Vert House, a low-cost sustainable house design, has been approved and adopted by Houston Habitat for Humanity. Designed by Yonatan Pressman and Courtney Benzon, graduate architecture students at Rice University, the 1,300 square-foot, 3-bedroom house will be constructed by Rice students and alumni in Spring 2012 as the Rice Centennial House, a student initiative in honor of of the university’s centennial celebrations. The design will also be added to Houston Habitat’s portfolio of home designs for additional builds in the future. More information on the project after the break.
Houston Habitat continually revises designs and processes to improve the houses they build and were very open to the new design. Vert House draws on Habitat’s best practices in order to keep the house buildable and the costs low, but proposes a new form to further Habitat’s sustainable goals. The design of the house emerged from Habitat’s use of prefabricated roof trusses to speed and simplify construction. Whereas Habitat’s houses tend toward traditional gable and hip roofs, Vert House turns the trusses upside-down.
