PATH Unveils Its Concept Home to Embrace Evolutionary Technology.

Homeowners have become used to the tyranny of the home technology treadmill: update or stagnate. And as many homeowners and most homebuilders know, updating can come with a considerable cost to a home’s walls and other structural elements. But imagine a home built to adapt to new technologies, whatever they might be.

Attempting to do just that, the Partnership for Advancing Technology in Housing (PATH) unveiled its first model of such a home at Union Station in Washington, D.C. on June 23. The model demonstrates advanced construction principles that promise to make it easier to incorporate new technologies after a home is complete.

"To date, the focus has been on developing specific technologies that improve housing quality," says Carlos Martín of the PATH program, administered by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. "The Concept Home addresses how the home’s design itself can work with the wave of new technologies that is already upon us."

The Concept Home, to be displayed at several venues throughout the year, including the International Builders’ Show in Orlando, Florida, in January 2005, is a collection of many of the top ideas of leaders in the homebuilding industry. PATH’s Technology Roadmap: Whole House and Building Process Redesign, and Technology Scanning report (which can be viewed at www.pathnet.org) provided the foundation for many of the ideas in the home.

And while these ideas are innovative, they aren’t radical. The PATH principles can be adopted into current building practices for public or private housing at any level of density, from multifamily housing to rowhouses to single-family homes.

The Flexible House

Your needs will change over the course of your life; why shouldn’t your home? The PATH Concept Home includes a flexible shell that can accommodate changes in lifestyle and technology.

The utilities in most homes—electrical, plumbing, HVAC and communication—are tangled together and buried behind finished interior walls, often making home upgrades difficult and costly. For many, the result is leaving them trapped in their homes "as is."

"Home technology doesn’t evolve very quickly," notes Chris French, an architect with Torti Gallas and Partners (Silver Spring, Md.), which designed the Concept Home model. "The way we build houses today isn’t that different than the way they were built at the beginning of the last century. Homes today are unable to adapt to future needs."

PATH proposes a different approach: Separate the three major home systems—the structure, the utilities and the floor plan. Untangling the utilities affords tremendous flexibility, opening up many new possibilities not only for the floor plan, but for bringing in new technologies as well.

If the utilities are located in chases, raceways, and between ceilings and floors, non-load-bearing interior walls can be moved far more easily. A designated wall could contain an access panel so utilities are easily reached. You won’t have to knock out walls to access the pipes or the duct system. Data cables and wiring become far less expensive to install. Suddenly, remodeling enters a whole new realm.

Let’s say you want to add electronically tintable electrochromic windows, just emerging on the market today. These energy-saving windows can be darkened or lightened through automated controls. To add such windows to most existing homes, each window would need to be wired separately. Mike Myser of Faribault, Minn.-based SAGE Electrochromics notes, "Allowing somebody to come in and install the windows after the house has already been built and have easy access to wiring through a central raceway would be an ideal way to ease the installation and lower the cost."

If the floor plan is flexible, homeowners can also create new spaces as need arises. Moving the wall to create a nursery for the new baby or a first-floor master bedroom for an older couple is no longer a remodeling job of huge proportions. By untangling utilities, the home can adapt to the inevitable changes in the lives of all homeowners—especially as we try to keep up with advances in technology.

The Multi-Tasking House

Time is tight, so we are increasingly a nation of multi-taskers. The home of the future follows our lead. Imagine roof shingles that collect solar energy (photovoltaic roofing), wallpaper that doubles as a conduit for electricity (electrotextiles), or siding that acts as insulation (insulative vinyl siding).

PATH is trying to challenge housing industry manufacturers to translate the vision of the multi-tasking house into reality, where building components incorporate new technologies to do more than one job. If home components can multi-task, houses need fewer of them. Through multi-tasking, efficiency increases, while installation time and costs decline. A few such multi-tasking products (like insulative vinyl siding) are on the market, ready to go.

Getting There

So, let’s say you untangle those utilities, put them in a chase, and three years later, decide to add new data cables without ripping through five walls. How is it done?

PATH admits it doesn’t have all the answers—yet. "We have a compelling outline. Now we need the industry to begin filling in the details," says Martín.

To generate the discussions that will get homebuilders there, PATH plans to develop additional models of the Concept Home that reflect other construction innovations and advanced technologies. Organizations interested in contributing their ideas are encouraged to contact PATH at info@pathnet.org.

"This is the challenge that PATH poses to our industry: to help shape the future of home design and construction, to finally bring our homes into the age of evolutionary technology," says French.

Susan Conbere is a writer/editor at D&R International in Silver Spring, Md. Contact her at sconbere@drintl.com.