The OPEN Prototype Initiative, led by the MIT Open Source Building Alliance (OSBA) and Bensonwood Homes, an enlightened builder in Walpole, N.H., announced on February 28 that they will work with a roundtable of industrial leaders to “develop a new model for creating more responsive, adaptable, higher-quality, cost-effective homes.” As architects and anyone else involved with the housing market know, homebuilding as an industry has not advanced significantly over the last half century, despite the best efforts of research and development, starting with Operation Breakthrough in the 1960s and continuing to this day. Members of the initiative are predicting that demographic and market pressures in the years ahead will finally force a change in how we design, build, and integrate technologies into housing.

Program from design through evaluation
The OPEN Prototype House Initiative will test the deployment of advanced designs, materials, systems, and fabrication strategies, with a goal of showing how high-quality, sophisticated, and personalized homes can be built more cost-effectively and in less time. The initiative intends to engage industry in an investigation of how this new model may create a path to market for new products and services.

The program will include design, construction, testing, and evaluation of prototype model homes. MIT and Bensonwood Homes will build one home every 18 months, starting in the spring of 2006 and continuing through 2010. The plan is to minimize field labor and maintain the highest quality design and construction criteria while completing each home in fewer than 30 days.

Specifically, Bensonwood says their goals are that:

• Design and construction will establish a varied collection of components that can be combined to form unique structures, linked directly to efficient prefabrication
• The floor, wall, and roof systems will be pre-built
• The structure will consist of distinct, disentangled, and accessible layers that allow both for efficient assembly and for change over time
• The building shell, with exterior finish, will be assembled in five working days
• Mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems will be installed in three working days
• Interior fit-out will be completed in five working days
• Interior finishes will be completed in five working days.

MIT leads initiative
The Open Source Building Alliance is a major initiative of House_n, the multidisciplinary project led by researchers at the MIT Department of Architecture. Its goal is to explore the house of the future as it will need to be to meet the challenges of widespread adoption of digital technologies. Participants include the MIT Media Lab and other departments at MIT, Intel Research, the Boston Medical Center, Stanford Medical, University of North Carolina School of Public Health, Bensonwood Homes, CIMIT, and industrial sponsors.

The program notes that houses rapidly are becoming centers for work, preventive health care, distributed energy production, entertainment, commerce, and learning, in many cases due to the explosion in digital technologies. Coupled with burgeoning advances in CAD/CAM manufacturing, the housing market may be poised at a tipping point for the introduction of new technologies.

First prototype to incorporate universal design
OSBA will site the first prototype on the grounds of the Crotched Mountain Rehabilitation Center in Greenfield, N.H., a highly regarded organization providing extensive rehabilitative and educational support services in a creative, inspiring environment for adults and children for more than 50 years. The prototype will be designed to respond to a wide range of physical and cognitive abilities of the center’s clients. As in all of the prototype homes, the multidisciplinary team and industry partners intend to “collaborate on the development of innovative design concepts, fabrication processes, and new home systems to create personalized residential environments that can be ‘mass-customized’ from highly engineered, integrated systems produced with advanced manufacturing processes—mirroring innovations found in other industries, from automotive to consumer electronics.”

The team currently is seeking industry sponsors for the effort. “Academic research will only make a difference to the lives of people if industry can deploy the resulting innovations,” says Kent Larson, director of the MIT Open Source Building Alliance. “This collaboration of MIT researchers, manufacturing leaders, and Bensonwood Homes may allow us to actually make a difference in the world.”

At completion of each prototype, the group plans to hold a symposium to discuss and evaluate the result and set increasingly challenging goals for the next prototype.

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