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By Sara Hart

Larson’s contentions are supported by both the housing industry and related federal agencies to varying degrees. The National Association of Home Builders (NAHB), a trade association with 200,000 members representing more than 50,000 companies who build greater than 80 percent of all U.S. homes, and the Partnership for Advancing Technology in Housing (PATH), an agency of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), are involved in their own research.

Living laboratory. This concept rendering shows a possible configuration of the prototype house to be constructed at MIT. The component infrastructure will permit hundreds of sensing components to be installed in nearly every part of the home. These sensors will be used to develop innovative user-interface applications.

Connecting anything, anywhere. A model based on the Chassis and Infill system was developed to test distributed-network concepts. Beams, columns, appliances, and other elements will have embedded computational technology whose function will depend on the function of each element and its relationship to the others. This model was developed by House_n graduate students T.J McLeish, Tyson Lawrence, H. Sharkuma, and Deva Seetharam.

Larson’s main criticism with these tepid improvements is that “all result in environments that are difficult and disruptive to change over time. They do not easily accommodate new and rapidly evolving technologies or customization demanded by the baby boomers. They also do not easily accommodate the many new products being developed by building companies that are trying to make the transition from commodity suppliers to providers of systems and services. Panelized and modular methods of construction are only suited for new construction, and not for the important renovation and interior fit-out market.”

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