The House of the Future

Building Blocks

Article excerpted from Popular Science Magazine, November 2006

Imagine if cars were built the way most houses are. A procession of trucks would deliver materials and parts to your driveway – sheet metal, spools of wire, screws, pistons, a roll of carpet, bumpers and a steering wheel. Then day laborers would arrive to put it all together. In the rain. It sounds absurdly efficient, yet that’s the accepted way of constructing a modern American house.

While cars, computers and other products have improved dramatically in recent decades, houses have changed almost as little as the methods used to build them. “Every product except homes has become more sophisticated, with higher quality at lower cost,” says architect Kent Larson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology."Homes are just the opposite.”

Larson is perhaps the country’s lead proponent of a radical new approach to designing and constructing homes. The house of the future, he says, should be more like a personal computer or a car. It should be affordable, built mostly in a factory, and with parts that are easy to repair or replace. You should be able to design your own home online, just as you can today with a Dell laptop or a Honda minivan. The key to making it happen? Follow the lead of other industries: standardize and accessorize.

Take personal computers. Products made by competing manufacturers are standardized for compatibility. You can buy virtually any printer or mouse on the market, and it will work with the computer you already own. “Nobody has to agree on what a mouse is; you just have to agree on the USB port,” Larson says.

Before houses can be built this way, though, the industry needs standards analogous to the USB standard for computers. “You don’t have to agree on the toilet, but you have to agree on how the toilet connects to the wall or the floor,” Larson explains. That may sound easy enough, but getting dozens of manufacturers to sync their johns will require fundamental changes in the homebuilding industry.

A House Made to Order

Prefabricated components – like walls, floors and plumbing – make home construction a snap



One of the key components of the MIT Open Source house is the core wall [A], a prefab unit into which all of the plumbing is already installed. Even the toilet [B] is built directly into the wall instead of attached to a waste drain on the floor. The core wall is simply hooked up to the service lines, and then the tiling and fixtures (sink, shower) are added to complete the bathroom. The house’s flooring is fitted with adjustable feet [C], which rest on the subfloor and provide soundproofing and space for HVAC ductwork [D]. The electrical wiring [E] is easily accessible behind removable paneling [F], making installation of extra outlets easy. Finally, the interior walls [G], which also arrive fully assembled, are snapped into place to form rooms.