Fixed Up, Looking Sharp

As countless recent articles in shelter magazines have shown us, prefabricated housing can be beautiful, modern, and green. But can it be beautiful, modern, green, and affordable?

I started to ask this question three years ago, when I led a team of architecture, engineering, and landscape architecture students from the University of Virginia to participate in the U.S. Department of Energy’s first-ever Solar Decathlon. University teams designed and built 800-square-foot houses powered by the sun. Each team moved its house to Washington, D.C., for three weeks and displayed it on the National Mall. Construction costs were pricey: at $400 a square foot, the budget for our house fell in the middle of the pack of fourteen university teams.

Our team won the architecture competition and took second place overall (thanks to a broken dishwasher and minor plumbing problems). Yet I had concerns about the way the competition was structured because there was little emphasis on quality contemporary design. For one thing, architectural design accounted for only 200 of the 1,100 available points. In addition, our little “solar village,” complete with street signs and cul-de-sacs, resembled a suburban subdivision - a strikingly incongruous sight, to say the least, on L’Enfant’s National Mall. The competition guidelines restricted houses to eighteen feet in height and set them in the middle of a lot with large setbacks, essentially forcing teams to build tract houses.

The event led me to found ecoMOD, a research and student design/build project at the UVA School of Architecture. We are designing and building a series of sustainable, prefabricated house prototypes in order to demonstrate that “prefab” housing can both look good and be affordable, without replicating patterns of suburban sprawl.

Modular and panelized construction techniques are revolutionizing residential development, as prefab homes continue to increase in quality to the point where they can rival or even surpass conventional stick-built construction. Greater numbers of pre-fab homes hold the promise of significantly reducing the environmental impact of new residential development, but prefab home builders have not realized much of that potential so far. Although several companies have adopted EnergyStar-rated models, few are seriously looking at the environmental impact of their methods or materials. And despite the popularity of magazines such as Dwell, which regularly feature $300,000-and-up prefab homes, very few prefab companies aim for high-quality, contemporary design that fits into dense, urban communities. 

EcoMOD is intended to demonstrate the alternatives. In Charlottesville, we recently completed ecoMOD1, which we have called the OUTin house. The students fabricated eight small modules for the two-story house in a decommissioned airport hangar and transported them to the urban infill site. Unlike conventional modular houses, the students designed their modules to fit in tighter city lots and to be easily transported along narrow streets. The house is in the process of being sold as two affordable condominium units - a basement studio and an occupancy taking up the first and second floors - by Piedmont Housing Alliance, a local non-profit.

Next came the hard part: checking to see if it all works. In the ongoing follow-up phase, a team of architecture, engineering, environmental science, planning, and business students is monitoring the energy efficiency of the house, assessing the life-cycle of the materials and structure, and analyzing the affordability of the house. They will also conduct a post-occupancy evaluation with the homeowners. These evaluations will guide later design/build teams.

The initial success of that first prototype allowed us to respond relatively quickly to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. EcoMOD2 - known as the preHAB house - is a panelized design that will house a family displaced by Hurricane Katrina. The preHAB house will be sited on an empty lot in a 1960s affordable housing subdivision in the city of Gautier, Mississippi - in a sense, suburban infill. We are designing the home, in conjunction with Habitat for Humanity affiliates in Greater Charlottesville and Jackson County, Mississippi, so that it can be pre-fabricated in several ways: in panels, room-sized modules, and/or smaller components. If successful, ecoMOD2 - along with other current efforts like Habitat for Humanity’s “Operation Home Delivery” project to deliver wall panels to the Gulf Coast - could be a model for future disaster relief efforts. A friend recently likened the idea to the way thousands of people prepared and sent first-aid dressings for injured soldiers during World War I.

Plans for ecoMOD3 are already underway, either as a modular unit added to a tiny historic home in Charlottesville or as a small multi-unit elderly housing complex. We are making the design schematics available for sale to home-owners, and one day a modular manufacturer may produce this design on a larger scale. EcoMOD offers one possible approach to the ambition many people have of fusing good design with good works. A student recently told me I had “ruined” her: she decided to quit her first job after one week because
she realized she missed design that directly helped people. As of this writing, she is preparing to head to Sri Lanka to participate in the post-Tsunami rebuilding effort.

ecoMOD: http://www.ecomod.virginia.edu

Operation Home Delivery: http://www.habitat.org/disaster/2005/Katrina/

Quale, John D. Trojan Goat: A Self-Sufficient House. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia School of Architecture, 2005.

UVA 2002 Solar Decathlon Team: solarhome.lib.virginia.edu