That history of spectacular flops and over-budget prototypes hasn't diminished architects' obsession with the problem, or kept the Museum of Modern Art from earnestly probing the subject.

On Sunday, MoMA debuts its latest survey on designing the prefabricated house. Titled "Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling," it comes 50 years after the museum's celebrated exploration of the topic, in which Breuer built a full-scale, butterfly-roof suburban house in the museum's garden.

The show was a huge popular success. Yet like so many other attempts at prefab construction, Breuer's prototype took months to build and never produced any offspring. No wonder the sixth-floor exhibit opens with clips of Buster Keaton's One Week, a 1920 satire about a quickie house.

MoMA is hoping to do better this time. Along with staging an absorbing gallery exhibit featuring models, drawings and artifacts, the museum commissioned five architects to try to crack the prefab problem, once and for all. It was perfect timing because the museum had recently acquired an 18,000-square-foot lot two doors west of its 53d Street building for yet another expansion of its art compound.

The land gave the architects a chance to build what MoMA curator Barry Bergdoll described as "the weirdest subdivision ever" on one of the priciest pieces of unbuilt real estate in Manhattan.

Weird it is. A gingerbread-decorated, New Orleans-style shotgun house, produced by MIT students, stands shoulder-to-shoulder with a shimmering, see-through, circuitry-studded townhouse by Philadelphia's KieranTimberlake Associates.

That urbane, energy-efficient Cellophane House stares down at BURST*008, a modern beach shack with wildly complex angles, plenty of surfboard storage, and the capacity for self-ventilation designed by New York's Jeremy Edmiston and Douglas Gauthier.

Between them are two true quick-build exercises: the Micro Compact, which could be a sleeping car on a zealously minimalist Orient Express, and SYSTEM3, a shipping container by a couple of Austrian architects that offers a ski-chalet aesthetic accessorized by prison-style bathroom fixtures.

You can walk through all except the Micro Compact, which at 76 square feet might be taking the notion of off-site construction a little too far. The stainless-steel cube is really a modernist version of a pop-up camp trailer, and no more useful to daily life.

Each of the five houses offers its own take on prefabrication. They're engaged in a furious debate on the best way to make houses in a world where energy consumption, sustainability and affordability are big concerns. The only point the five agree on is that the construction industry, a major spewer of carbon emissions, needs to learn to build more efficiently.

Reading the front-page news these days, it may seem that America won't be erecting many houses of any sort, efficient or not, for a while. But it's hard not to be drawn into MoMA's five-way conversation. There's something irresistible about plopping little houses into the canyons of Midtown, with skyscrapers like Eero Saarinen's brooding CBS tower forming the background peaks.

It's not only architects who are attracted by the utopian idea of bringing prefab houses to the masses. Judging by the traffic jams for Ikea, which produces the furniture equivalent, the public is interested in acquiring shelter that can be carried home in a flat pack. In researching the exhibition, Bergdoll discovered that the prefabrication urge is as old as history. Ancient Greek shipwrecks have been found carrying all the parts necessary for an Athenian temple.

Early attempts at prefabrication were really just a matter of assembling all the pieces before construction. The notion that you could prepare multiple houses at once probably began in 1844, when a London carpenter sent his son off to Australia with all the components for several small cottages.

Sears, Roebuck & Co. tried much the same thing in the early decades of the 20th century, when it offered precut parts for Victorian houses delivered straight to the building lot. But the houses still had to be constructed using the same time-consuming methods as a conventional house.

Henry Ford raised the ante. Ever since he started turning out low-cost cars on an assembly line, architects have been trying to systematize house-building. Wood-rich America helped advance the cause with balloon-frame construction, which relies on standardized two-by-fours and nails. It allowed carpenters to dispense with time-consuming joinery and quickly frame the skeleton of a house. But it still wasn't fast enough.

MoMA's five architecture groups are determined to pick up the pace. Unlike their modernist forebears, they have the technology to revolutionize the way buildings are made. All five use computers to design 3-D models of their houses and e-mail the details to the factory for cutting.

If you judge the houses purely on how quickly they were erected on the site, Micro Compact and SYSTEM3 win easily, since they were delivered as is. But they really aren't spaces where you'd want to make a home. While people might crave cheap, sustainable shelter, they're not likely to sacrifice traditional home comforts. Only KieranTimberlake's Cellophane House and the BURST*008 house feel like places you could actually move into tomorrow.

Cellophane House goes furthest in making prefabrication seem plausible. It's built on true intellectual foundations, honed over the last decade by its architects. Not only did their innovative ideas about revamping the construction process enable them to build Cellophane in under three weeks, they designed it using recyclable materials, such as PET plastic, glass and aluminum, with almost no construction waste.

They don't just talk the talk on energy efficiency; they embedded the walls with enough photovoltaics to power Cellophane House off the grid.

Like the other prototypes, it's designed to stand alone as a house but can be incorporated as a module of a larger apartment building. The architects are no longer concerned just with prefabrication; they want to "mass-customize" houses unique to individual needs. Call it the salad-bar approach.

But there's one drawback: Their prototype is said to cost almost $1 million, twice as much as BURST*008, which is half the size. Who needs mass production at that price point?

High cost has done in prefabrication efforts before. Take the Lustron House, whose history is bound up with MoMA's. In 1948, with American soldiers returning in droves, Lustron Corp. introduced an all-steel, prefab suburban house, which it claimed could be built cheaper and better than anything by William J. Levitt. It promoted the product by erecting a sales model on Sixth Avenue, a stone's throw from MoMA. Crowds flocked to see the marvel.

That stunt infuriated Philip Johnson, head of MoMA's architecture department, who thought Lustron was passing off the homey ranch as modern design. He retaliated by commissioning Breuer to build his stylistically modern house. But as manufacturing costs soared, the designs met similar fates, becoming dead ends of prefab design. Imagine how Johnson, who died in 2005, would react if he knew the Lustron model house was the one MoMA included in this exhibition.

MoMA still underestimates the greatest prefabrication success of all time, the Levitt House. I grew up in a knock-off in the original Levittown (in New York), where about 80,000 mass-customized houses were built. My parents still live there contentedly, more than half a century after it was assembled, and have changed it relatively little. In fact, they only just got around to replacing the knotty-pine kitchen cabinets.

Not a bad record for a prefab.

Changing Skyline: If You Go

"Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling" runs Sunday to Oct. 20 at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 W. 53d St., New York. Hours: 10:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday; 10:30 a.m. to 8 p.m. Friday; closed Tuesday. Information: 212-708-9400, http://www.moma.

org/.

Changing Skyline:

Cellophane House rises in a video at http:// go.philly.com/

cellophane.