Unity House: Prototype for 21st century building to be featured on 'This Old House'

UNITY (April 28): Not all houses are created equal.

'Unity House' (Bensonwood Builders)

Now, even the most entrenched principles around which houses have been built are being challenged. Today’s builders of tomorrow’s homes are addressing a new reality: to be truly durable and sustainable, houses should be able to adapt to homeowners’ needs over time.

Moreover, this adaptability must be achieved with minimal impact to the environment. This involves nothing less than the reinvention of the home. But, how does one change a building industry that has held fast to conventional wisdom?

According to the OPEN Prototype Initiative (OPI), the answer lies in the Open-Built® system of home construction, the nexus of future homebuilding.

OPI is a program of the MIT House_n Research Consortium, Bensonwood Homes, and other industry partners. Its goal is to improve homebuilding across the country and to make homes more affordable, adaptable and environmentally friendly.

OPI has developed a process that makes it possible to construct thousands of environmentally friendly Net-Zero homes (which produce as much energy as they consume) and is sharing these innovations with the entire building industry.

“There are countless examples of green homes, but the industry has not developed a process to affordably mass produce these homes,” said Kent Larson, director of the MIT House_n Research Consortium. “The OPEN Prototype Initiative has developed scalable processes, such as prefabrication and the separation of core services that, when followed, enable builders to create thousands of customizable Net-Zero homes that are being made more affordable right now.”

OPEN_1, the first house built by OPI, used green building concepts such as energy-efficient wall, window, roof, and lighting systems; advanced tracking of energy use; and provisions for the best possible indoor air quality.

The design and construction processes of the Open-Built® system demonstrate ways building assemblies can be fabricated off-site, with integrated systems for plumbing, heating and cooling, and exterior siding. Off-site pre-finishing of construction elements allows for faster on-site assembly and thousands of pounds of less waste and debris.

'Unity House' (Bensonwood Builders)

The second home being built by the OPI, dubbed “Unity House,” will be the on-campus home for Mitch Thomashow, president of Unity College. It was important for Thomashow, author of two books on environmentalism, that the home reflect the college’s environmental commitment.

The house is scheduled to be assembled on-site in May and will serve as a single family residence, an on-campus meeting and entertaining space, as well as a classroom.

Designed for Net-Zero energy use, the 1,930-square-foot home will achieve LEED Platinum standards (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design), feature a photovoltaic (PV) solar panel array, and be a living classroom for college students.

Because of these attributes and the advanced prefabrication techniques, Unity House will be featured on an upcoming episode of This Old House, the PBS television home improvement series.

“Unity House and the OPEN Prototype Initiative embody the principles of Unity College, including environmental leadership, sustainability, and collaborative and experiential learning,” said Thomashow. “We are a leading environmental college, and with Unity House we are proud to be a part of an effort to reframe America’s building industry, making the mass-production of custom environmentally friendly homes a reality.”

According to a press release, a key to the OPI, and one of the main elements that separates the home and the building process from other green or prototype home projects, is the use of Open-Built® principles.

Open-Built® thinking takes a layered approach to building, with each layer defined by its lifespan and anticipated need for future alteration. The high-quality homes resulting from this process are built rapidly and with minimal waste. Homeowners can easily move or remove walls and fixtures, access swiftly evolving technologies or adapt the home to the changing needs of the occupants.

For example, Unity House can be altered at its core, allowing walls to be moved or removed with the use of simple tools, rather than tearing down sheetrock.

Preproduction in a controlled shop environment improves the quality of the home while reducing on-site waste. The average new homebuilding project today creates 8,000 pounds of on-site waste and can take from nine months to a year or more to complete.

Goals for the entire Unity House project include producing less than three barrels of on-site waste and completing on-site construction in 20 working days.

The architects/designers for Unity House are Hilary Harris and Randall Walter of Bensonwood Homes, with input from Kent Larson at MIT.

Harris is a certified expert in environmental design and co-author of the Vermont Builds Greener Program, which certifies residential buildings constructed to sustainable criteria. She believes it’s not enough for a home just to be green; it must be flexible enough to meet the individual needs of homeowners.

“Very few people have the ability today to design and build a home that meets their needs,” said Harris. “Beyond just outlining a way to affordably build green homes, this initiative shows we can and should be building homes that can fit the needs of the homeowner, rather than forcing them to live within the current design of the house. What good is a green home if it can’t adapt to change?”

Tedd Benson, founder of Bensonwood Homes, is recognized for revitalizing and modernizing the timberframe industry three decades ago. The company was among the first American builders to use Computer Numerically Controlled (CNC) machinery and one of the first to adopt 3-D modeling software for home design.

“Ultimately, the OPEN Prototype Initiative will lead to greater efficiencies,” said Benson. When architects, builders and suppliers begin adopting Open-Built® technologies, homes will become disentangled, enabling the industry to create a series of standardized systems and processes that increase efficiency and reduce costs, without sacrificing creativity,” he said.

The OPEN Prototype Initiative is a program of the MIT House_n Research Consortium, Bensonwood Homes and other industry partners. The overarching goal of the initiative is to improve the way homes are built in America, making them more affordable, adaptable, and environmentally friendly while sharing these innovations with the entire industry.

The OPI is developing a series of prototype homes to be designed and constructed every 18-24 months.

The first prototype, OPEN_1, was completed in fall 2006 in Greenfield, N.H. The second house, known as Unity House has been designed, and is being fabricated at Bensonwood’s Walpole, New Hampshire facilities. It is scheduled to be assembled on site in the spring of 2008. For more information go to openprototype.com.