Architecture researchers design faster, more affordable housing

This is called the Future House. This is an extension of the research we've been working on since 2010. So we're thinking through what are ways that we can go through and make housing more affordable. If you look at a traditional home, you know, it's built piece by piece, stick by stick. This is really taking a fully designed home, dividing it and prefabricating those pieces, and then we're able to put them back together. The idea behind this house is you essentially do all of the initial work in a factory. You do all the framing, and then eventually the hope is that you can get cartridges like these that are fully finished with plumbing, electrical, and fully finished on the outside. And then you just essentially, like pieces of Legos, you just put them together on site. The exciting part about that is, one, it's cheaper since it's factory-made, and two, it's a lot faster, especially on site. Might take a month or two to build a house. This should take two to three days. I started working with Joe Wheeler, who was a professor at Virginia Tech. He has since left and has gone to Van Meter, who is our industry sponsor now but way back in 2010 Joe and I actually started working on Future House together. We co-led the Future House Dubai project and then this is an evolution of that concept into more of a volumetric component. When I was talking with Joe about the opportunity to come back to Virginia Tech and then to pass the torch to lead this project I mean it really is it's a dream come true because we've been working on this for such a long time. We've now really found a way for it to move beyond just the prototype stage. Working with the production builder now we can actually get the concepts that we're developing here at Virginia Tech into the hands of consumers through our partnership. So I think it just it totally scales the impact that we have and then bringing in students with that too. I teach at the School of Architecture and what's amazing is you know we spend a lot of time designing but not a lot of time actually realizing the design. So this is really an opportunity for the students to understand that the lines on the piece of paper actually are materials. They have weight, they have cost to them and this allows them the experience to get their hands dirty and I think it's it's the best way to learn architecture is to actually build it.