Over the course of just 10 months, New York City’s first building made entirely of modular units came together. (Sorry, Atlantic Yards’ B2, but you’re literally going be No. 2 in this fight.) Developers Jeffrey Brown and Kim Frank, along with the creative architecture firm Gluck+, took a 50-foot-wide, 150-foot-deep site on Broadway near the Cloisters and loaded 56 modules into it in only 19 days, stacking them—in a manner that handily produced neat time-lapse videos—into two seven-story structures with one unified facade that surround a central courtyard. Within The Stack are 22 apartments that hit the rental market in May, with studios starting at $1,755, one-bedrooms from $2,400, two-bedrooms from $2,850, and three-bedrooms from $3,990. (There are also six affordable apartments getting doled out via lottery.)
Curbed took a tour of this urban milestone in prefab-ulous construction, learning all sorts new terminology, like “mate lines,” a.k.a. the visible notches in the floor where two modules meet. Fun fact: the quarter-mile-long assembly line where the modules were constructed in Pennsylvania custom-equipped each of the 56 rectangular prisms with everything from toilet paper roll holders and mirrors to kitchen cabinets and countertops, all constructed into position hundreds of miles away based on the module’s final destination in its intended apartment
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http://ny.curbed.com/archives/2014/06/26/inside_the_stack_new_yorks_first_batch_of_modular_homes.php