, they shifted gears and centered on producers with a world attain who may fabricate metallic framing, which is extra sensible than carpentry for mass distribution.
This led Maise to Kettal. Thirty % of the corporate’s enterprise comes from an indoor-outdoor modular pavilion system, which it has produced for a decade. The corporate had the infrastructure in place to fabricate, distribute, and set up the pavilions worldwide. Happily, Antonio Navarro, Kettal’s inventive director, was additionally interested by exploring an Eamesian design. “It’s tough to not fall in love with the options, the environment that they created, the lighting,” Navarro says. “It’s the sort of structure that we’d like for the long run as a result of it’s ecological, it’s simple to assemble, it’s simple to move, and it’s simple to fabricate.”
Maise and Kettal spent three years researching and growing the Eames Pavilion System.
They started by visiting the Case Research #8 and took measurements, colour samples, and materials research. Getting the small print proper, all the way in which all the way down to window profiles, can be “vital to maintain the magic” of Charles and Ray’s areas, Maise says. Additionally they combed the archives for data on the homes the duo designed for Arts & Structure editor John Entenza (also known as Case Study #9), the actor Billy Wilder (Maise uncovered an unpublished design idea for the home), and Max De Pree, the son of Herman Miller founder D.J. De Pree.
Throughout the homes, Maise observed how Charles & Ray established modules and prolonged floorplans based mostly on the scale of these modules. “It gave us the safety to say it’s an open system and you may construct many alternative issues as a result of throughout these 5 – 6 designs, you understand how open they thought of their configurations,” Maise says.
Adapting an icon
The Kettal-manufactured system, which ships flat, has comparable DNA to the Eameses’ structure however, “it’s actually vital to know that the Pavilion just isn’t a facsimile of the Eames Home,” Maise says. Nonetheless, the choices for personalisation shall be recognizable to followers of the couple’s work. For instance, consumers can select a roofline that’s flush with the partitions, identical to Case Research #8, or a roof with deep eaves for shading, which nods to the overhang on the Wilder home. For the outside partitions, the combos may embrace strong partitions, glass, and panels bolstered with X-braces, particulars borrowed from Case Research #8, or a strong panel adorned with two triangles, just like the Entenza house. Inside finishes like wooden paneling and draperies additionally reference the small print the Eameses used throughout their residential initiatives.
At the moment’s supplies and manufacturing course of have improved for the reason that Eameses designed their properties. In the meantime, constructing codes throughout the globe have change into far more rigorous for vitality effectivity, seismic exercise, and wind tolerances. Due to this, Kettal is integrating trendy supplies and merchandise into the pavilions together with aluminum home windows with efficiency glass for thermal insulation as a substitute of single-pane glazing, light-weight concrete panels as a substitute of poured-in-place parts, and aluminum alloy framing which has the identical resistance as metal.
The Eames Workplace and Kettal see alternatives for the Pavilion System to function Accent Dwelling Items, yard pavilions, pool homes, or perhaps a single-family residence. However first, it wants to check how the pavilion performs open air and show that it meets essentially the most rigorous constructing codes and technical necessities all over the world. Moreover, creating assembly rooms or non-public places of work in open-plan workspaces represents a “enormous potential,” Maise says. (Kettal already sells its indoor merchandise to prospects like Tesla, Apple, Google, Amazon, LinkedIn, and Salesforce.)
“It’s thrilling to make the magic of [Charles & Ray’s] structure accessible as a product,” says Maise, who beforehand collaborated with the Eames Workplace on furnishings when he was the chief design officer at Vitra. “If you stroll into an inside, you stroll in with all of your senses. It’s totally different from an object.”
