There are nearly 500,000 freestanding billboards in the United States alone. What if any number of these could be converted en mass into functional, modular prefab homes that could be shipped and installed in rural and urban areas around the country – eco-friendly, cheap new housing from recycled old billboards.

Prefabrication and portability are nothing new in architecture and transportation, but world-changing modular and mass-producible visions like this concept by Nocturnal Design Labs are few and far between. Unlike most conventional prefabs, these spaces are planned with interior layouts, sun paths and wind patterns in mind, giving the result a distictive and dynamic shape.

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From the curved modern shell and functional interior spaces to the high-up locations with varied views, there is more to this than simply a clever idea from a forward-thinking designer – these are best understood as prefab building prototypes, the potential start of an entire movement in adaptive reuse already being explored by various architects and designs.

“nocturnal design Lab [n:dL] was founded in 2004 by Brendan O’Grady, AIA and Tom Trenolone, AIA in Dallas, TX.  We are an emerging design studio that is dedicated to ongoing research and experimentation in the realms of architecture, design, graphics, and fabrication.”

“We are engaged in a range of activities and projects that establish a critical balance between our realized work and our theoretical design projects.  We seek out projects that demand new and innovative solutions.  We work with clients who are interested in new ways of thinking, investigating, and exploring ideas, rather than just getting a predetermined solution.”

“We like to describe the current work that we are engaged in as ProtoTecture.  This work falls somewhere in-between the realms of architecture and product design.  One could call it architecture because the context of our work is the built environment, but most of our projects are conceived more like products that can be customized, mass produced, and sometimes self-assembled.”

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