Green Plug and Play Housing?

When it comes to city living almost anywhere in the world, a growing challenge is the need to develop vertically. Indeed, one may look no further than Manhattan where thin air (or more specifically "air rights", essentially the right to build higher) sells for tens of millions of dollars in a heartbeat. The right to build higher decreases the cost of the footprint of buildings, increasing housing capacity.

The problem of verticality is one that a team of students from the Community of Universities and University Institutions of Paris is attempting to solve with their innovative and uniquely sustainable Live-Lib residential design as part of the 2014 European Solar Decathlon.

Plug and Play Sustainable Housing

The Live-Lib building is comprised of two parts: a central "hub" and residential "capsules". The hub is a vertically constructed tower with a series of “plugs”. The tower contains central systems such as energy production, ventilation, electricity, and waste and rainwater management. The capsules are individual pods or residences that all connect into the hub by plugging into it.

Particularly interesting, however, is that they propose the utilities provided by the hub be managed by the city. The concept of city run, as opposed to utility run, services such as electricity, energy, water, etc. is an increasingly common concept related to distributed energy, the need for redundancy and the development of micro-grids. With Live-Lib, the individual capsules would be the full property of each resident, energy and other utilities would be regulated by an outside party.

Simply put, it’s individual living utilizing communal resources, thereby (theoretically) driving down costs and improving sustainability.

Sounds wildly futuristic, right? Maybe not so. While the team has yet to release many of the technical details associated with their concept, they’ve designed a full digital model and will be delivering said details in the form of a fully-functional prototype at the Decathlon this June in Versailles.

In my opinion, the concept of the design itself is not the difficult part to swallow – it’s the thought of local municipalities directly governing (or perhaps rationing) consumer utilities and energy consumption. Without having access to all the details, it is difficult to say whether units would be centrally conditioned (i.e. with no submetering), or if units would have control. IMHO, a key aspect of indoor environmental quality is the ability to have full control. But again, these are the specifics that the team either has yet to iron out or yet to release. I’ll certainly be looking forward to the details this summer.

The European Solar Decathlon is in its fourth year, and was the brainchild of American and Spanish governments in 2007. This year’s competition emphasizes six specific points, including density, mobility, innovation, affordability, local context, and energy consumption. There are a number of construction rules, as well, including a maximum footprint of 150 square meters, 10 kilowatt photovoltaic installation, and other requisites pertaining to internal temperature, light quality, air quality and more.

Among the twenty teams in this year’s competition, only one includes participants from the US (comprised of Rhode Island School of Design and Brown University students with the University of Applied Sciences at Erfurt out of German). Yet while low participation from the States is slightly disconcerting, the fact that this year has the highest number of teams is certainly an across-the-board win for the green building industry.