According to Wikipedia, modular homes are houses that are divided into multiple modules or sections, which are manufactured in a remote facility, and then delivered to their intended site of use.  This sounds nice, but not particularly cool.  However, if you pick up a design magazine like Dwell or Urbis, you're practically guaranteed to find some nugget about modular home designs.  Which means modular must by cool, at least by association.  But why?

The first reason, of course, is that modular is good for planet.  Building a new house from scratch produces a lot of waste.  The "modules" used in modular homes are manufactured in bulk, which cuts waste by maximizing resources -- and those resources are frequently chosen with sustainability in mind.  But sustainability and lack of waste are hardly enough on their own to make a house Dwell-worthy.  What really makes modular cool is who is doing it – and how.  The who in this case are young, cutting edge architects around the world.  The how is by applying their creativity and design knowledge to a simple challenge:  to build better, smarter and more livable homes.  When it comes to contemporary architecture, you can't get much cooler than that.