Design

THE ARCHITECTURAL PROFESSION HAS long been blamed for keeping its head in the clouds instead of democratizing its skills and designing for those in need of better housing. Architects are not always attentive to pressing social and economic problems: most architectural firms would sooner design mansions and museums than tackle the problem of affordable housing. Though Modernist architects tried to address this challenge at various points throughout the 20th century, their best designs remained in the realm of exhibitions and experiments; in the end there was no revolution in building housing for working-class families. Now America sits at the edge of an affordable housing crisis: a growing number of households pay more than 50 percent of their income for housing, and population is projected to increase 48 percent by 2050. We must find a way to generate a vast number of sound, affordable, and desirable housing units.

Since 1994, the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA) in Winston-Salem, North Carolina has set out to raise awareness of pressing social issues through its Artist and the Community program. The program was initially a residency program for artists who produce new work on issues critical to the local community. In 2002, David J. Brown, SECCA’s Senior Curator, took the program to a broader scale with an international design competition for a prototype affordable house. Brown had become concerned with the rise of housing prices in his region and noted that the existing housing stock was aging, declining in quality, and lacking in character. The HOME House Project, as it was called, aimed to “turn the model inside out”: instead of letting conventional building methods and archaic housing types dictate design, the competition would empower architects and artists to devise new design strategies to address the housing problem. The HOME House competition aimed to establish a new national housing model that would showcase advances in the field of sustainable design and to implement this model through new partnerships enabling “creative applications of affordable design.”

Habitat for Humanity is the most well-known builder of affordable housing. Its model house, however, is poorly designed, and because it relies on volunteers and donations rather than standard development practices, Habitat has not proven to be an economically sustainable solution to the shortage of affordable housing in America. SECCA thus charged its competitors with transforming the Habitat model into one that can be replicated efficiently and that could one day become completely self-sustaining. The competition called for the design of a home for low- to moderate-income families within specific parameters for an unspecified site in Winston-Salem. An impressive number of architects submitted 442 designs for a 900-square-foot, two-bedroom house with no garage, one bathroom, and a covered entrance, sited on a typical 140-foot by 60-foot lot and with a working budget of just over $100,000.

The design entries that received awards of merit have been published in a book from MIT Press and are now on view through 2006 in an exhibition traveling nationally. They reflect a broad cross-section of ideas, types, and technologies. Some architects and artists simply updated traditional housing types, such as the Southern vernacular “dog trot” or the “cracker house,” with site-specific and passive solar technology. Other competitors broke with convention to propose innovative construction techniques—borrowing from other industries or pushing the boundaries of new technologies—as well as new housing types that address the needs of contemporary, non-nuclear families.

Several designs employed a modular approach, giving their houses flexibility to respond to the changing needs, desires, and aspirations of the client family. One such entry, the House of Ivy, can be configured into single units, duplexes, or townhouses as needed. Another entry, the FrameWork House, is a traditional housing form that open-endedly incorporates recycled materials, giving homebuilders their choice of different colors and materials to suit their neighborhood or the homeowner’s taste and interests. Any houses built according to this design can be individualized in numerous ways, such as including colored recycled aluminum in the facade, creative use of paint remnants, employing a friend or family member’s masonry skills, or incorporating salvaged building materials.

New methods for prefabricated, off-site construction techniques were the most widely used means among the entries for making designs flexible. While it was not required in the competition brief, many entrants recognized the value of prefabrication for increasing energy and cost efficiency; the FrameWork House, for instance, was largely composed of Structural Insulated Panels (SIPs), which have traditional building materials like plywood for their surface but an insulating material like polystyrene for their core, integrating both functions in one product which can be easily assembled on-site. More importantly, prefabrication, many entrants recognized, could potentially lead to more innovative designs. Today’s housing market thrives upon a standardized kit of parts, typified by light-frame wood construction, standard dimensions, and off-the-shelf products available at big-box retailers. While housing standardization is economically efficient, it stifles the technological and material advances seen in other industries. Many proposals in the HOME House Competition attempted to adapt these advances to systems of prefabrication, and in the process improve the aesthetics often lacking in standardized parts. 

Prefabrication can be done well or not so well. Ikea’s furniture is a successful example, while the monotony of Levittown—when first constructed, anyway—is perhaps less inspiring. Competition jury member Steve Badanes, professor at the University of Washington and founder of the Jersey Devil architects/builders, noted that while prefabrication can save time and money in on-site labor, it was more important that the designs be “intelligent, and not just a cookie-cutter box being shipped to a site—it still must respond to the culture and climate of a particular site and region. We were looking for houses that responded to [Winston-Salem].” Site-specific designs that are anything but generic allow the home to flexibly respond to the client, program, and the local climate, culture, and vernacular language of architecture.

As the HOME House Project progresses, six of the designs that successfully responded to the feel of Winston-Salem will actually become built reality. Sustainable Housing, LLC, a company formed to build the winning designs at market-rate prices, will put them up for sale. The city council has already voted to approve the zoning request for four houses. The first houses are expected to be priced a bit beyond the affordable range, but will give the developers the opportunity to “work with the designers and builders to learn more about actually building the designs so we can tell where costs can be cut without sacrificing the original intent of the program,” says Sustainable Housing’s Bill Benton.

Beth Blostein of Blostein/Overly Architects in Columbus, Ohio, has been working with Sustainable Housing, LLC, to construct her winning design for the Gradient House. The Gradient House employs a layered, exterior skin comprised of translucent polycarbonate panels, a textile veil for shading and cooling, and a prefabricated greenhouse structural system, to create a spacious home for a family of four that is private but full of natural light. The greater significance of this house is the adaptability of its design to a range of climates. When built, the flexible design of the Gradient House will demonstrate on the ground how design can democratize access to livable and inspirational housing.

The HOME House Project’s experiment is already serving as a model for other regions of the country. After the touring exhibition traveled to El Paso, for instance, the community there launched a grassroots effort to create a similar competition—the HOME House Project El Paso—inviting local designers and architects to use the data from Winston-Salem’s competition to produce new designs suitable to the locale. The goal is not only to build new units, but to initiate affordable, sustainable design in the city.

Technology is rapidly changing the world of design, and design competitions, innovative architectural practices, and architectural education have begun to apply new materials and technologies to critical social problems. Elizabeth Alford, Lecturer in the Master of Architecture program at the University of Texas at Austin, feels that “the real thrust is towards widening architecture’s range; reaching more clients/consumers by taking on design of houses for people who typically wouldn’t be able to afford an architect… Architects are trained to design exquisite objects, and designing an affordable house is more about designing a process, or system. You think more like a product designer, more about communication with the public.” The HOME House competition is thus part of a larger reimagination of the architect’s place in culture and construction, a reexamination necessary to address social needs through design.

The most important lesson from SECCA’s experiment is that the problem of affordable housing can be solved with style. The price tag of many of the groundbreaking houses in the HOME House Project will only become more affordable as more people—potential homeowners as well as developers—come in contact with and appreciate these new models for living, and as higher production volume leads to greater efficiency in the construction process. Both homeowners and the housing industry stand to benefit, but it will take the collaboration of many designers, developers, craftsmen, policy makers, and community leaders to adapt good design on a larger scale.