NEXT HOME | 2021 Design Competition
Modular Single Family Homes
Awarded 3rd Place
Status: Unbuilt
This proposal for a modular house design concept, constructed with conventional building materials, makes possible a new construction of a single-family dwelling within a cost of less than $170,000. Moreover, the modular construction approach portrayed here allows dwelling units to be flexibly adapted over time to suit a range of possibilities in the future; the module size, construction, and simplicity of the design is oriented for the dwelling to evolve over multiple phases of construction. To produce the diversity of housing situations that our city currently needs, construction of new dwellings must offer more than one future for a plot of land and a way for more citizens to become home owners. While the term ‘affordable housing’ is often associated with small, unimaginative, low-cost dwelling units, our proposal will investigate how to overcome the challenge of construction costs with universal space planning concepts to promote an improved housing sensibility than offered by Columbus’s status-quo.
The design of the modular dwelling unit is focused on enhancing the inhabitants lives and encourages healthy, inclusive, and sustainable living through its shape and layout. The modularity also latently contains a logic for multiple layouts to be created based on house space needs evolve for households. In addition, the 12’x12’ shaped module creates efficiencies based on the conventional size of domestic lumber, the building material that is affordable, sustainable, and known intimately by a wide range of labor throughout the construction industry. The modular system allows the end user to simply prioritize the spaces of the house to best fit the needs of the inhabitant during design, so this proposal is suited for a universal end user. The modular design permits for future phases of construction to be plugged-in, stuck-on, or piled-up as the needs of the homeowner evolves.
