12 12 House

The 12 12 house was a project I completed with Shannon Stack in my 4th year of university. This project was to create an affordable housing concept that could utilize Miami Dade’s smaller lots.

The company RENCO sponsored this studio and tasked us with using their “Lego block” like material to create affordable housing that would be easy to build and repeatable. At the end of the semester our projects would be judged to determine who’s project would have a life sized mockup built. Currently our project is one of four finalists being evaluated out of the total of 12 projects.

The site was a large obstacle to overcome as our lot was a technically a single lot with dimensions of 25’ x 100’. Students were allowed to combine the single lot to a double lot with dimensions of 50’ x 100’ if they desired, but we decided to come up with two concepts that could fit both lots. Students were also tasked to imagine their project could become an entire neighborhood of houses.

Inspired by George Nelson’s concept “Experimental House” we decided instead of focusing on making a single house, we focused on perfecting two different kinds of modules and how they interact.

Focusing on fitting living within these two modules allowed us a massive amount of flexibility when configuring a floorplan. It allows for houses to be tailored toward the needs of inhabitants that would ultimately create diversity between the appearance of two houses. Lastly, playing with how the half and full modules were connected allowed for small courtyard pockets.

These are two proposal we made for both the single and double lot using our modular system in combination with RENCO’s blocks. These plans could also be extended to be multiple floors if needed, but because of limited space on our competition boards we decided to keep them 1 floor.

I believe that products like the RENCO blocks could revolutionize the way we not only approach affordable housing, but also shelter as a whole. The ability to construct buildings in a fraction of the time has uses in the military and emergency relocation scenarios. I hope our project wins the competition so it can display the power of a combined modular system between material and architects.