From its first issue, Dwell encouraged architects to play with the form, with varying degrees of success, because in the United States, producing prefabricated, single-family homes economically is stymied by transportation costs, and the entrenched habits (and union restrictions) of the construction industry.

“The problem,” Ms. Jacobs said, “is that for prefab to be meaningful” — to produce affordable good architecture — “it needs industrialists, not architects. It needs capital money to build real factories. Architects limp along, but for the most part, they can’t make it happen, not for real.”

Allison Arieff, Ms. Jacobs’s successor at Dwell and the co-author, with Bryan Burkhart, of the 2002 book “Prefab,” suggested that Revolution’s wares might just as easily be made the old-fashioned way. “That this project is prefab is a cute way of getting to it, but it’s not an essential way of getting to it,” she said. “It’s not saving any money, and it’s not trying to disrupt anything. I’m glad he’s giving architects work, though.”

In other countries, well-designed prefabricated housing is a healthier story. Ikea has been making house modules for years, and selling them in Finland, Norway and Sweden. And in Japan, where the average life span of a house is 38 years, prefab is an intuitive choice for so-called disposable housing, which is why Muji, the Japanese housewares company, has teamed up with designers like Konstantin Grcic, Jasper Morrison and Naoto Fukasawa to create affordable kit houses.

“Architectural jewelry” is how Michael Haverland, the Manhattan-based architect who has designed modernist structures for Calvin Klein and Mr. Salle, among others, described Mr. Antonio’s offerings. “How much do you want to be talking about the notion of prefab and how much do you want to talk about these as art objects which happen to be made in a factory, which doesn’t necessarily mean prefab,” he said. “Anyone’s custom kitchen done in a millwork shop is prefab; so are your windows, whether they’re made of steel, wood or vinyl. Is prefab being used as a fashionable term or is it trying to develop and advance the fundamental tenets of what prefab is supposed to be, which is affordable, mass production, not couture dwelling?”

A little bit of both, Mr. Antonio would answer. He said that some prototypes may end up in the master plans of large developments, in Asia and South America, and that a foundation will be created to “support homegrown C.S.R.” — corporate social responsibility — “efforts and nonprofit third parties,” according to Revolution’s website.