Thanks very much to Inhabit for posting the notice of the competition. Everyone, please alert anyone you know who has demonstrated an innovative design in affordable housing to enter.

Affordable sustainable housing, needs to be affordable. Lots of fancy ideas, but they just aren’t based in reality. Design like you give a damn; walk outside into your backyard and build a house without buying anything, just with what is available around you. That is the reality for affordable housing worldwide.

Please continue coverage of this contest. It will be great to see the winning designs.

The ‘Dog Trot House’ design by Jim Fox, Leslie Ford, Marcuss Bushong, Geoffrey Adams & Karen King of the University of New Mexico School for Architecture & Planning might be a very strong contender here. It was a winning entry in the SECCA ‘Home / House’ design competition ( secca.org/homehouse/winners.html ). If anyone knows how to contact them, please let them know about this ‘Changemakers’ competition. I’ll try as well.

Basically, their design consists of (2) shipping containers, whose long sides are spaced 16 feet apart, sitting atop a robust wooden deck/platform. They’re then joined together (front and back) with Aluminum Storefront framing with glazing. (Substituting 2 x 4″ wooden stud framing, w/o full glazing, would make sense for a lower budgets) Another wooden platform with 4- 6 foot(?) overhangs sits atop these containers as a ‘flat roof’. (A slight pitch would make this roof an excellent water catchment surface). This overhanging wooden roof, solves the problem of Sun heating up the metal of the shipping containers in a simple and cost effective way. In high wind areas, the outer margins of the wooden deck and the roof could be joined together with metal plumbers pipe or ‘split post’ wooden ‘bent’ type ‘ribs’.

Because shipping containers are cheap & plentiful, and knowing how to build wooden platforms and roofs are are skills known worldwide… their design could be a strong entry in this competetion. It’s a GREAT, cheap and simple design. It’s also a realistic design for a self – build, or local contractor built (w/o architect), type project. In places like Africa, this design might only cost between $5 – $10,000 to build… and if it was mass produced, it could arrive in kit form, ready to assemble. That would be great !

As for the foundation… I recently saw an elevated reformated truck trailer house that sat atop metal I-beams welded to 12″ reclaimed iron pipes that were in ground about 4 feet, with 4 feet clearance aboveground as well. Something like this could be used for this design. Either that, or sonotubes filled with rebar reinforced concrete, with I-beam rails atop them, would work.

All the best,

Richie K

http://www.changemakers.net