[Turing_Machine]

Buckminster Fuller did a lot of work in this area, way back when. He's probably best known for the geodesic dome, but did a lot of other stuff as well. One of his other projects was a preformed, all-metal (copper, I think) bathroom in which all the surfaces were smoothly curved (no corners to catch crud) and which had the plumbing hookups in standard locations (a bolt-on, as it were). Then there was the Dymaxion House, designed to be mass-produce in the same factories that were producing aluminum-bodied aircraft.

There are numerous problems with innovation in construction -- building codes and trade union resistance being two of them. Building codes are often written in such a way as to exclude nonstandard materials altogether. "Component X must be made of 2x6 lumber" (a "prescriptive" building code) rather than "component X must be capable of withstanding a load of Y pounds with a safety factor of Z" (a "performance" building code). An advantage of that is that building inspectors don't have to be engineers. The disadvantage is that it's hard/expensive/impossible to do something that isn't in the book.

Another problem is that there's still something of a "trailer park" stigma associated with prefab construction.