New House Rules

It is good to see that the latest version of the government’s bailout plan is aiming more squarely at the consumer side of the problem. We now know that the road to economic ruin beats up our cars (automobile industry), but it travels right through our homes (housing industry). We got into this crisis because a plethora of gamers—from the world’s biggest banks all the way down to the now proverbial Joe six-pack—converged on the American home in the hope that it would take them directly to fast and easy money. When it led them instead to a massive financial sinkhole, a whole lot of people got a rough reminder that the highest and best purpose of a home hasn’t changed since the dawn of civilization. As cars are for driving, homes are for living. They might also be a good investment, but their underlying value is in enhancing the quality of life, not creating wealth.

The investment banks created the confusion of a home as an investment commodity by developing loans that misled or lied. The virtue of home ownership was the excuse used by the bankers to explain the ruse by which they were convincing one and all to accept the pernicious vice of living far beyond their means. I’m sure those closely involved would say their intentions were well considered and well meaning, but for many of us it always looked stupid and avaricious.

And it is also how that-which-ought-to-be-sacred became instead profane.

I am in homebuilding because I like the direct and good effect we can have on the quality of peoples’ lives. That big ideal was triggered in me in the 1970s, during a lunchtime conversation, while on a remodeling project. I heard this from a fellow carpenter: “Ours is a sacred profession. We build the places where people live.” He then went on to explain his point, and, unfortunately, I can't remember it verbatim, but here’s the gist in my own words:

We make the places where people usually experience the most intimate and formative experiences of their lives. A home is the place people go for comfort and renewal; for joy and celebration; it is nearly synonymous with words like security, loyalty and love. Home is the chapel of all that is personal and familiar, and it is the center of our closest human relationships. It is where love is found and made, where children grow up and develop a sense of who they are and grow into their unique perspective about the world around them. Our earliest memories are often embedded with the smallest details of the place where we lived in our early years. Nooks and crannies, shapes, colors and all the odd eccentricities of buildings are stuck to our psyche and revealed again and again in thoughts and dreams. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, we build our homes, thereafter they build us.

Well, we’re pretty far from all that, but I still stand with all those people whose lives are now decimated by the bills they can’t pay. They perhaps got foolish and greedy and are now imperiled by that choice, but they didn’t mix the Kool-Aid; they just drank it.

Since the government is still looking for a way out of this mess, I have a proposal. It is modest and simple. It punishes everyone, but keeps people in their homes. It separates those who mixed the toxic Kool-Aid from those who drank it. It allows the economy to recover, but slowly. Mostly, it parallels the idea that a home is a long-term value, not a get-rich scheme.

1. Reduce the mortgage payments for all the subprime loans to 1/3 of the family income. Drop the interest rate to a very low level (3%?) and stretch the payment period out as long as is necessary, even 50 to 75 years, whatever it takes to make the formula work.

2. Reappraise the house in five years and adjust the interest rate up or down as necessary. From there on, it would be fixed. The difference would come from the bailout money.

This would achieve several things:

1. If people wanted to stay in their homes, they could. If not, the home would foreclose and they would have a stain on their credit rating. For those who stay, they have a place to live that is affordable, but full ownership may not be possible in their lifetime. It’s a punishment, but it isn't oppressive because equity is still accrued and they get a place to live.

2. Money would flow again, but slowly. And incomes won’t be eaten up with mortgage payments, allowing other sectors of the economy to recover.

3. The banking community would get money, but their desire for fast profits would be severely punished.

4. The bailout amounts would be reduced by the difference between current bubble-inflated values and the values determined by the market in the next five years, which will be enough time to sort out real values.

If you’re planning to shoot holes in my plan, forget it. I'm putting my head back in the sand. I just want homes to mean what they should again.

My blog is about housing (mostly), so I'll try not to mix it up with politics, except when necessary. And when it does seem necessary, I'll try to keep my political opinions on point and succinct. No doubt you get enough of that elsewhere.

For today, I found a quote that sums up my feelings about the election of Barack Obama to be our next President. The following prayer was reported in the Nicholas Kristof column this morning. It's from a preacher who had once been a slave. Martin Luther King used it in a speech in Hawaii in 1959, two years before Obama was born in Honolulu.

"Lord, we ain't what we want to be; we ain't what we ought to be; we ain't what we gonna be, but, thank God, we ain't what we was."

Duo Dickinson, a well-known and talented residential architect, wrote a revealing editorial about the housing crisis and his profession. It appeared in Sunday’s New Haven (CT) Register. Dickinson writes that the housing bubble was foreseen by only a few architects like himself.

“But who was in the best position to tell people that the houses being sold to them had a fraction of the value they were paying for? Well, truth be told, residential architects, like me, could have declared that the emperor had no clothes. There were a bunch of us who unrelentingly spoke of the mis-fit between what was being built and what people were paying for it, and of the absurdity of basing the value of a home on its monthly mortgage payment.”

His point is that lots of people may have suspected the problem, but architects were among those who should have known about the bubble, and whose opinions should have carried weight. However, few knew and fewer still cared, and it didn’t matter anyway because architects aren’t really very much involved in mainstream homebuilding.

“Unlike legal aid attorneys who can tell the least powerful among us what their rights are, or the emergency room doctor who can make clear the practical and ethical realities of health care to those who are most endangered, architects have largely abandoned social relevance for the glamour of a star system where the hip and fashionable get the professional credibility that carries media attention.

Abstraction has been celebrated in my profession to the point where sculpture and architecture merged in the buildings that received acclaim. This stylistic fetish further reinforced our status as elite artistes in the minds of many.”

Parenthetically, I will point out that this use of the word “elite” is the reference to the educated but out-of-touch kind of person derided recently in McCain ads, as opposed to the primary dictionary definition which is: “the choice or best of anything considered collectively, as of a group or class of persons.”

Elite or not, architects have largely marginalized themselves by completely separating themselves from what people want or care about in regards to homes. The patrons are essentially asking for well-prepared vegetables and meat, but these haughty chefs deliver the equivalent of escargot. More from Dickinson:

“Many of us aspired to be fashion designers rather than grounding what we do in the belief that a client has legitimate demands, that a context has elements to be respected, and a budget must be derived from the true costs of what it takes to build any building.

Instead, we have used the prophylactics of "green" and "sustainability" to project an image of relevance that is grounded in some overarching social responsibility rather than the nitty-gritty world of dealing with people, neighborhoods and money. This disconnect made us largely irrelevant to those who might have listened to us.”

Since architects are involved with less than 5% of new American homes, it could be said that in no other profession are so many people so diligently (and expensively) educated to do so little. Architects should have been in this game, but they’ve not even been close to the sidelines because they tend to prefer the air up in the clouds. They might think this absolves them of blame, but Dickinson isn’t buying it:

“Architects could have warned against this rip-off, but a lot of us valued fame over relevance.”

Last week I was asked to give a presentation about our attempts to create a more democratic, bottom-up business model to a group of graduate students from Antioch University New England. They visited our company as a part of their research for a course called: “Building Sustainable Organizations.” My preparation for their visit caused me to organize some thoughts about a subject that has become an important aspect of my daily thoughts and efforts. I call it, "The craft of business."

For many years, we have specifically tried to build an open, sustainable organization. It’s a path and process that is at various times interesting or maddening; exciting or disappointing; rewarding or humbling. Like our own American democracy vs. countries that are run by dictatorships, it is easy to come to the conclusion that the alternative surely must be easier and less messy, but it is also, most definitely, not better.

Our company can’t claim to be the perfect model for what we’ve been striving for, but we’ve come a long way and we’re not turning back. We like this path. It’s based on a goal to make our company always a restorative, positive influence on peoples’ lives, both internally and externally. Greatly inspired by evidence from the workings of natural systems, we are building an organization that engenders more discipline, energy, innovation and constant improvement than could ever be generated by command and control management.

Along the way, I’ve learned some lessons from my perspective as a Company Steward (my title).

1. Progress is more important than growth.
Growth may be an outcome of progress, but it’s often not. Strive for progress and see what happens.

2. Signs of life are more important than signs of order.
Chaos is not the enemy; inertia is.

3. Doing right is the first and primary objective.
Sustainable business recognizes that moral, spiritual and ecological considerations should be given greater value than economic goals and strategies.

4. With entrepreneurship comes responsibility, not entitlement.
The purpose of business is not to be a wealth and power generator for a few executives, but to be a mechanism for creating opportunity and lifting people.

5. The mission of the company is NOT more important than its people…
…unless you are in the business of saving lives.

6. Ninety-nine percent of the time, systems are bad, people are good.
When people perform poorly, tinker with the system and support the people.

7. Give away the things to do that are fun and help people grow; help with the hard and tedious things.
Let others have as much responsibility, authority, recognition and fun as possible, and then pitch in to help when things in their world get difficult.

8. If people in your company don’t challenge any of your ideas, worry.
You are not always right.

9. Don’t take yourself too seriously.
Pride goeth before a fall.

10. If people stop laughing on the job, worry.
Business at its best is fun.

I am first of all a carpenter and builder. I like shaping and assembling materials and I like to see buildings rise from the ground because the forces of brain and brawn made it happen. It’s a process that gives honest and direct feedback in response to physical effort, which is nearly always equal parts gratifying and motivating. You can literally measure the quantity and quality of the work achieved in any time period and therefore know, with some objective certainty, that it will have a lasting affect on lives and communities. But those same observations incessantly reveal that it could have also been done better. Good builders are proud, humble and addicted.

After nearly 35 years and over 700 buildings, I can say that our company has continuously improved and, project by project, year by year, made some remarkable achievements in nearly every phase of design and building. I can also say that nothing we’ve done has been perfect. Somehow we’ve managed to both improve dramatically and still have as far to go as we did in the year of our founding.

I am also a timberframer. As a young carpenter and builder, I worked to relearn and reinvigorate the craft of timber joinery as a way to infuse the building process with more craft and greater inherent beauty and durability. I couldn’t understand why timberframing had been abandoned by the late 19th century. If it had proven to be labor intensive and inefficient in the days of hand tools, why wouldn’t it fare better in the age of sophisticated power tools and material handling equipment? And if the old style timberframe house—with its typical poor insulation, low ceilings and dark spaces—was obsolete, then what about a modern version with expanses of glass, open living areas and super-efficient insulation? I essentially squinted hard and saw timberframing as a structure upon which we could build a bridge to the future of homebuilding, not as a reversion to ancient methodologies.

Even more than I could have imagined, the effort of reviving timberframing has proven to be an excellent basis for rethinking and reinventing the process of homebuilding. It has grown into a healthy industry and has attracted to its ranks scores of great craftspeople and builders throughout North America and overseas. Inch by inch, we have collectively raised the bar of homebuilding craft and quality. Over the last 25 years or so, our impact has been real and profound.

In my company, I am now dog-paddling in a pool of talent and energy, as I work with a large group of hard-charging carpenters, engineers, architects, building systems specialists, woodworkers and project managers. I can no longer say that my skills are the best in any of those disciplines. Luckily, I still have a role. I keep my eyes on what’s next, as we continue to improve on that bridge to the future of homebuilding. A better way is always just around the corner and there’s always another corner. I’m finally at peace with the notion that the original dream is, in fact, a towering cathedral that won’t be finished in my lifetime. It’s satisfying enough to see it taking shape and rising upward.

But it is important to understand that just as a bridge is not the destination, the medium (in this case) is not the message.

Timberframing has indeed taken us away from the loggerheaded conventional wisdom about how homes should be built and turned our whole emerging industry towards innovation, both by inclination and necessity. Here are few things we’ve learned from the timberframe perspective:

-- Homes are better when they are infused with well-executed and visible craft. Architecture and building crafts should not be separated.
-- All built volume is valuable and shouldn’t be wasted.
-- A sustainable home is a durable home. The design and construction goal should be projected in centuries, not decades.
-- Structure and insulation can be separated, with benefits to energy efficiency and potential building durability.
-- All homes can be energy misers.
-- Shell and infill can be separated, with benefits to adaptability of the building to its inhabitants over time.
-- Homes' environments should be malleable to the inhabitants.
-- Fabricating building elements in controlled conditions, and using the site for assembly only, improves quality and efficiency.
-- The discipline of fabricating exacting building elements is a building solution in itself.
-- Advanced CAD software improves quality and efficiency. "Virtual before actual," is the modern equivalent of, "measuring twice and cutting once."
-- Applying the best of modern technology to the building process can help to make buildings better and more affordable.

Now that most of my professional life has been spent with timberframing nearly always playing a central role in our building process, I have come to realize that it has matured into a system that, like the conventional methods we have tended to spurn, has potential for its practitioners to get mired in ruts of conventional wisdom. Timberframing has limits:

-- A timberframe doesn’t automatically make the house better.
-- A high performance, durable building results from keeping an eye on every detail.
-- A well-crafted timberframe in a badly designed home is a waste of time and timbers.
-- Neither a frame nor a building shell is a house.
-- Most local contractors aren’t able to work with timberframe buildings effectively and efficiently without training.

All good building stems from keeping the priorities balanced and focused. The oldest surviving book about design and building was written by the Roman architect Vitruvius over 2000 years ago. His famous triad of objectives for buildings still describes the fundamental goals for good quality building today. He essentially said that good buildings are a composition of function, strength and beauty (utilitas, firmitas, venustas) and that none should be sacrificed for the other. I suggest that when buildings achieve this, they are also sustainable because they are loved for their beauty, appreciated for their usefulness and survive the rigors of time because they are structurally strong. It goes without saying that the principles defined by Vitruvius don’t describe a method, but a result.

After 35 years, I will always be a timberframer, but I won’t only be a timberframer. The objective of making high performance, sustainable, beautiful and affordable buildings is far more important.

From what I understand about Chad Ludeman, I am instinctively his fan. His work as a developer with postgreen and his vision with the 100K House project demonstrate his values and commitment. Now he’s written an interesting, well-considered critique of prefabrication that has been bouncing around and getting attention the past few days. His title isn’t subtle: Prefab is Not the Answer to Affordable, Modern & Green Homes. It’s worth reading. Do so, but please come back. I have some comments, including agreements, corrections and rebuttals.

My title in response is similarly direct:

What good is Prefab…if it is Not the Answer to Affordable, Modern, Traditional & Green Homes?

Ludeman means to strike down what he outlines as four broad and untrue assertions about prefabricated homes:

1. Prefab is more Affordable
2. Prefab produces less Waste
3. Prefab takes less Time
4. Prefab is more "Green”

He makes some very good points in his analysis, but I’d like to dig in a little. The subject is interesting and I think ultimately an important one, considering where things may go next for the homebuilding industry.

First, I dislike the term "prefab." I don’t know what it means. Are the manufacturers providing precut parts, or panelized sections, or modular volumes or a combination? What percentage of the house is completed when it arrives on site? There’s no good definition of the term. Most manufacturers are only precutting and/or preassembling a small percentage (15%-40%) of the whole house, leaving some of the most difficult and time consuming aspects to be accomplished on site. Others are doing more complete buildings, but they are really providing fully-formed modular volumes, which I think of as a different construction species, generally just called "modular."

I also don’t understand why prefab is presumed to be modern. Isn’t Prefabrication a method of building, not a stylistic outcome? What is the correlation? Is it that progressive design should be (or must be) connected to progressive building techniques? Ludeman seems to think so:

“Like many, I hoped that prefab would be the answer to bringing modern architecture to the masses in the US and beyond. I thought that finally, modern home design would be attainable by those of us who aren't pulling in lofty six figure incomes.”

But really, where’s the connection? Why would a contemporary house be built differently than a traditional home? The only reason I can think of is to amortize the design fees over numerous projects, allowing the architect/designer to get an income stream, as opposed to the typical architectural design fee. Presumably, this is a technique to make “high” design more affordable, but the real motivation might be just a potentially better business model for modernist architects. Who knows? What I do know is that although there is sometimes a symbiotic basis for the relationship between modern design and prefab, the marriage is more an outgrowth of intention than style. The manufacturing process doesn’t care.

I also don’t like the prefix added to fabrication. When parts and pieces are aggregated into larger and more complete components before arriving at the building site, this is simply fabrication that happens in a different place. The term, therefore, only applies to the component itself, not the building. Windows, cabinets, doors, fixtures, and most of the heating, cooling and appliance equipment come to building sites already fabricated, but the buildings these elements become a part of aren’t automatically prefabricated. Similarly, when wall, floor and roof elements are also fabricated elsewhere (to one degree or another), they are still just wall, floor and roof panels that help to improve the quality and efficiency of the home’s construction. Despite my objections, I acknowledge that the term is pervasive and I won’t fight it for this post.

So, back to Chad Ludeman’s challenge of prefabrication’s trumpeted attributes. To begin with, the four points are actually two. “More affordable” and “Less time” are inseparable, as are “Less Waste” and “Green.” More time, more cost; more waste, less green.

I assume that as a developer, Ludeman has direct experience with prefabrication, but I am intrigued by his claim that site built is faster.

“If you scour a prefab company's FAQ's, call them or ask others that have gone through the process you will find that 6-12 months or more is not uncommon from start to finish. With site-built homes often going up in 4-5 months where is the time savings in prefab?”

If that’s true, it explains the relative high cost. Ludeman says that prefab homes would typically cost between $250 and $400 per square foot and says that the site built equivalent would be a lot less. Well, if he’s right about the time, he’s also right about the money. And if he’s right at all, it’s more a critique of the particular companies Ludeman has checked out (or used) than it is a condemnation of the concept of prefabrication.

Ludeman is right that prefab has to overcome its costs (overhead, shipping, crane, etc.) to be competitive and affordable. This is hard to do if the product has the costs of prefabrication without the benefit. I’m afraid Ludeman is looking at some poor examples.

The only point of off-site fabrication is to make consistently better products that can be assembled on site more quickly. If it does that first, then the price points will be variable depending on production runs, types of materials used and customization. Windows, for instance, are almost never made on the construction site. If they were, it would take much more time and the quality/price ratio couldn’t possibly compare with what can be accomplished by the window manufacturers. When the window arrives on site, it is installed in the opening and done. It doesn’t require more work. The same is true of the manufacturing of prehung doors and cabinets. They are better, they save time, and you can choose from very expensive to very affordable. You don’t have to choose between time, quality and cost. You can have all three.

This is not true of many companies that are trying to get on the prefab bandwagon. Since there is no accepted definition of prefab, anything goes. A kit of raw materials, with some essential parts precut, makes the grade; so does a package that comes with open wall panels, roof trusses and bundles of unprocessed materials that have to be cut, shaped and installed on site. Ludeman’s story about his friend having a pile of OSB left over from his building project suggests that the prefab in question had raw materials, even at the building’s sheathing level. No wonder it was slow to construct and expensive. Prefabrication without any added value (cutting, shaping, assembling) is simply a hoax.

Even with much of the package incomplete, it’s hard to imagine any credible reason why a prefab building would take longer than conventional construction. Not only would the company have provided no added value with its package, but it would have added some difficulty factor that must have confounded the guys who were trying to put it together. Perhaps the directions were in Greek. Kidding aside, I don’t get that.

On the other hand, I do understand why costs might be higher. One of the big reasons is that the contractors hired to put the package together often have no motivation to be efficient, and furthermore, have a very convenient excuse if things take longer and cost more: it’s not their fault; they are the solution, the prefab package is the problem. In addition, the subcontractors who bid on the portions of work not accomplished with the prefabrication tend to charge 15-25% more for the same reason. It’s very often not whether the work will be more or less difficult, but just the fact that it’s different. It’s the out-of-my-comfort-zone tax, and it's one of the hidden costs of any alternative form of construction. Too often, there’s simply an up-charge for having to think.

The secret to successful prefabrication is to make the components as complete as possible. Anything that isn’t done will take longer than it should to accomplish on site. How do I know that? Experience. The lesson learned is that the building can’t be called prefabricated unless most everything, including some of the mechanical systems and finishes, are delivered to the site in a mostly completed state and can be installed very quickly. Since Ludeman has made the point, I’ll raise the ante and say that if the product takes as long or longer to build on site than its conventional counterpoint, then it doesn’t deserve to be called anything other than a pile of expensive materials. There’s nothing fab about it.

There’s an alternative, and it’s similar to Chad Ludeman’s hybrid proposal. We call it a "Shell Package." It’s not a prefabricated house; it’s the structural shell. Typically, the shell goes up in one to two weeks and includes all the structure from the foundation to the roof and results in a complete, enclosed, weather tight, insulated (closed panel) building. It’s not the finished product, though. It’s just a good jump start. It advances the construction schedule by 2-3 months, but it leaves a substantial amount of work to be done the old-fashioned way on site. The distinction is perhaps subtle, but important. We didn’t promise a car and sell a chassis. With the Shell Package, we promise and sell only the chassis, and then put a lot of effort (including a twice-yearly intensive course) into helping homeowners and contractors understand the most efficient methods for installing and applying mechanical systems and finishes. The Shell Package has good value, reduces time, and is detailed to allow systems and finishes to install easily, but it isn’t priced or marketed as a prefab house. That’s something else entirely.

Let’s define that "something else": a complete prefab home package should have 60-75% of the above-foundation construction done before arriving on site, and it should be completed a similar percentage faster than on-site construction. This raises the bar, but it doesn’t make sense that a home that is marketed as prefabricated is actually only 15-20% complete when the fabricated elements are in place. This is why I think Ludeman’s gripe is real, but it reveals an immature industry and consumer confusion, not a revelation that prefab can’t work.

A fully prefabricated house is one in which the panelized sections come with finishes in place; wiring, plumbing and heating systems are substantially installed off site; “pods,” as Ludeman calls them, are used for bathrooms and mechanically intensive areas; and millwork comes cut and finished and ready to install. Of course, it’s easy to describe, but harder to do. Despite the reach and challenge, we have decided to make this process our standard product because it is our best way of controlling quality, time and cost. I’ll say more about this process in future blogs, but here are a few photos of recent projects to pique your interest. And since I can almost hear the question, yes, we are building complete homes under $200 p.s.f. (a current project will come in at around $150 p.s.f.; another that is close to completion will be around $185 p.s.f.), and these are fully custom homes, not stock plans. We can’t wait to find out how cost efficient we can be when we find the opportunity to build multiples.

Exterior walls in process with finishes



Unity House nearing completion



Private residence, all components fabricated off site







Regarding the green/waste issue, the first point I have already made. Ludeman decries the waste inherent in prefabs by telling this story:

“I recently walked through a delivered prefab with the owner and he offered me pallets of free OSB because he had so much extra and had no idea what he was going to do with it. I'm sure every prefab company is not this sloppy, but it is another indication of waste in an industry claiming extreme efficiency.”

If raw materials such as this are coming to the site, this hardly fits the description of a home that has been prefabricated. Chad’s right: this is a waste of both material and money and there’s no good reason to ship in a raw material that can be purchased at any lumber yard. It also doesn’t fit my definition of prefab. Neither does the rest of his description about the waste issue. He’s describing modular building, not what I think of as a much smarter and better way to accomplish off-site fabrication.

“Most prefab companies are still using loose, batt insulation that is often falling out of the framing by the time the modules reach the site. Batt insulation alone is not what is making the better green homes out there more energy efficient. Also, in many cases, all of that house wrap that is supposed to be sealing up the home from the outside is tearing apart and falling off of the exterior by the time the modules reach their final resting spot.”

This is a fair critique of the typical modular box one sees barreling down the highway, but it doesn’t apply to prefab, in which components are mostly panelized and flat-packed for delivery. Also, the typical fiberglass batt insulation that’s used in most modular homes isn’t either green or energy efficient. Whether installed on site or in a factory, it’s not up to any basic standard for a well-built 2008 home. Other forms of insulation, such as dense packed cellulose or spray foam, can be installed in factory conditions effectively and with greater control than one would typically be able to achieve on the construction site.

The extra framing Ludeman alludes to is also an issue for the modular boxes, not panelized prefabrication, so I’m not going to spend time with that. I do want to address this comment:

“There is something called "value engineering" which can be done effectively on site-built homes and the polar opposite called "over-engineering" that is often done with prefabs. Guess which produces more waste and costs the client more money.”

This just isn’t true. Value engineering can be done on site or in the off-site production facility. The difference is that, in off-site production, the decisions and cutting are accomplished entirely with software and CNC cutting equipment. It is precise and nobody is spending any time on a chop box. The decisions are made by the engineers, who can balance sturdy results and cost-effective framing solutions.

My biggest problem with site construction is that it often results in “devalue” engineering. Frequently, the people on the site think they know more than engineers and they reduce the framing schedule, reduce the fastening patterns, don’t install all the clips and tie-downs and otherwise save themselves effort and time by reducing the structural quality of the building. My start in the building industry was with tract home construction in suburban developments. Before I knew anything, the shortcuts and the flimsy buildings were appalling to me. We sometimes forget that the standard of building in America isn’t the custom homes built by the good builders, or the good prefabrication efforts by responsible companies. That vast majority of homes are tract homes built by low-skilled, unqualified labor.

We can do much better. We have to do much better. When the economy rebounds and large volumes of homes will need to be built for the average American, we need a viable alternative to out-of-date, out-of-sync site construction. I’m firmly dedicated to the concept that the future is in really good quality building components being assembled in controlled conditions, in both small shops and large factories, leaving the site for efficient, effective assembly only. This will lead to the answer for affordable, green homes, both modern and traditional. This could be called prefab, but in the 21st century, I will just call it "smart building."

In Monday’s By Design blog, Allison Arieff challenges the focus and relevance of the Museum of Modern Art's (MOMA) Home Delivery exhibit, making the obvious and salient point that cutting-edge technology is always interesting, but when it comes to homes, people matter.

"Home Delivery has tons of cool stuff to look at, but it really does feel odd that a show about homes has so little to say about the experience of actually living in one.”

It’s a fair criticism, and I made a similar point-out in my own thoughts about the exhibit. I mused that it would have been instructive if the MOMA exhibit would have tried to make their presentation like a living history museum, such as Old Sturbridge Village, in which actors play the part of the period village inhabitants. It would have been interesting (and fun) to see people trying to live in the little neighborhood of prefab homes on display at MOMA. I think it would make life in an early American village look pretty good. They may not have had amenities back then, but they had space; and they may not have the blessing of modern structural materials to create high perches in metal, plywood and glass, but they had the blessing of being on a firm foundation, living in a dwelling built with solid, natural materials, and an intention of endurance, not with a built-in plan for a fast demise.

Since I agree with Arieff that the lives of people are what really matters in any new housing idea, I’m a little confused as to why Arieff references the Whitney Museum’s Buckminister Fuller exhibit and seems to suggest that, compared to the Home Delivery exhibit's architects, Fuller was correctly motivated and on the right track, even though he ultimately failed. If that is truly her point of view, I disagree. Even though I found fault with the houses displayed at Home Delivery, I applaud the fact that most of them are attempts to create innovative ways in which buildings could be built, rather than an attempt to create a perfect solution for how people should live.

Fuller’s focus was on people, yes, but he wanted to engineer their lives as much as he wanted to engineer a method of building. To go with his grand alternative, disrupting vision about structure, shape and space, he also had a parallel vision to reshape the daily lives of humans. The Dymaxion House, his most ambitious home-focused project, wasn’t just an innovative building. In Fuller’s view it was THE single solution to the big post WWII housing shortage. He saw Dymaxion as the way every family should live and assumed it would be heralded by all, and would wash across the country overnight, finally making all domestic life neatly organized and efficient, while also completely transforming the architectural landscape with a pox of his round pods. He may have been a genius, but he was also completely full of himself and wrong.

There are few things as personal as one’s home. To remove the inhabitants from the process of defining and organizing the spaces in their home is unfortunate; to postulate that people should submit to a pre-canned and identical home for everyone is both arrogant and ignorant. We are living mammals and after tens of thousands of years of evolution, our need to create our own nest is only more deeply refined and crucial. It is our home that defines us, makes us and remakes us, as we in turn define it, shape it and reshape it, in the constantly unfolding drama of our lives.

Therefore, the only good homebuilding solutions are the ones that create and expand potential, giving increased opportunities for the inhabitants to have the opportunity to self-express, self-create and constantly change. Conversely, bad homes are those that lock the inhabitants into a preconceived notion about who they are and how they should live, and gives them little opportunity to do otherwise. Fortunately, most of those attempts, like the Dymaxion House, fail pretty miserably. Some that exist, like the block buildings in the Communist countries, are evidence that even architecture is capable of being a high crime against the human spirit. Others, like the urban tenement housing projects of the 60s, were imploded to cheering crowds, demonstrating that the human spirit will eventually prevail over bricks and mortar.

But architects keep trying. The house as manufactured widget is still compelling, it seems. But it won’t work. Humans are boundless creatures. The best homebuilding ideas won’t attempt to tie them down; homes will be designed and configured to let their imaginations and lives soar free.

I don’t know how the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) team chose the five full-scale buildings to be in the Home Delivery exhibit, but I applaud their choices. Erected on a vacant lot, the mini-village offers a diversity of perspectives about how new approaches to fabrication might have an impact on architecture and lifestyle, and in turn, how technology might have an impact on fabrication. I used the word might instead of will, because while the projects give a sense of the great force of ingenuity we can expect in the coming years, they each pose as many questions as answers.

The ultimate question is not “How will we build?” but “How will we live?” When you visit Old Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts, the outdoor museum attempts to help visitors understand both questions: the reconstruction of 18th century buildings make up a historical village that is occupied by actors who attempt to reenact what life was like in the old-world context. The point is to help one understand what was built, how it was built, how the resulting buildings affected life, and vice versa. I thought of this as I toured the MOMA outdoor exhibition. People acting the lifestyle suggested by the buildings would have been an interesting addition to the exhibit. Architects should never forget that homes are more about function than art and more about life than technology, but they can be remarkable indeed when they are also art and when the technology is deployed for the right reasons.

There are five homes in the exhibit, but I only went into four of them. The smallest one, The Micro Compact Home (foreground), caused my claustrophobic tendencies to surface. I toured it from the outside, peering through the windows. Still, it’s quite a feat. It’s the work of British architect, Richard Horden, who managed to shoehorn two beds, a sitting area, a table, dining space for five, HVAC, a shower, toilet, kitchen, broadband internet, clothes storage and two flat screen TVs in a very compact 2.2 ton cube. So, all the accouterments of modern living are there, but it looked to me like a too-heavy, immobile tent, not a place where one could really live. So, lock yourself in your bathroom and try to fathom what it would be like if this was also your bedroom, your kitchen, your living room and your office. If that sounds good, you’re in luck. You can buy The Micro Compact Home for around $40K-$50K. It would be pretty impressive, except there are better executions of the same idea that float or have wheels.

I did walk through BURST 008, the work of Jeremy Edmiston and Douglas Gauthier. As The Micro Compact Home drew out my spatial irrationality, BURST 008 grated on my natural irritation about bad detailing and workmanship. BURST is a cool trick that melds a design concept, parametric algorithms, plywood and laser cutters. It basically works and that should be impressive, but the result looks like a tree house built by a Carpentry 101 class. I didn’t know whether it was the fault of the design, the algorithms, the laser cutters, or the people who assembled it. The cuts were rough, the fits were bad, and I had the sense that the whole unit might not be completely structurally resolved, which made me nervous. I noted there were a few too many people touring with me for my comfort, and quickly reduced the load by one.

It is nearly always obvious and unfortunate when builders try their hand at being architects: all the skills of their real trade can’t overcome their lack of skills as designers. BURST 008 shows what happens when architects and programmers think they don’t need the skills of a builder: their good design skills don’t prevent them from abusing valuable building materials. There are good ideas here, but they aren’t yet well executed, but who knows? With the right design, the right algorithms, the right materials, a better cutting machine and improved building details, the next BURST just might take off. As it exists in the exhibition, it’s only an elaborate plywood shack.

The Instant House by MIT Associate Professor Larry Sass is also not quite ready for prime time, but the execution is precise and the result is quite sophisticated. The home model that was built for the exhibit was called, “Digitally Fabricated Housing for New Orleans.” Its design was derived from the vernacular architecture of historic New Orleans. Using exactly the same set of tools as BURST 008 (design concept, parametric algorithms, plywood and laser cutters) Sass and his team developed an interlocking tab-and-slot system. The outcome is a precise and flexible kit of parts that allows them to make everything in the building, including columns, ornamentation, and the complete structural shell, using connections and details that could be applied in large and small scale, and in the creation of numerous building elements.

It’s a good start, but there is some work to be done before one would think of Instant House as a real building system. It creates a structural shell, but it still needs a protective skin on the outside and a more appropriate finish on the interior. It also needs accommodation for mechanical systems, insulation and lots of structural testing. Still, Instant House is a strong demonstration of the potential of bringing emerging software and cutting technology to help solve the big problems in homebuilding. For me, this one was a hit, even if not yet a livable house.

System3, by Austrian architects Oscar Leo Kaufmann and Albert Rüf, is the one you would go to if you were trapped in the exhibit in a snowstorm. It’s a complete home with a tight envelope ready for living. Like The Micro Compact Home, this isn’t a prototype; it’s a product that is being sold in Europe. As such, it displays European craftsmanship and attention to detail. The solid wood shell is made from laminated wood elements that are common products in Europe. This is an attractive, modern home and a bunker. For that, I like it. It’s also a clever system. It’s a box made up of component elements that can be configured in a variety of ways. In addition, the box itself can be attached to other boxes side by side and stacked one on top of another, or both. In this way, System3 can be a detached single family home with various size and configuration possibilities, or it could be a multifamily complex with numerous variations. If fact, it could be a village of boxes.

System3 is very good. It’s also a proprietary product, and since I wasn’t there to buy a home, but to steal ideas, it bored me. The one great idea I might have stolen is the separation of the complex mechanical areas from living areas. But Kaufmann and Rüf had already stolen the idea from Louis Kahn’s distinction between “servant” and “served,” calling it “serving” and “naked,” instead. In any event, we had already developed our own version of the idea for Unity House in which we developed a “mechanical bar” with kitchen, bathrooms, and mechanical room, that serves the private and public living areas. With nothing more to steal, I moved on.

The Cellophane House by KieranTimberlake is the most ambitious and also the most intriguing building in the exhibit. Before I say more, I need to also say that our company built Loblolly, another widely-known KieranTimberlake project, and I will be co-presenting with Steve Kieran at two separate conferences this fall. So, I’m a little close for complete objectivity, but I’ll try.

Cellophane is a real house, architecturally compelling, and the biggest in the exhibition by far. System3 is the other complete house and could have been equivalent in size, but it would have been rather expensive to import more boxes from Austria. Instant House and BURST didn’t attempt to show how the whole house would work, so they are more demonstrations of an automated system to produce a building shell. In those cases, how the shell would become a livable home still requires some imagination. But Cellophane has five levels and most everything a modern home requires is accounted for: bathrooms, mechanical room, laundry, kitchen, bedrooms and living area. Except for some unresolved building details (big gaps in the building skin, for instance), one can imagine living there, at least on a seasonal basis.

More than anything else, Cellophane House is a physical exhibit of a philosophy. Where Instant House and BURST are particular solutions using software and laser cutters, and where System3 is a particular rectangular building block, KieranTimberlake contemplates an approach to design and construction that could be accomplished in an endless variety of ways, with an endless variety of materials. Their approach has been to develop a process of building that is a temporal assembly of fabricated components that, if logically separated, but strategically connected, can make up a complete house in a manner that is systematic and flexible. The details and the architecture itself celebrate the distinct functions rather than acceding to the notion that buildings are defined by the massing of the intertwined elements of the building shell. Each component type is integrated into the building assembly with connections that are intended to make the building easier to construct in the first place, and easier to demount for reuse or recycling in the future. The idea is that an efficient, sustainable construction method also considers a plan for its sustainable demise. In its philosophical ideal, it’s an Erector Set, constantly regenerating into new forms.

Cellophane House (like Loblolly House) passes two important thresholds in my mind. It is first of all a demonstration of excellent, evocative modern design, while secondly also being a demonstration of an innovative approach to building construction that has few limitations. The KieranTimberlake team is definitely on the right track.

I don’t think I could live in the Cellophane House. Transparency may be a good thing in politics, but doesn’t strike me as a good idea for a private residence where a sense of security is typically an essential quality. But that’s a small quibble and a personal one. There are other Philip Johnsons (the Glass House architect) out there, who don’t mind their private lives being fully exposed. The fact that KieranTimberlake was able to make nearly every aspect of the home with either transparent or translucent materials is further evidence of the ultimate flexibility of the idea.

My main disagreement with the KieranTimberlake idea is that it assumes that buildings can’t or won’t endure. I agree that many parts of a building should be designed to be easily demounted and easily reconfigured or replaced. But I don’t agree with the goal to make buildings more transitory than they already are. It takes a mighty effort to create a house, especially one that can fight off hurricanes and can cut off heating and cooling bills. I’m therefore much more comfortable with the notion that the shell of the building should be relatively permanent, while most other aspects should be designed and built to be easily changed and upgraded.

Even this is a minor complaint, I suppose. I would just change the scaffold idea for a very strong, permanent beautiful structure that could also be dismantled and reused at the end of its long, multi-century life. (Hey, that sounds like a timberframe!) Then, I would wrap that frame with a thick (and opaque) skin that would reduce the energy requirements to a bare minimum for that long life. (Hey, that sounds like the Unity House wall system!) Everything else could be changed, improved and reconfigured at the whim of the homeowners. (Hey, that sounds like Open-Built®!)

The Museum of Modern Art’s (MOMA) exhibit about home prefabrication (Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling) is delightful, insightful and inspiring. Even so, it is also slightly depressing.

The sixth floor display is mostly a retrospective, which gives evidence to just how much creative energy has gone into an apparently age-old quest by architects, inventors and entrepreneurs to realize the elusive beautiful, affordable and easily-assembled factory built house. In film, models, original drawings, artifacts, advertisements and even a reassembled portion of an actual home, it is clear that that the compelling vision of marrying the benefits of factory production with the need for “better, cheaper, faster” homebuilding isn’t a new notion.

Kit homes were being shipped from Great Britain to Australia in the early 1800’s by The Manning Portable Cottage Company. They exported “dozens” of packaged homes to adventurous settlers who hoped to bring some civilized comfort with them to ease the difficulties of the wilderness. Thomas Edison took a crack at industrializing the construction process with a concrete house that started as a complete form of itself and then, through a hole in the roof, the wet concrete was poured, creating all at once the floors, walls, roof, porch columns, and ornamentation. Unlikely as it seems, about one hundred were built, making this venture a relative success story, even as it failed in relation to Edison’s hope of revolutionizing homebuilding throughout the country.

The most spectacular success/failure may have been the Lustron House, an all-steel concept that was launched with the benefit of massive government funding and great expectations. Twenty-five hundred homes were produced before the overly-invested company declared bankruptcy. One of the homes was set up in the MOMA display. As advertised, everything is steel, including cabinets and closets. It was an ambitious idea, but an awful place to live: incarceration comes to mind. In the history of prefabrication, 2,500 built projects is a big number, but the size of the investment failure ($40 million or so) was much bigger.

Most of the ideas and projects on display were just un-built ideas, single prototype realizations, or otherwise failures. Despite the efforts of renowned architects such as Walter Gropius, Frank Lloyd Wright, Buckminster Fuller, Marcel Breur and Le Corbusier, the ideal of prefabrication didn’t find a market. Despite numerous patents, systems innovations, and grand production possibilities, prefabrication has even yet to fulfill its promise.

In addition to the display, there are five full scale homes built in an adjacent vacant lot. They give ample demonstration that the dream is still alive; nothing about the prefabrication disappointments of the past seem to have dimmed the hopes of architects today. Charming, idiosyncratic, silly and occasionally wonderful things happen when designers set their sights on what is known as the “mass housing problem.”

On the first day of our visit, we went to the inside exhibit first, then toured the full scale homes on the lot. In this order, the sobering (and inspiring) historical perspective caused the contemporary model homes to feel unimpressive. Besides the materials and technology, I was groping to see the progress. On the next day, we went to the see the model homes first. This time, with the morning light, they looked fresher, better, more hopeful; a little neighborhood of grand notions, fully constructed. How bad could that be? When I went back to the exhibit hall, I didn’t linger, but there were some things I wanted to see again. Then I watched some of the film for a short while…and left. I wanted to believe, and therefore didn’t care to spend too much time in the company of evidence to the contrary.

I will say more about the five houses on display at Home Delivery in my next post, but in the meantime, if you possibly can, go. For those of us who care about what happens next with the homebuilding industry, MOMA has delivered. This is a special window in which the past, present and future can be seen all in one place. For a clear view, though, you kind of have to squint.

...to work on your hair, but be prepared for a fool on your roof.

One of our clients, whose new home is currently being assembled on site, is unusually qualified to critique and comment about our proposed construction details because he not only has personal experience as a builder, but has since spent many years as a university professor, teaching courses in building materials and construction technology. We are gratified that he and his wife have faith in us and we’re thrilled that, as a result, we’re also getting a very motivated professional consultant.

In any event, he wrote to me the other day about some concerns he had about the roofing details on his home being done correctly. His descriptions of his preferred solutions were clear and instructive and then he ended the message by saying that his real problem is with roofers. “I have had terrible experiences with roofers over the years,” he lamented.

I wrote back in sympathy and support. What I wrote back to him was this:

“I agree with your comment about roofers. I have the same attitude about foundation contractors: almost always both ignorant and ignorant of their ignorance. So what supports the house at the bottom and what protects it at the top are at the risk of bad attitudes, low skills and completely inadequate training. Most states require training, apprenticeship, certification and licensing for a person to become a barber or a hairdresser even though if they make a mistake, the head will self-correct the problem in days or weeks. But to roof a house, where any mistake can fester into ever-increasing damage for years, you generally need only a ladder, a hammer and little fear of heights.”

Now, I realize this overarching condemnation isn’t fair to those many subcontracting companies that do good work and have good knowledge about the materials and technology of their field, but I will stand by the (unsubstantiated) opinion that way too many in these trades are pretty clueless about the science that ought to be associated with their craft. Why is this so? Well, to make the point, whoever you are, however much you know about these trades, tomorrow you could do business as a roofer or a foundation contractor (or many other building trades).

Any approach to improving the quality of homes must include a way to improve the process, including a system in which proper education and training is an integrated and ongoing ingredient. One of the principal advantages of prefabrication is that our tradespeople are always here and we can always know that we are executing the right details, with the right material and equipment AND with the right training.

So far, though, we haven’t been prefabricating foundations or roofs, leaving those two critical trades to local subcontractors. If only they had as much training as a barber!

This has been an incredibly busy couple of weeks. Blog posts have been few, but buildings going up have been many. When this much work gets done in a short period of time, it’s not magic; it’s about coordination, planning, smart work, hard work, and really good people.

Unity House, OPEN_2, is up, and the exterior is completed, thanks to the efforts of Phil Henry, Paul Boa, Joey Szuch, Hans Porschitz, and Caleb French. The Chronicle of Higher Education and Residential Architect carried the story.


This week the interior finishes are underway and will be installed by Kevin Bittenbender, Paul Tuller, and Drew Kurimay. Last week, the woodworking team was very busy preparing the millwork, and gave a good demonstration of our flexibility and craftsmanship as they created some prototype finishes for an exciting, contemporary home that breaks new ground, both inside and out.


With the work teams dividing up the responsibility and with orchestration by Kevin Bittenbender, most of the work was accomplished very quickly. Scott Bosworth, Josh Conley, and Collin Clifford are building the interior doors, while Scott Frazier and Mike LeBlanc are doing entry doors. Joe Szuch and Dave Chase made the wainscot and wall finish panels. Paul Tuller, Randy Roberts, and Nick Kranowski ran the window trim and ceiling system materials. And it’s no surprise that Skip Singer is masterminding and building our innovative, removable wall.



Our This Old House project is completely enclosed, roof is going on, siding is being completed, plumbing and electrical systems are ready for inspection, and finish work is underway. It continues to be great fun to work with the TOH team!



Tom Silva, Norm Abram, and Rich Trethewey are the “real deal” professionally, while also juggling TV requirements; whereas we are building professionals, only, and are pretty clumsy about the demands of documenting the process for the show. But they are patient, thankfully.



We had a couple of good TV sequences when we attached the ceremonial evergreen bough on the ridge, after the last rafter was placed, and again when the cupola, copper roof and all was picked into place, literally topping off the home and completing the enclosure.



Stair design

Pete Favat (homeowner) wrote a wonderful blog post about the tree ceremony. He recites a story I told him about the death of my brother Stephen, who was also my original business partner. I’ll make you read Pete’s story, but I will say here that I will always do my best to carry the spirit of Stephen with me, especially in celebrations of our achievements, because that’s when I miss him the most.


Our on-site crew for the Weston project has been Jay Lepple, Mark Roentsch, Luke Marcum, Dennis Wright, Toby Wandzy, Duane Beiler, John McElroy, and Kevin Stowell. I also helped a little, but these guys did a mountain of work, in some very challenging circumstances. Our architect on this project is Chris Adams; the project manager is Tony Poanessa. Heroes, all.



Tuesday of last week, Norm Abram and I were filmed doing a tour of one of our homes on Squam Lake in New Hampshire. It was fun, but I’ll keep my day job. Norm is more than a consummate woodworking craftsman; he’s just a fine person and we're privileged for both reasons to work with him. Here’s a sneak peek at home we visited. The filmed tour will be a part of the first show in a sixteen-part series on This Old House, starting this fall.





Our team also completed the enclosure of the BrightBuilt Barn in Rockland, Maine. You can see sequences of photos that show the raising and assembly process, which was completed over the course of just a few days on the BrightBuilt Blog. Our team on BrightBuilt was Project Manager Lovell Parsons and crew members Jesse Gallagher, Seth Ashworth, and Daniel Wirth. It has been a pleasure to work with Kaplan Thompson Architects. We plan to follow them wherever they go next.

Meanwhile, Duane Beiler, Eric Selmer, and C. J. Brehio completed work on an addition for a home in Harvard, Massachusetts, which was engineered by Fire Tower Engineered Timber. It was demanding work, as it always is when new construction attempts to match up with old buildings. Connections and interfaces need to be very precise, but in a random, distorted, non-planer way.

We have yet another crew out working on a local project designed by the architectural firm Weller & Michal, engineered by Fire Tower Engineered Timber. Our collaboration with these firms has always produced excellent, remarkable buildings. Our crew on this one was Chops Polcari, Dan Rennoldson, Jesse Gallagher, and Guyton Ash.






While Norm Abram and I were doing the TOH filming last Tuesday, another crew was putting up a new steeple on a church in Brattleboro, Vermont. The original was demolished by lightning about this time last year. It was a very quick, but dramatic raising: one steeple, one crane pick. The photos from the local paper show the steeple, but not the remarkable framing underneath.






Here’s a CAD drawing of the timberframe.


Last, but not least, this past Saturday some of us were a part of a volunteer project to put up a timberframe for a local automobile repair company whose shop was swept away in the Alstead, New Hampshire, flood of 2005. The trees for most of the timberframe were donated by a local farm and timberframers from around the Northeast contributed labor for cutting and shaping the individual pieces. Our company donated salvage timbers and labor for one of the tall central wall section…and LOTS of people came out to help with the raising. Here’s a link to the Keene Sentinel story, NHPR coverage, and a couple of photos. Chris Carbone (Bensonwood engineer) designed the timberframe and provided information to all those who donated their work, and Mark Roentsch masterfully orchestrated a smooth and safe raising day.

Onward!

At a party over the July 4th weekend, I had a conversation with one of our clients. Not unlike probably every other holiday gathering in the U.S. this year, one of the topics we talked about was the high cost of fuel. While all of his neighbors and friends are panicking about heating their homes next winter, my client (and friend) said he had no worries. It was gratifying to hear his enthusiasm for his home’s energy performance. “You and I were smart,” he said, “to build a house in response to the energy crises. It just works! On the few occasions when the house gets chilly, I just use the woodstove. Even in the coldest weather, I rely only on the sun and a little bit of wood.”

The energy crisis my client was referring to was the one that happened in 1979-1980, not the one we are experiencing now. We built his house in 1981. It’s interesting how thrifty and wise we get when energy costs are high. It’s also interesting how silly and wasteful we can be when the cost is low. We built many of our most energy-efficient homes in the ‘70s and ‘80s. The energy crises of 1973 and 1979 made us (including the government, through subsidies and tax incentives), extremely creative and very willing to make better energy performance a higher priority. After that, oil costs fell back again and houses quickly grew in size, insulation shrank in importance, and some great energy-conserving methodologies were soon forgotten.

I can tell you without embarrassment that our energy strategies in 1981 weren’t very complicated. Step #1: Go to site, find sun; face it. Put more glass there. Step #2: Add and improve insulation to thermal envelope…and then a bit more. Step #3: Design a compact and open floor plan with public areas south, functional things (stairs, baths, laundry, entry, etc.) north, and bedrooms up. Step #4: Don’t deviate.

Back then, I was our company’s principal designer. Knowing my amateur limits, I was conservative and habitual. The running joke around the office was that you could go to Tedd with any crazy home design ideas you might want, but you’d likely come away with a story-and-a-half cape. Today, we have a team of good architects who create livelier architecture, lots of engineering support to detail the various systems, and a whole lot of new information and technologies. But much of what we do today to create energy conserving buildings, still leans on following the basic steps, learned many years ago. Eighty percent of achieving energy stingy homes is as simple as turning your face to the sun, your back to the north wind, and putting on a good coat. None of us should need a set of instructions for that!

We are doing a series of remarkable projects right now, each a demonstration of cutting-edge, energy-conserving design and technologies. All of them start with the basics. Unity House and Brightbuilt Barn have R-40 walls and roof; the Weston house (featured in the upcoming fall series on PBS', This Old House) is R-35; all three face south with logically-oriented floor plans. Having done that, Unity and Britebuilt are striving for net-zero and LEED platinum, while the Weston project will be a more sensible alternative to the gargantuan 6,000 to 10,000 square foot energy guzzlers in its neighborhood. Additionally, all of these highly efficient homes will have photovoltaic arrays, thermal hot water, and some sophisticated heating, cooling, and ventilation systems. The last twenty percent is difficult and expensive; the rest ought to be common sense.

I’m proud to say we knew it and applied it in 1981. Then again, so did every other civilization that has lived in cold climates, up until cheap fossil fuel made us stupid. In an already precarious world, this gives us something else to watch out for: fossil fools.

If you have followed my posts, you have seen more than a few references to the auto industry, mostly to give evidence as to the level of efficiency and quality missing in homebuilding. My aspirations for homebuilding are wedded to the effective technology you can see under the hood of your car, to the absence of defects in the production of cars, and to the incredible efficiency that causes so much to be purchased for so little. If you compare all the dependable rolling technology you get for $15,000 when you buy a new Toyota Corolla (including chassis, engine, transmission, heat, air conditioning, plumbing, wiring, sound system, comfort seating, upholstery, perfect paint finish, power windows carpeting, air bags, warranty and more) with the same amount of money spent on the construction of a new home, you will get the idea. For the same money, you could get one small, inert bedroom, with inadequate insulation, thin drywall, cheap carpeting, one hand-crank window, no sound system and no furniture. The kind of production efficiency and quality assurance used to manufacture cars is not a proprietary secret. In most industries, it is now just the ante into the game of business. Conventional homebuilders think they are playing a different game.

It is notable, then, that The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday about the reinvigoration of Toyota Home, a division of the company that is now the world’s largest carmaker. Yes, they also build homes and have been doing so—very much under the radar, it would seem—since 1975. If “The Toyota Way” is being brought to the production of homes, expect something very good and getting constantly better: expect the future of homebuilding.

Toyota sets the standard for continuous product improvement, elimination of waste and for balancing customer satisfaction with employee satisfaction. Thousands of businesses, including ours, are adherents to LEAN principles, which have largely been modeled and led by Toyota. Ironically, the quality leadership might not have come from Japan were it not for an American, W. Edwards Deming. He was a statistician and quality control expert who worked with American industry during WWII, but was forgotten afterwards. He was invited to Japan around 1950 to advise their industry leaders about how to build quality into business and manufacturing processes. What he told them sparked an incredible turnaround. There is no doubt that Deming was the catalyst for what is now legendary Japanese quality, and the Deming Prize has been the most prestigious award for Japanese corporations since 1950. If only we had listened…

I now see this history repeating itself. There is precious little information on the Toyota web site about Toyota Home. In fact, there is only one page, with no links. However, there is this clue about what they are doing: “…Toyota’s house making is based on the ‘Skeleton & Infill’ approach.” These are words right out of the mouth of John Habraken, another big thinker whose ideas have been largely ignored in many parts of the world, but not Japan, where he is well known and highly respected. Habraken has preached the theoretical and physical separation of structure and infill for decades. The reference on the Toyota site isn’t a coincidence; it comes from either a Habraken lecture or one of his books. Toyota listened to Deming and therefore led the world in manufacturing quality; they are now listening to Habraken and, in the same manner, may be positioned to use his ideas to transform homebuilding. If we would only listen…

I recognize Habraken’s words because I know them. I discovered Habraken in the early 1990’s and have been an advocate of his “Open Building” concepts since. I was captivated by his book, Supports, tracked him down, and subsequently spent some time with him when he was living in Cambridge, MA, later visited him in Holland and even managed to persuade him to give a full day seminar at our company. Our Open-Built® system is greatly derived from Habraken’s thinking. I’ll devote a post about Habraken in the near future, but for now, you can link to a short bio on Wikipedia. As far as I know, we are the only company in North America that uses the philosophy of Open Building as a basis for our design and construction systems. I now know we, at Bensonwood, have a pretty good companion company in Japan.

One other thing struck me about The Wall Street Journal article. The author ponders whether Toyota can sustain the homebuilding operation because its sales are “so small”— at around 5,000 units a year from three production facilities. They have a goal of producing 7,000 units in the near future. That’s “so small?” I am aware of no companies in North America producing anything like that!

Whether or not Toyota can sustain its homebuilding operations, the answer here is clear. Not to mix metaphors, but if design/build companies and the businesses that supply them fail to see the “value” train leaving the station, their conventionally built homes—unable to compete—will be going the way of the Edsel.

This post is for all those who keep asking us how much the Unity House costs and can’t believe we don’t have a clearer answer.

Unity House is also called OPEN_2. It is the second project of our OPEN Prototype Initiative, which is a partnership between MIT’s Open Source Building Alliance (OSBA) and Bensonwood Homes. Our naming of the collaborative venture using the word, “prototype,” was purposeful. Here’s the definition of prototype from the American Heritage Dictionary:

An original, full-scale, and usually working model of a new product or new version of an existing product

Unity House fits both aspects of this definition. Working on it has turned us into an experimental design studio and a building systems laboratory. As we become satisfied with the design concepts and the performance of the building envelope and systems, it is our intention to scale up production processes in order to create the construction elements in a more efficient manner. From the Small Business Encyclopedia, this is called a “Pre-Production Prototype.”

This type of prototype is for all practical purposes the final version of the product. It should be just like the finished product in every way, from how it is manufactured to its appearance, packaging, and instructions. This final-stage prototype is typically expensive to produce—and far more expensive to make than the actual unit cost once the product is in full production—but the added cost is often well worth it.

I added the italics. Prototypes are expensive.

Here are a few of the construction elements we’ve developed or improved specifically for Unity House:

• R-40 exterior wall, with a hybrid insulation approach
• Rain screen siding systems
• Window pan flashing and sealing system for thickened wall
• Roof panels and protected membrane system for flat roof
• Custom steel rack for PV (photo voltaic) array
• Folding interior walls for rapid partitioning and removal (15 minutes)
• Modular interior wall system for quick installation and reconfiguration using simple tools (1/2 day)
• Modular suspended ceiling system, creating mechanical chase
• Wainscot system for wiring access, using unique materials

We also worked extensively on mechanical system engineering and design, building code compliance issues, and LEED research and documentation requirements.

If prototypes are inherently expensive, this one has been especially expensive because so much new ground is being broken. We are not just prototyping the building; we are also prototyping nearly every ingredient of the structure and finish. It’s been fun, exciting, and yes, costly. But as the definition above suggests, we expect the added costs will be well worth it. We’ll bring the innovations and ideas to all of our projects. We’ll make better buildings and be a better company because of these investments.

So, to be honest, we still don’t know what Unity House costs will be. We are ten days into the site assembly, with at least 50% of the work yet to be done. When it’s done, we’ll know, but that information won’t be made public. The investment in the prototype will be borne by Bensonwood, Unity College, OSBA, and a few corporate participants, all of whom will be involved when we do a post-construction financial review. For anyone else, asking what Unity House costs is not a fair question, nor is it relevant to any kind of comparison.

On the other hand, the good, fair, and right question is, how much will it cost when it goes into production? We plan to answer that question soon. We will be offering versions of Unity House to the general public, and we’ll therefore have to put a price tag on it. I’m as eager as anyone else to find out what that will be.

The SUV was born from cheap fuel, a lust for things large and powerful, and big profits. It died from the high cost of fuel, a need for things small and efficient, and ultimately, low sales.

It was widely reported this week that consumers very quickly changed their minds about the features they seek in an automobile.

The three Detroit automakers were outsold for the first time ever by their Asian rivals in May, and a sedan was the top-selling vehicle in the United States for the first time in 16 years.

"Clearly, for people who are shopping for a new car today, the only thing that matters is its fuel economy,” said Ron Pinelli, the president of Autodata. “The big vehicle that they once loved is now a source of pain for them when they fill up at the pump."

From this consumer shift, the industry is starting to immediately and dramatically respond. To meet customer demand that is increasingly dominated by concern about fuel efficiency, not surprisingly, GM announced imminent plans to close four pickup and SUV plants in North America and expand output at two of their car plants.

The astounding thing is that the end of the SUV/pickup dominance appears to have happened in a single month.

Jesse Toprak, senior director of industry analysis at Edmunds.com, said everyone was scrambling to keep up with one of the most rapid sea changes ever for the auto industry.

"The shift was so swift that it caught everybody by surprise, including Toyota,” Mr. Toprak said. “Dealers we’ve talked to said they could have sold twice as many Priuses easily, basically resulting in a record month."

We’ve also heard in the last few days that the average cost of gasoline is at a new high and is climbing. Putting these two momentous news stories together, I gather we now know the price of common sense: it’s about $4 per gallon.

What happened so suddenly to the automobile industry is no doubt about to happen to homebuilding. The energy gobbling McMansions are our SUVs and every overly large, energy-wasting production home built is evidence that consumers haven’t cared enough because, until now, the cost of heating and cooling homes has been too cheap.

Now that consumers have learned the price of common sense, what can they do? Clearly, they are buying Priuses and other hybrids as fast as they are made, and they have the industry scrambling to remake itself in the image of their newfound desire.

But there is no Prius for living widely available to consumers, because there is no consolidated national industry homebuilder or manufacturer to develop one. This is one of the reasons why we are stepping into the breach with the OPEN Prototype Initiative. While we aren’t one of the giant builders and our manufacturing capacity is limited, we know that, in partnership with MIT’s Open Source Building Alliance, we are in a unique position to develop the ideas, standards, processes, and products that will enable the homebuilding industry to give American homeowners what they now know they desperately need: a high-performance home that doesn’t use up our finite fossi