Not to go all MIT on y’all, but this piece from the news office hit my desktop today.
The gist: a design studio taught within the MIT Department of Architecture in 2009 posed the challenge of coming up with a house design that could be built for $1,000, with the idea that such housing could be used in the wake of natural disasters like the then fresh-in-memory Sichuan earthquake of 2008.
Masters student Ying chee Chui came up with a 500 square foot dwelling that has now been built in a town in Sichuan for $5,925. Dubbed a “Pinwheel House,”…
…it has a modular layout, with rectangular room units surrounding a central courtyard space. “The module can be duplicated and rotated, and then it becomes a house,” Chui says. “The construction is easy enough, because if you know how to build a single module, you can build the whole house.”
Part of the boost in cost from the design target came from enlarging the original plan to 800 sq. ft., and part reflects prototyping costs — but the point is being made: there are alternative approaches to both design and construction methodology that can produce good housing for a much larger swath of the world’s people than now possess it.
Two postscripts: first: this year’s version of the same studio course is looking at $10K houses for Japan in the wake of the earthquake-tsunami disaster.
Second: the linked article is sadly lacking in the heart of the cool — the tech within and the details of the layout and production methods for the Sichuan prototype as it now exists. I’ll try to track those down and post later.
Image: Meister der Weltenchronik, Construction of the Tower of Babel, c. 1380
...now I try to be amused
Ceiling Cat is watching you build.
Mike Goetz
Oh my goodness, an interesting, informative post about something real. I like stuff like this. Thanks.
JPL
The cost must be for the basic structure and electrical and plumbing must be extra. What a fascinating project though.
harlana
ok, I just love the artwork, as always! that is all.
srv
The best architect I’ve found in the US for small home design:
http://rosschapin.com/Plans/Cottage/1plansCottagespage.html
barath
@srv:
I’m a big fan of Jay Shafer’s Tumbleweed houses. They’re really well designed and waste nothing. (I took a tour of his 91 sq. ft. house and was really amazed at how much usable space there was in such a small place – and how it really could be lived in – and was lived in – by two people.)
joes527
@JPL: Plumbing? Hmmm… Didn’t see that in the plans.
The pictures make it look more like a large partitioned shed than a house (no kitchen, no bathroom, no place for a heater or air conditioner, no built in storage) Don’t get me wrong, it looks like a really cool shed.
Cultural differences may make those omissions more acceptable in some places, but I suspect that bringing it up to something that is recognizable as a house would double the price.
EDT:
As someone who has had to deal with water issues in the house more than once, it wouldn’t take much to convince me that indoor plumbing is just a bad idea.
Social outcast
The floorplan is here: http://web.mit.edu/1khouse/website%20info/images/1p_PINWHEEL.pdf
Other entrants here: http://web.mit.edu/1khouse/designs.htm
srv
@barath: Seen the weeds, but too small unless your single. I’d never seen the larger cottages.
Tom Levenson
@Social outcast: Thanks.
I’d like to go one step further and see what was actually done in Sichuan — the plumbing and other system issues mentioned above are key. Looks like the stove is a wood/local fuel system, which is [email protected]joes527: in the context of disaster relief but is a lousy solution over the longer term.
@joes527:
Which would still be a damn cheap dwelling…but you’re right.
blondie
Thank you for posting this! I’ve started looking for plans for a small house (<900 sf), but I also want it to be zero-energy. Do you think I should find the house plan and then look to incorporate renewables, or am I better off working from a plan that incorporates them from the get-go?
joes527
@Social outcast: Hmmm… the floor plan does show a kitchen and bath.
Looks like it sits on a concrete footing rather than a slab. It is interesting that it looks like they chose to have 2 wet walls rather than putting the kitchen and bath back to back. I would think that they could save money by putting all the plumbing in a constrained wall/floor area.
Tom Levenson
@blondie: You are better off talking to someone who knows the nitty gritty of green building better than I ever will.
My gut feeling is to look for designs/designers working with green ideas from the start. It’s always more straightforward to set your design parameters from the start than to retrofit — which is what makes my love of older houses such a costly interest.
Southern Beale
And this is China? One word: PANOPTICON!
:-)
singfoom
One of the more inspiring uses of green homes I’ve seen is the rebuilding of Greensburg Kansas, which was basically destroyed by a tornado a bit back.
http://www.greensburggreentown.org/home/category/meadowlark-house
The entire town has green features, but this is their house that they’re trying to get certified as LEED for homes.
aimai
I think its kind of an odd House. I’d like to have heard more about how the Architect was thinking about it in the context of Chinese living/working conditions and I thought framing the discussion in terms of “apartment dwelling” costs was weird. In an apartment you are actually cutting costs, in some ways, by sharing walls and plumbing. These are stand alone houses. The model also shows no exterior windows. Presumably light and air come from the interior window walls. This may be a good idea in places where the house still also serves as a kind of fortress against neighbor’s eyes and intrusions, but I don’t see how the house is well insulated and having a wind tunnel inside the house formed by the courtyard seems like it adds to the insulation problem in cold areas. I think Szechuan has both hot steamy summers and cold winters and a history of courtyards so maybe this just isn’t the problem I think it is.
Still, very cool project.
For local MA people if you get a chance don’t miss going to the Salem Peabody Essex Museum to see the reconstructed Chinese merchant’s house they imported and rebuilt from China. It shows a working courtyard in a multi story dwelling that was used for multiple generations.
aimai
Culture of Truth
IKEA should be all over this.
Culture of Truth
also watch out for toxic drywall
Culture of Truth
Between the brick house, the straw house and the bamboo house, the big bad wolf is going to have his work cut out for him.
srv
And here’s a campground of under $1000 homes outside Lakewood NJ:
http://www.businessinsider.com/lakewood-new-jersey-homeless-tent-city-2011-9?op=1
Town folks want them gone.
Tom Levenson
@aimai: What Aimai said:
Truly a fascinating and very beautiful structure. (The rest of the museum is cool too. Great permanent maritime culture/art exhibit. Visitors to MA are also permitted to enter.)
opie jeanne
@srv: I love those. The price is for the plans?
opie jeanne
@joes527: indoor plumbing is a bad idea until you need the outhouse in the middle of the night in February in Nebraska.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
That idiot Cramer and Mornin Joe were going on and on about there being all these 120k jobs in the Dakota’s and nowhere for people to live.
wrb
I tend to be highly suspicious of the ideas for all-new ways of building that regularly issue from universities.
There is tremendous imbedded knowledge in vernacular building- how to make it comfortable in that unbearable August that comes every 5 years (mass, orientation, shading, funneling of breezes) or how to survive that 100 year storm. Vernacular building has been refined over thousands of years. I contains functions we don’t understand until they are again needed.
We can still build inexpensively. The problem has come due to codes designed either to keep inexpensive building out of a town or to set a standard that people think should be the minimum acceptable, when we haven’t made people rich enough to afford our idea of the minimum.
The cabins in which the settlers delighted are illegal now.
Here is a friend’s site that deals with some of these issues
http://www.originalgreen.org/
dmsilev
@aimai:
I second this recommendation. My mom and I went to see this exhibit last winter, and it’s very very well done.
The Moar You Know
Still a bad design. You don’t need 800 square feet for a house.
I just spent a month in Africa living in a CLU – Container Living Unit – and it is just what it sounds like, a house made out of a 20′ cargo container. Insulated, small A/C unit (necessary), 160 square feet, including bathroom/shower, and it’s still enough room for two people. With just me it was downright spacious.
It’s a military invention, and boy howdy am I sold on it. You can get the base container for about $800. Modifications tack on about another $1000, but if you did a bunch in bulk that cost will fall substantially.
Built from the get-go to be shipped, and then trucked, to a location of your choice. I swear I was racking my brains for a downside, and couldn’t really see any.
srv
@opie jeanne: Just for plans which can be copied for one structure. From what I’ve read, they leave it up to a local architect to make any small changes. They’ll do something custom, but I’d expect it to be 10% or more of the house cost. A custom job will cost a lot, but an architect who knows what they’re doing and will supervise the bids and has Q&A oversight can actually save you as much as they cost.
ruemara
I like it, but I wish there were better pictures of the actual dwelling. I like 800 sq ft, it would help hold my books, but if it’s just me, 4-600 would probably suffice. Here’s my biggest question, would it make a difference to our gluttonous 1st world nations? I don’t think so.
Tom Levenson
@The Moar You Know: These are great, but have limitations. I experienced these in the high Atacama above San Pedro de Atacama in Chile — a bunch of them formed the infrastructure of Caltech’s COsmic Background Explorer (COBE) — a microwave telescope at almost 17,000 feet.
They worked a treat — but they have real drawbacks as even semi-permanent housing in what you would hope would turn into civic space, aka a town.
@wrb: Absolutely: people who build know a lot about building, especially the needs of their local area. (I have bitter family experience with this, having seen our mountain cabin collapse under snow loads the flat-land designer simply couldn’t believe would really occur).
But at the same time there are significant technical advances and design-tech approaches that reduce the cost of building, or could. Not all that could be known is.
Linda Featheringill
I googled pinwheel house and found pictures. Cool. I think it has a glass panel over the courtyard so you can get light but not weather. Very nice.
It looks to me like the design would have real possibilities.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
If Obama was willing to use the bully pulpit maybe some of these housing units would get built.
Judas Escargot
@aimai:
I’ll third this. And the PEM often gets good Chinese/Asian art exhibits before any other museum in the States, for historical reasons (hard to believe now, but Salem was once THE major shipping port for the Northern colonies and the center of the China Trade, way back when).
Just don’t go there in October if you can avoid it (Halloween season screws up the parking).
Southern Beale
Apparently the London arms fair had to boot some exhibitors for peddling in banned torture equipment.
God I hate the world sometimes.
You And I And George
Breath of fresh air after all the ABL bilge.
Dennis SGMM
@srv:
From the article that you linked:
WTF? What kind of politicians have led us into an economy with a glut of unsold homes, rapidly increasing rates of foreclosure, and 700,000 American men, women and children without a roof over their heads?
And chew on this:
Again, WTF? Food insecure households in America? That phrase “food insecure” is a nice way of saying that at any given time 14.7 percent of Americans aren’t getting enough to eat.
When in hell did having a place to live and enough food to eat become optional here? I can’t help but think that both parties have played a part in our deterioration and that neither of them are going to do much to reverse it.
Austerity, baby, it’s what’s for dinner.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@The Moar You Know: That’s what LBJ, Long Bihn Jail was, fuck up enough and you went in the conex.
Judas Escargot
@Dennis SGMM:
But– but— Moral Hazard!
Can’t be rewarding people for not predicting the Great Recession and making sure they were born into wealthy families now, can we?
Linda Featheringill
@Dennis SGMM:
We should be ashamed of those statistics.
Dennis SGMM
@Raven (formerly stuckinred):
Heh, I had to live in a Conex Box when I first arrived at Binh Thuy. I did so for a few weeks until someone DEROS’d and I was invited into their spot in a hooch made of lumber scavenged from rocket boxes and odds and ends gifted by the Seabees. Bless their hearts, the Seebees had cut windows in the Conex but it still got so hot during the day that you couldn’t grab the handle that opened the door.
I stowed my gear in the Conex and slept on the rock hard sandbags that made up the roof of the aptly-named Bunker J. A side note: I stand six feet tall and when I arrived in Vietnam I weighed 185 lbs. When I left I still stood six feet tall but I weighed 144 lbs. That’s what kind of fun we had.
Cheap Jim
@Dennis SGMM: Not to argue with you about the fact that this is bad, but it doesn’t say 14.7% of Americans aren’t getting enough to eat. It says 14.5% of Americans were food insecure during 2010.
Their definitions make a distinction between insecurity with and without hunger. 14.7% therefore have had decreased quality, desirability, or variety of food OR have had reduced food intake. 5.4% is the amount with reduced food intake.
http://www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/FoodSecurity/labels.htm
Still sucks, though. 1 in 20 households. In the US.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@Dennis SGMM: We made commo bunkers out of em, covered and sided with layers of sandbags made them slightly tolerable. Actually, I was so raggedy ass that my lack of any kind of clearance kept me well away from any radio equipment except the prick 25 on the jeep I drove!
Elias Schewel
God bless Tom Levenson
Dennis SGMM
@Cheap Jim:
Thank you for the clarification. This wouldn’t be the first time that my outrage overstepped the facts. I am boggled by the fact that even in our weakened state this country can’t seem to come up with some minimum level of support for its most disadvantaged citizens. I have been homeless and that was solely due to my Vietnam vet anger, stubbornness, and stupidity. It was only by the grace of good luck and caring friends that I was able to work my way out of that situation. Others are not so lucky. This should be, to my mind, an issue of pressing national importance. Once people slip far enough they will never recover and yet there’s mostly silence about how we can or should address that dismal fact.
The Moar You Know
@Raven (formerly stuckinred): Yes, they do also use them for the jail. Where I was, they use them for EVERYTHING save the dining hall.
They’d probably make a damn good jail. You’re not digging your way out of one.
Tom Levenson
@The Moar You Know: Some alternative designs using shipping containers in architecture.
Dennis SGMM
@The Moar You Know:
IIRC, you couldn’t open one from the inside if it was latched unless someone had torch-cut a hole in the door. Clang! “Aw fuck!”
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@The Moar You Know: Our Hq was about 3 blocks from there and you did NOT want to be there. They tried to make it worse than the bush.
Field expediency!
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@Dennis SGMM: xin loi
bin Lurkin'
My home is a little under 240 sq ft, in that space I have a bedroom with a full sized bed, bathroom with tub/shower/wc/sink, kitchen/dr/lr with central air and more storage space than you might imagine.
The whole thing cost me under $1500.
This winter I plan on installing a heat pump that will at least double my heating efficiency, cost will be under $400 for a brand new unit.
Dennis SGMM
@Raven (formerly stuckinred):
Xin loi minoy! Only us old gators understand the full import of that phrase.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@Dennis SGMM: Choi duck, you righta!
The Moar You Know
@Tom Levenson: Awesome. Thank you for that.
I really believe these have a place in temporary/easily relocatable/emergency housing. And quite possibly permanent housing, as shown at the link you gave me.
aimai
@Southern Beale:
I love the idea of the arms dealers shouting “you got torture on our killing devices! How Rude!”
aimai
aimai
I’d like to point out that there’s a real difference between SRO housing for middle class/working class loners and expandable, affordable, family housing for people with kids, in laws, and grandparents coming home to roost. Its all well and good to want to set up your own yurt with bookshelves (my personal dream) but quite another to create cheap, small, effective housing for people who have the luck or the problem of living on top of other family members.
I’m with jrg upthread that the idea of doing something divorced from the vernacular architecture of a specific place seems strange to me. It reminds me of criticism I read years ago about failed attempts by an NGO to build cookie cutter apartments for Afghan Refugees which were modeled on regular apartment buildings with external stairs that worked in other countries. They totally failed to take into acoc#nt that the refugees needed/wanted to keep their women in purdah and that chance encounters between unrelated adults on the stairs could lead to fights and murders.
aimai
Bill Murray
@blondie: It would depend on what type of energy harvesting you were using to get to zero energy, but incorporating from the start is likely to be cheaper and to work better. Energy storage is usually the biggest problem in achieving true zero energy, but net zero energy where you sell generated electricity during high generation times (like the summer) and buy energy off the grid during lower generation times does not have this problem. Treehugger just opened a small net zero energy subdivision in Issaquah Washington http://www.treehugger.com/files/2011/09/zero-net-energy-zhome-model-for-housing.php
Bill Murray
@Tom Levenson: you forgot the all american cardboard box. It’s an easily portable shipping container housing unit
Carol from CO
I had expected a virtual tour of the house seeing that it was MIT and all.
shep
In the department of warm, you could cut total home heating energy in half in this country if you simply used house orientation, window glazing and interior thermal mass structures to take advantage of passive solar energy. And it wouldn’t cost developers or home buyers much more than existing homes. Just like the housing and transportation disaster that is most cities, it all boils down to an inability to centrally plan.
The Moar You Know
Anyone know where to get shipping containers?
Tom Levenson
@The Moar You Know: Try this for a start:
@shep: Indeed. see, e.g. this.
wrb
@The Moar You Know:
They are everywhere. Used (usually rusty and leaky) ones are auctioned off as-is at ports and inland terminals and there are local entrepreneurs who buy them and fix them up. Their fix can range from just patching holes and treating rust to insulating and installing doors and windows.
Google “shipping container” together with your state or city.
opie jeanne
@wrb: Double-hung windows. People who buy older homes with them replace them with single-hung because the doubles cost so much more, mainly because they don’t understand why doubles are so great. You open both the bottom and the top at the same time, and they will cool off your house pretty quickly. We had them in SoCal and instead of replacing them with vinyl we had them repaired for a tenth of the cost, and the house remained eligible for a property tax credit given to historic properties.
opie jeanne
@Bill Murray: Some of the comments in the article are pretty funny, like the comment about having to run up to the third floor to pee when you get home, that cracked me up.
They claim that $400k to $600k for those units is reasonable because that’s the price range for Seattle, but they are not in Seattle. They’re in Issaquah, where houses cost considerably less than that.