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A sleek, eye-catching housing design that joins the affordability and mass customization
possibilities of precast concrete. With a low-maintenance home appealing to all ages
and needs. This is ENJOY: A Generation House. The house is designed for a fictitious elderly
couple who’s interested in retiring to the Jersey Shore and what’s interesting about
our client is that, one of them is wheelchair-bound. So the entire house is designed using Universal
Design principles, and what that means is that, anybody who is interested, any age range,
could move into this house and use the house barrier-free. The layout is in accordance
with the ADA (American with Disabilities Act). So we have one level that is centralized around
our central core, and we have ramps on either entrance. There are no stairs. We have floating
fixtures in the house, made of concrete - heavy material. And what they do is they actually
mount into metal rackets in the wall, giving the appearance of floating off the ground.
Something that we thought was important not only conceptually but also it allows us to
have accessibility access for ADA standards. Everything in the home has a dual purpose.
So a hallway is not just a hallway. A closet is not just a closet. For example, our main
closet space is storage, laundry, and an office space. Another example of that is our living,
dining, and kitchen. Since it’s a small home, you have everything centralized right
in one core. The landscape of the house was designed primarily to promote outdoor physical
activity. So, on the north side, there’s a large public space which is where you go
outside to have dinner or lunch. The eastern side is a kind of more privatized, closer
to the bedroom, where you’d go out or try and enjoy a cup of coffee while the sun rises
in the morning. We designed the ENJOY house with the idea that it would be both mass producible
and mass customizable. We could roll these things out on assembly lines and that would
dramatically drive down the cost of any ENJOY house. As a property of concrete, the house
is fire-resistant, it’s earthquake-resistant, it’s waterproof – so the leaky ceilings
in the roof is less of a worry than a typical A-frame house. Just during construction we
used little to no VOCs. Concrete is mildew and mold, and even pest-resistant. And just
upkeep and typical cleaning – it’s much easier to clean than a sheet rock. We really
wanted to show the versatility of concrete. Not only can it be structure-able, not only
can it be a piece of our house such as our closet, it also can be colored different colors
– our floors are darker, slate gray and our walls are trying to be lighter and white,
trying to lighten up the space. We really wanted to take what concrete is doing for
us efficiently in the energy aspect and also showcase it in the idea of how it can be a
finish in architectural design, in interior design, in industrial design. Most of the
house’s eye-catching aesthetic comes from the design of the roof, which is designed
entirely to optimize our solar and rainwater collection. The house will stand out on a
block. It doesn’t look like your typical wood-frame house in any neighborhood in America.
But what it stands for is a good thing that we all want to see in the future of housing.