Living laboratory: a unique high-tech project probes housing's future

Building Products, Nov-Dec, 2002 by Rebecca Day

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology's department of architecture is building a 1,600-square-foot house that it hopes will reshape the concept of a home. Called the MIT Home of the Future or House_n, the living residential laboratory will host a variety of innovations in building, design, construction, and technology.

Unlike the prototypical house of the future, which focuses heavily on home entertainment, House_n promises to harness technology toward more serviceable ends.

"We tend to be more pragmatically oriented," says Kenneth Wacks, home systems consultant to the futuristic dwelling. House_n is named for the mathematical variable "n" to suggest its malleability in becoming whatever the occupant needs or desires. The vision for House_n, which is the brainchild of director Kent Larson, architect and principal research scientist in the MIT School of Architecture, is architecture available to the mainstream through a process that he calls mass customization.

"The objective is to allow people to get the advantages of an architect without having to pay for an architect's services through the use of Web-based design tools," says Wacks.

House_n will employ a variety of innovative housing materials that will enable customization in home building using the manufacturing efficiencies of mass production. "Your design would get translated into practical products both for the fabrication of the house and the design of the elements of the house," Wacks says.

The idea is to enlist high-profile brand-name marketers such as Martha Stewart, Target, Home Depot, or even BMW, to provide the services. Wacks says he envisions that these types of companies, which merchandise for both the middle and upper-middle classes, will see the value of getting into the home building industry as Sears did in the 1920s. The difference is that people won't buy cookie-cutter packages as they did then.

"Instead it's going to be the Cabbage Patch Doll," Wacks says. "Every doll was slightly different yet they were all produced on the same assembly line," he says.

The concept, which creates customized products for the masses using computer numerical control (CNC), isn't new. It's used in car manufacturing and even kitchen cabinet building where cabinets are produced on an assembly line but can accommodate variations according to room dimensions, style, and materials.

"We said, `Why can't you do complete sections of a house that way?'" Wacks asks rhetorically. "The answer is you can, but no one has asked for it."

House_n will use materials that are readily available but that haven't been applied to housing before. The framing of the home, for example, will use pultrusion, a fabrication technique utilized in commercial building that uses a composite that can be molded in different ways to create structural elements.

"Instead of I-beams," Wacks says, "we're talking about complex devices that provide strength for the building and also contain chambers that could carry the air for heating and cooling and the cabling required for audio/video and communications."

"In 125 years, housing hasn't caught up with technology," he says. "We take perfectly good walls and damage them to put in power wire. We want to have the infrastructure of the building integrated with the technology that's needed to provide the electronics infrastructure." That framework will not only include structured wiring but clusters of sensors that will monitor the performance of the building and help it adapt to conditions and to the needs of the occupants.

Sensors for the HVAC system could be placed in rooms where the occupants spend time rather than in a dark hallway where most thermostats are placed. Sensors might also be placed outside the house to determine which direction the wind is blowing.

"One of our designs involves flowing air through a core in the wall to try to overcome the infiltration of cold air," Wacks says. A cluster of sensors in the ceiling could read smoke and heat levels or even barometric pressure. "It's important to know the differentials in air pressure from room to room because air flows from higher to lower pressures. If we don't equalize pressure we set up air currents in the house that allow for drafts."

Other sensors can test for noxious gases such as carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide, an increasing issue in newer homes built to tighter tolerances and with fewer air leaks. A sensor used with a heat exchanger could determine when it's time to ventilate a given area. In addition, infrared and occupancy sensors could heat and illuminate rooms where people are and turn back heat and tights in rooms that haven't been occupied for, say, 20 minutes or more. Video sensors--aka security cameras--could be used to monitor a sick or elderly relative.

The Salt River Project, a publicly funded utility out of Arizona, was one of the first sponsors of the MIT home. The utility hopes to get a better understanding of opportunities the connected home can offer utilities as Internet service providers "since we have an automatic relationship with residents, and we're already bringing wires to the home," says Don Pelley, senior research engineer.