Efficiency, flexibility highlight new Unity College President's Cottage 

By Morning Sentinel Staff
 
01/06/2008

By Morning Sentinel Staff
Sometime this spring Mitch and Cindy Thomashow will move into their new home on the campus of Unity College.

But for the college president and his wife, the new home will mean much more than sparkling appliances and polished floors: It will represent the very future of the college itself.

And, for those who will build and design the home, it will mean another step toward destroying the core beliefs we've held about home construction for the past 200 years.

"It's exactly what Unity College ought to be doing," Mitch Thomashow said. "It's America's environmental college, it should be setting the example."

NET-ZERO HOME

The design and construction of the college's new 2,000-square-foot President's Cottage will include state-of-the art technology and systems to build a home that will produce as much energy as it uses, a so-called net-zero home.

And the house will be adaptable, with whole walls and fixtures easily changeable to allow unheard of flexibility with changing use.

But what sets the home apart is neither its flexibility nor the efficiency it will exhibit once complete, it is the efficiency and virtually uncharted method with which it will be built.

"Our intention in this project is to demonstrate both of those things, an efficient construction process and the very flexible kind of building organization that leads to ultimate flexibility," said Tedd Benson of Bensonwood Homes in Walpole, N.H., which is building the new home. "The whole idea is we ought to have buildings that are designed in an organized way, disentangled."

Traditional construction has always worked on the premise that its occupants must adjust their lives to the structure. Homes are built on predictions ranging from number of children a couple plans to have, to whether or not there will be a home business.

"On the basis of this prediction the home is built, and from the moment of construction until the home is completed, 15 or 20 significant subcontractors come in and ply their trade, without regard of one for the other," Benson said.

What the framer puts up is soon filled with a dizzying maze of wires, plumbing and other systems that are virtually unchangeable.

Over the past 100 years homes have become more complex, meaning more intertwined systems and less flexibility, Benson said.

"By the time the building is done you have this mess of entanglement," he said. "If you want to change the light fixture in a ceiling you'll have to have at least four or five of those subcontractors come back in and untangle the mess. People are constantly adapting their lives to the homes that have been constructed. It's much simpler to leave the home."

JOINT VENTURE

Bensonwood hopes to change that with its Open Prototype initiative, a joint venture with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other industry representatives to create new standards for home building and make the design, construction and renovation of homes more affordable, adaptable, energy efficient and environmentally sound.

In Open Building, the home is viewed as a well-organized layer of systems and subsystems, each of which can be carefully coordinated to ensure a better process and product for the homeowner.

In essence, what Henry Ford did for the automobile, Bensonwood is trying to do for the home building industry.

"Henry Ford concluded organization of parts and pieces would allow him to make a better, more efficient automobile," Benson said. "Home building, for various reasons, has not come to that conclusion."

All of the systems, such as walls, cabinets, plumbing, and wiring, are first pre-assembled using a 3D computer program that allows every component to be examined and changed. The program allows builders to get to a zero tolerance in fittings, said Hans Porschitz, steward for Bensonwood.

Once the design is settled, crews go to work assembling the building at Bensonwood and then it is taken down for delivery to the building site.

"Every component we bring to the site is pre-finished," Porschitz said. "It's ready for a siding system on the outside and an interior system on the inside."

Rather than thousands of pieces that must be fitted into the house, however, there are 45 or 50 pieces to assemble on site.

The typical construction site produces up to 8,000 pounds of waste, but Bensonwood believes it can whittle its waste stream down to a single garbage barrel.

Benson hopes the Open initiative spurs the industry to adopt standards so that it can begin making home pieces. For instance, instead of going to a hardware store to buy parts for a new sink, you would get a whole system that could easily be installed.

"There's no reason for plumbing systems to come as raw pipes, elbows and valves," Benson said. "If there were a few standards they could come complete and we could take that whole plumbing tree and fit it into a wall. The common message we're sending to industry is a high performance building is something we're sure we can do practically in the way we go about making construction components. We're sure we can make high quality components that are very tight."

Benson first noticed the limitations of conventional construction early in his home building career.

In the early 1990's, he discovered the home building theories of Dutch architect N. John Habraken. The head of architecture at MIT, Habraken researched designs for adaptable housing. Benson became acquainted with Habraken and began incorporating his ideas into his timber frame homes.

In 2003, the effort got a boost when Benson was invited to attend architect Kent Larson's Open Source Building Alliance, a forum for building industry representatives to brainstorm common interests and goals. The Open initiative is an attempt to bring the best ideas into a home.

BREAKING NEW GROUND

"By combining these efforts hopefully we can break some new ground," said Larson, who heads a research consortium at MIT. "The design and construction industry is dysfunctional and needs to find totally new ways of doing things."

The most promising potential of the Open initiative could be bringing sustainability to the average homeowner, Larson said. The Unity house has a $400,000 limit, but costs will decrease as systems and components are standardized.

A huge percentage of energy is consumed by buildings and homes. The best way to limit that consumption is through better design and systems.

"It's easy to build a net-zero home," Larson said. "If we're successful, what will be unique about it is we'll prototype a way that will scale to thousands."

Which would be just fine for Unity College president Thomashow, who got involved with the project through a friendship with Benson.

The Thomashows see the house as an experiment in sustainability.

"For me, it represents the future of the college," Thomashow said. "We want all our buildings to look this way and be this way. The spirit of the future of Unity is embodied in construction like this."

Craig Crosby