This modern house on Cedar Lake centers around a coved space for piano performance. Dwell featured this curvy home for a Minneapolis musician in its May 2020 tour of homes.
Awards & Recognition –
Publications
Dwell Magazine highlighted six cool prefabs in the American Heartland. The Week’nder designed by Lazor/Office was featured as a beloved modern Midwest prefab home.
Beautiful Modern Forest Houses. Architectural Digest elaborated on the architecture of Kiss Kiss a Rainy Lake, Ontario retreat.
These four Minnesota–based companies are raising the bar with their prefab home designs and systems.
Being inside the house feels like floating over the water. The Kiss-Kiss House is a result of two cedar clad, prefabricated modules “kissing’ over a remote Canadian lake.
Light-toned cedar boards wrap around this lake house in Ontario, by American firm Lazor Office, which comprises two volumes that face the water and are joined at their corners.
It can be challenging enough to find the right frame for a painting. But what if you want to frame an ever-changing natural environment—and you also want to live inside the frame?
A celebration of twenty years of design, philosophy, and inspiration from the renowned American furniture brand Blu Dot.
The Stack House designed by Lazor Office is essentially a stack of blocks.
Designing a home around what we call 'social spaces', where social interaction drives the design, is a key to making a home with soul.
Prefab housing, IKEA, and the craze for all things modern were tantalizing possibilities when Charlie Lazor started Blu Dot in 1997 with college friends Maurice Blanks and John Christakos.
Inspired by driftwood, the Kiss-Kiss House is clad in unpainted cedar panels that also help blend the home into its forested surroundings. The house snaps in half like a brand to embrace the landscape.
Architecture Minnesota uncovered the design logic and homeowners’ passions that shaped the architecture of the Stack House. This tree house in Minneapolis is for a couple that is passionate about contemporary living and design.
A home in Ontario, Canada, demonstrates how factory-built housing can be as site sensitive as traditional construction.
An isolated Prefarb in Ontario, Canada demonstrates how factory-built hosing can be as site sensitive as traditional construction. Dwell featured this home for a remote site in Ontario.
In a trio of cabins, architect Charlie Lazor (of Blu Dot and FlatPak fame), plays with such modernist no-nos as narrative and fantasy.
Minneapolis-based Charlie Lazor first introduced the panelized FlatPak house in 2005. Since then, his firm, Lazor Office, has built 18 FlatPaks.
Intelligent, appealing, and affordable, Charlie Lazor’s user-friendly FlatPak just might be the project that revolutionizes the prefab industry. Dwell Magazine reveals what inspired the first FlatPak and the possibilities of the FlatPak building system.
The offices of branding/advertising agency Mono, located in Minneapolis, Minnesota were recently designed by architect Charlie Lazor in collaboration with Chris Lange, co-founder of Mono.
Lazor/Office's FlatPak house in Aspen, Colorado is featured in a story about prefabricated residences in The Wall Street Journal
A modernist modular home confirms the trend: Prefab is back.
Lazor/Office's FlatPak system is featured in a story about winners of a competition hosted by Dwell Home Deisgn in the New York Times
One of Blu Dot’s founding triumvirate, Charlie Lazor is also the principle of Minneapolis-based architectural firm Lazor Office.
Awards
Week'nder won Architizer's juried A+ Award in the Prefabricated Architecutre category. Celebrating the year's best buildings and spaces, the A+Awards are bigger than just the architectural community. Entries are judged by more than 400 luminaries from fields as diverse as fashion, publishing, product design, real estate development, and tech.
Blu Dot was founded in 1997 by college friends John Christakos, Maurice Blanks, and Charlie Lazor. Recognized for its inventive use of materials, fabrication technology, and assembly methods, Blu Dot produces furniture that is determined by an economy of means while maintaining a playful sensibility.
The Kiss Kiss House, on the shore of Rainy Lake in Ontario, received the Merit Award in the Modular/Prefab Home category
The Stack House, a family home near Cedar Lake in Minneapolis received the Grand Award. A custom Home Less Than 5,000 Square
Charlie Lazor was one of five finalists for the Emerging Designer Award by the Rhode Island School of Design in partnership with Surface Magazine in 2005.
Exhibitions
The National Building Museum presented House & Home featuring a peek into life in a Lazor Office FlatPak project. The exhibit showed a wide range of stories about the American home, both historical and contemporary. A two-screen film displayed a film showing how Tom and Rodney live in their FlatPak.
This diverse collection of material illustrates how the prefabricated house has been, and continues to be, not only a reflection on the house as a replicable object of design but also a critical agent in the discourse of sustainability, architectural invention, and new material and formal research.
Fabricating the Modern Dwelling exhibition. The short video playfully presents the process of how the prefabricated parts of FlatPak homes come together to create inviting and customizable architecture.
Cooper Hewitt National Design Triennial: FlatPak
2007
Charlie Lazor's FlatPak House was chosen as one of the best American designs from the preceding three years and showcased as part of the Design Life Now: National Design Triennial show at Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum
Lazor Office presented the FlatPak series for the Walker Arts Center exhibition Some Assembly Required: Contemporary Prefabricated Houses.
Workspheres examines the balance between work and life, and the important role designers play in devising effective solutions for our ever-changing work paradigms.