Dreams in Reach

Architects envision affordable housing in innovative ways

By Gaile Robinson

Star-Telegram Art and Design Critic

What if something as basic as a Habitat for Humanity house were designed by an architect? What would designers devise if held to the same cost and size parameters as the Habitat dwellings? What if the designs emphasized energy efficiency and environmental consciousness?

What-if musings play through David J. Brown's thinking. As senior curator for the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, N.C., he tries to find artistic challenges that will ultimately benefit his community. Since 1994, the center has championed projects that pair creative thinkers with social organizations. Two years ago, Brown tried coupling architects with low- to moderately priced housing. "The majority of architects tend to work with the most affluent 2 percent of the population," he says. "What if we turned that equation around? What if we provided inspired design in the affordable-housing market for people who historically have been omitted from enjoying its benefits?"

Last year, he found out what would happen. More than 400 schools and design firms answered his challenge and submitted ideas to SECCA's Home House Project. The participants used the Habitat for Humanity guidelines as a "departure point," Brown says. He obtained the specifications from Habitat's headquarters in Americus, Ga. -- lot size (60 by 140 feet) and square-footage minimums (1,050 for a three-bedroom and 1,150 for a four-bedroom). The architects' results displayed an amazing breadth of creative thinking. There were dynamic futuristic visions, as well as practical solutions to the real problems encountered on a daily basis at Habitat construction sites.

Steve Badanes, founder of the iconoclastic architecture group Jersey Devil and a jury member for the competition, said he and the two other panelists found many "poetic notions" among the submissions. Nearly a year after the competition, it is these poetic pieces that he distinctly remembers. "There was a guy who built a solid thing of straw and burrowed through it. His board was handwritten. It looked like an art project."

Some, he says, were modest statements that fit the small budget and were doable with today's technology; others were so forward-looking that the visions outpaced technology. Badanes says the jury wanted this mix of conceptually artistic projects and those that were grounded in their affordability and buildability. After considering hundreds of entries, the jury awarded 25 prizes. In keeping with the egalitarian nature of the project, the winners shared equally in the monetary prize. Brown brought 100 of the best ideas, poetic and practical, with him when he came to North Texas recently. They are on view at the University of North Texas Art Gallery through May 25.

Some of the suggestions:

Highly imaginative
* Docking Dwelling by Matias Creimer of Los Angeles
This is the most colorful and eye-catching submission -- and possibly the most far-fetched. It is hard to resist its effervescent visual appeal in a gallery filled with earnest schematics. Creimer suggests building pod-shaped units, all jelly-beanlike but with bulges, porches, overhangs or clerestory windows. Depending on the number of bedrooms needed, an appropriate number of pods in a variety of mouth-watering colors (two rooms to a pod) would be snapped together. The kitchen-on-one-side, bath-on-the-other pod is painted in brightly colored stripes. The living-area pod, in a variety of candy colors, has three walls of windows and a snap-on front porch. A neighborhood of these brightly colored homes looks like a penny-candy counter.

* The Income Producing House by Steven Raike of Bear Creek, Pa.
Recognizing that the need of many low-income families is to be near a city center, Raike proposes housing units that can be attached to the roofs of existing downtown buildings. Parasitic structures, he calls them. One side of his narrow 3-story homes would function as a revenue-producing stream, as the most publicly exposed side, with a minimum of interruptions such as windows or doors, could be used to mount billboards.

Respectfully considerate
* The connector set by Joe Meppelink, Adam Janusz, Onezieme Mouton and Wyatt Frantom, of Houston
On any Habitat building site, only a few people have any experience with power tools, says Joe Meppelink of the Framework group. To that end, he and his fellow Rice University alums have devised a series of extruded aluminum connectors that could "clip" the exterior of a house together -- foundation, floors, walls and roof -- using only wrenches and screwdrivers. Large aluminum channels that run along the perimeter carry air, water and electricity. Smaller aluminum pieces form the supports for the walls and floor. A roof of fiberglass-covered foam pieces, similar to surfboard construction, snaps to the walls, making an easy-to-erect, highly insulated, colorful covering. The young Framework guys think they can provide the exterior shell of a house for $40 to $50 a square foot and are intent on producing these erector-set connectors. Watch this group. They are enthusiastic and very bright.

* Jeff Alan Gard, Jag Design of San Francisco
Gard borrowed his concept from gas-station roofs and Frank Lloyd Wright's Usonian homes. He sees a butterfly roof structure (with an inverted pitch) with two large supporting poles erected on the site. These take some serious construction materials and equipment. Once the roofs are in place -- "one, two or more, depending on how big you want to build," he says -- the house is constructed underneath using the roof supports as primary structural elements. The roofs provide shade for the workers, making the house cool both literally and figuratively. Like the Framework designers, Gard tried to eliminate many of the jobs that would be difficult for volunteer construction workers. He envisioned walls that come to the site pre-wired, insulated and drywall-free so they only have to be screwed to the studs. "Even painting could have been eliminated by specifying plywood in grades that have a beautiful paper finish," he says.

Extremely practical
* Porch House by Daniela Fabricius of Brooklyn, N.Y.
Fabricius suggests using only building materials that can be ordered from the Home Depot catalog. She makes no apologies for the do-it-yourself look of her design. Limiting materials to the inexpensive and readily available "is not seen as a constraint but as an inspiring game of making-do," she writes on her entry's board. "The parts can be assembled with minimal labor and waste." The house is not fanciful, but her resourcefulness is quite commendable.

* The Container Boxes by Jim Fox, Leslie Ford and Marcus Bushong from the University of New Mexico School of Architecture and Planning, Albuquerque.
Two shipping containers, the large rectangular metal crates that are used on container ships and transported on land by rail, are kitted out with insulation, windows, kitchens and baths, then trucked to the home site, where they are placed on a foundation that extends beyond the containers to function as a surrounding porch. The two containers are connected with glass walls. The resulting house is reminiscent of early dogtrots but looks much more contemporary.

* Gabion House by Mark Nye, Lambertville, N.J.
Gabions are wire boxes that hold large rocks and debris. They have been used extensively along creeks and rivers in this area to shore up the banks and halt erosion. You can see them along the Trinity River near downtown. Nye suggests that the dirt removed to prepare a building site and driveway is wasted and would be put to greater use to fill gabions that can subsequently be used as the wall supports for a house. The gabions would be covered with stucco and form a thick, insulated structure.

From dream to reality

The 400 ideas submitted were exactly that -- ideas only. To become a reality, working drawings have to be generated, projected costs estimated, a site found and bought, crews employed, construction loans obtained. The drawings are an expensive step that separates a highfalutin idea from a street address.
But one of the houses is being built. The house designed by S. Flavio Espinoza of Sag Harbor, N.Y., for the Home House Project was selected to be built in Winston-Salem. The students at Forsyth Technical Community College there are making the working drawings. Espinoza forfeited the usual design fee, and the project is being funded by the Housing Partnership of Winston-Salem.

This is the sort of moment for which Brown lives. The art has become a live project.

Currently the costs are running to $100 a square foot, says Herb Burns, chairman of architecture and construction technologies for Forsyth Tech, which is a price tag that Jane Milner of the Housing Partnership calls "not truly in the realm of low-cost housing. But it's a prototype. To make true affordable housing, you have to develop systems, do it over and over, hone it till you know exactly how much it will cost to do the roof, the windows, the site prep." Milner says that this first effort from the SECCA submissions may prove to be more in the moderate price range, even with her agency providing financing and the city kicking in construction loans.

"We are testing the marketability of this kind of housing," she says. "We would like to build other houses from the Home House Project, but they have to be cost-effective. Are these something people will buy? Our guess is yes, but they may not be our traditional niche buyer." She suspects that because of its proximity to downtown, the house will appeal to a working couple without children.

Even though Habitat provided the baseline information, the organization cannot build this sort of housing, as there are too many variables. It needs the repetition of building the same house over and over, and as these designs are experimental, there are unforeseen problems, which always increase the costs. The Habitat for Humanity offices in Winston-Salem are not planning on adopting any of the designs. "We're pleased with the house we're building," says Kay Lord, executive director of Habitat for Forsyth County. "We certainly applaud new design for affordable housing. We've worked hard to incorporate new design in our homes." But she's intrigued by the architect-designed attempts. "I can see there's definitely going to be a market for them. With the show traveling around the country, it will help that market develop."

Although not due for an extreme makeover, the Habitat houses are constantly being tweaked. The design used in Fort Worth recently was given two new facades, Victorian and craftsman, so they assimilate into the various neighborhoods. This came at the request of the Fort Worth Housing and Workforce Development Committee, says Reid Rector, assistant city manager. "I don't think anyone questions the quality of what Habitat does, but you drive into a neighborhood, you can pick out the Habitat house, the architecture was so different." This is an aspect of Habitat homes that is being addressed, says Gail Ryan, director of Fort Worth's Habitat office. "We want diversity. We want them to be different enough that you wouldn't automatically think, 'That's a Habitat house.' We want to do better."

Brown is pragmatic about Habitat's reluctance to adopt anything as radical as the design ideas put forth by the architects, but he hopes some of the green suggestions and sustainable materials they offered can steer Habitat's choice of building products. "If they stop using vinyl and use low VOC paint and finishes [products that contain no ozone-depleting chemicals] and take a good look at the carpet they put in, we will have made a positive impact."

Brown says there is another entity in Winston-Salem seriously considering building a group of the architect-designed homes. If that happens, then part of the proceeds could fund a plan book, making all the designs available to the public. Brown is working to that end, resolutely pushing the design project forward, encouraging community involvement. He has connected the community of Winston-Salem to the project and says it can happen in other cities as well.