Vermont architects launch affordable housing study

A recently-formed Vermont chapter of the national organization Congress of Resident Architecture (CORA), is launching a statewide project find ways to build affordable, green, and sustainable manufactured housing in the snow belt.

Architects and factory-built housing manufacturers will team up with other building and energy professionals across the state through the project.

The idea is to develop what architect John Connell of Warren, calls “snow belt solutions by integrating the cost and construction efficiencies of the assembly line with the energy and environmental enlightenment of our state’s architects.”

Today’s manufactured housing is produced all over the United States, and more than 50 percent of all new housing is factory built.

This “one size-fits-all standard," said architect Ramsay Gourd of Manchester, "does not address the specific needs of the snow-belt, let alone Vermont."

Increasing insulation, installing energy efficient windows and doors, adding air lock entries and designing roofs for serious snow loads is just the beginning of what’s needed in affordable houses for Vermont.

To solve these problems the architects have spent three months interviewing manufacturers and touring manufactured housing production facilities in Vermont and Canada.

As a result, the group has funded and formed the Manufactured Housing Colloquium of team-building fabricators with green architects to solve what they see as a perennial problem of building sustainable homes in the snow belt that are accessible to people of normal means.

After a three-month long “discovery and solution” process the teams will share their various findings so that each may benefit from the other’s work. This pooled information will form the foundation for the final design solutions that the teams will develop in the subsequent six months. Participants will design single-family or multi-family homes to fit a three-acre study site that can accommodate up to 10 units. The group expects final work to be published in June 2007.

Manufactured housing includes a variety of pre-engineered approaches, including:

• Panelized kit houses that are precut, pre-sourced, partially factory built, shipped and assembled on-site;
• Modular homes created from whole sections of the final house being assembled in a factory, then shipped to and assembled on site; and,
• Prefab, precut and kit built homes.

Posted November 2, 2006

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