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For the past couple of years, in these pages and elsewhere, I've been writing about prefabricated housing, and the fascination prefab holds for some contemporary architects. It would be hard to avoid such topics, even if I wanted to (which I don't).

Prefab, after all, has enjoyed several moments of popularity among designers (and, less frequently, among developers and manufacturers) in the past 100 years, though its vogue has probably never been more vivid than it is right now.

True, the old avant-garde idealism that dreamed of cheap, ready-made housing for the masses is thin on the ground (if not wholly absent) these days. And the factory-built houses we're seeing on the market are usually upmarket items, pitched to a sophisticated clientele with a thing for the impersonal, dumb-box look associated in the popular imagination with industrial production. But once all the differences between now and then are factored in, we're left with a remarkable outpouring of handsome designs from studios in North America and Europe, and a creative flourishing of a certain kind of architectural practice.

At least I think the outpouring is a remarkable phenomenon. Not everyone agrees that this phenomenon is a also good thing for architecture. Of that fact, I was reminded last week, when I received a crisp e-mail from Graham Smith, partner in the Toronto firm Altius Architecture Inc.

In particular, Mr. Smith took aim at my occasional praise for prefab housing designs being marketed for use as cottages. In this matter, Mr. Smith and his office have a direct interest, since their practice consists almost entirely of custom-designing and building holiday houses across Ontario's cottage country. That said, Mr. Smith has important words of caution for anyone wondering whether to go with a prefab house in cottage country or hire an architect to create something unique for the site.

Two cautions stand out from all the rest. The first has to do with cost, which is often thought to be less with prefab products.

"The overhead costs for fabrication facilities cannot compete with workers on a building site who have no such overhead," Mr. Smith argues. " Production efficiencies could not possibly offset these costs, unless the operation was on an assembly-plant scale."

But even if production were on such a footing, other costs, notably labour, would come into play. Units now on the market "are deceptively expensive. While consumers may not realize that the Ikea bookcase is actually 300 per cent more expensive than the raw purchase price, if they factor in the cost of their own assembly labour, prospective owners of prefabs certainly find out when their contractor hands them the quote to 'install' it." (These installation costs typically include site preparation, transport of the unit to the construction site, utility hookups and so on.)

It's hard to disagree with Mr. Smith on his general point. In doing research for other stories on prefab, I have never been able to make the figures add up in a way that makes architecturally savvy prefab housing significantly more cost-effective, square foot for square foot, than custom-designed building.

Mr. Smith says he is able to create an architecturally significant cottage for $300 a square foot — signed, sealed and delivered. I would like to see a prefab cottage — including necessary engineering, permits, land severances, surveys, foundations, utilities, driveway, flooring and lighting — that can beat that.

Mr. Smith's other objection — in a sense as weighty as the cost matter — has to do with the fit of structure to landscape. Prefab, of course, is all about standardization, and therefore not about snuggling down gracefully among the rocks of Muskoka or the Kawarthas. I have found that exactly this anti-landscape quality, in fact, makes prefab interesting for a small clientele — mostly urbanites who want to hear the occasional loon but don't trust nature enough to settle into it.

But at least some cottagers with the option either to buy prefab or to hire an architect will want a getaway place that seems well-anchored in the ancient landscape of cottage country. That sense of belonging is something gifted builders and architectural designers can give a place. Prefab simply does something else.

"I say prefab-schmefab," Mr. Smith declared in his e-mail. "While this list [of objections] can go on at length, the bottom line is that the current prefab crop neither offers significant savings nor significant benefits to prospective buyers. For those individuals looking for a turnkey solution, there is the resale and spec-built market. For those a little more adventurous, there is the traditional route of hiring an architect or a builder. . . . This is a route fraught with perils, but like anything in this world, the right people can get the job done."