​The EcoFab concept began in 2010 with a question: How can we actually impact the built environment and our nation's growing energy use?​

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Throughout years of school, we are taught about amazing architects, but most of these figureheads will build fifty to one hundred buildings over the course of their career. Frank Lloyd Wright, one of the most prolific architects in the modern era built a whopping 532 works over his 70 year career. Although sustainable, passive design was not at the forefront of design during the FLW era, even if all 532 buildings had been designed and built in a passive manner, the energy savings still would have been minimal when compared to the millions of buildings that exist in our country today.

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This was the beginning of the EcoFab concept. How and where can we impact the most people's lives and energy consumption? The answer was clear: the manufactured home market that caters to nearly 20 million Americans. Just one percent of this market equates to just under 100,000 homes. This was our starting point - and the basis of our prototype - but the EcoFab concept has blossomed into a concept that can be applied to nearly any building type, be it a single family home, office space, apartment buildings and many others.  

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In an effort to reduce energy and material consumption, an affordable, easily transportable and customizable pre-fabricated kit home that is climatically adaptive and responsive to various regions of the United States could provide basic human comfort while also operating in closer symbiosis with the natural environment. Through passive heating, cooling, and lighting design strategies, along with grey water recycling, water catchment systems, and modern solar technology, inhabitants of such a home could live off the grid or even contribute to it. This project explores the modification of a basic climatically responsive “kit” by testing the design idea in five basic climate zones: moderate, hot/dry, cold/semi-arid, cold/humid, and hot/humid.

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​The final design for Eco-Fab revolved around a nexus of materiality, performance analysis, an efficient use of materials, and a compact, logical
floorplan. Through the Solar Shoe Box climate and comfort analysis program developed by Troy Peters, we isolated five variable factors that
change based on location and that we found to be cost-effective for large scale production. They are the size of the thermal mass, thickness of the thermal mass, percentage of southern glazing, how deep the southern overhang is, and envelope insulation values.

Materiality, the southern overhang, and the percentage of southern glazing have the greatest aesthetic impacts on Eco-Fab and we designed five iterations based on the five different climate types analyzed and regional vernacular.  Eco-Fab is designed as a modern, sexy, open home that allows the occupant to bring in the outdoors and open the home to nature if desired, while leaving a minimal footprint on the earth through the use of pinned piers, an efficient passive design, and sustainable material choices.