University of Michigan Awarded $300,000 Grant to Fund Research on Energy-Efficient Housing

Professor of Practice in Architecture Harry Giles and nine other researchers received a total of $3 million in grants from PATH and the National Science Foundation (NSF) to continue their work forging new ground in interdisciplinary energy-efficient housing technologies.

NSF-PATH Program Awards provide funding to spur innovative background research, a key component to technology development. First given in 2000, the awards have not only led to interesting developments on a variety of technological fronts, but have brought increased attention to housing within the broader university research community.

Giles is researching technological innovations in an industrially designed and manufactured modular housing concept for low energy, prefabricated, low-rise low income housing units. Chair of Architecture Tom Buresh, Assistant Professor of Architecture Fernando Lara and TCAUP Community Outreach Coordinator Eric Dueweke are collaborating on the project.

The grants, which are for $300,000 each for a cycle of three years, were available to researchers from academic institutions and partnerships between academic institutions, research organizations, industrial enterprises, state and local governments, and other research endeavors relevant to the housing and homebuilding industries. Researchers were asked to explore one of the following themes:

• Construction Management and Production
• Structural Design and Materials
• Building Enclosures, Energy, and Indoor Air Quality
• Community and Economic Impacts of Housing Technology
• Systems Interactions and Whole House Approaches

The goal of the project is to encourage greater collaboration among disparate industry stakeholders in order to advance innovations in home building and to create new avenues of research and development.

Project Summary
The overarching objective of the University of Michigan research project is to create a new way of conceptualizing housing design that integrates technological innovation with manufacturing processes, resulting in a more socially responsible outcome. Giles and his team will focus on innovations in the areas of production, building enclosures, and energy/whole house design. They hope to transform traditional construction methods into a mass customized production process to benefit society through improved property performance—directly impacting national concerns about the environment, the state of the housing infrastructure, and the improvement of low income housing communities. Their ideas include:

• A new genre of affordable medium density buildings will be conceived that will be more adaptable, durable, and energy efficient as whole-life housing typologies.

• A new format for housing design and construction will initiate a social transformation from depressed low-income groups toward a progressive homeowner society that has more lifestyle choices, therefore encouraging the viability of mixed use developments which will serve as a model for creating socially sustainable communities.

The project objectives are motivated by the potential to create opportunities to repopulate blighted urban areas. Therefore, the investigator and his team will be creating an initial focus on sites situated in the Detroit inner urban area, as a model for repopulating these denuded urban zones. Significantly, the principles of their proposal will be equally relevant to the re-densification of cities throughout the United States and the rest of the world.

To learn more about Professor Giles' research project grant, visit the PATH website.

This article appeared in Portico 2005/3.