Modular Building: Three Scales/Three Strategies

Modular building is a productive vehicle for achieving high-performance residential designs. The following chapter discusses a range of design and construction practices associated with modular building whose performance parameters refer to energy use, constructability and, more generally, measures of sustainability. In the detailed description of three projects, this chapter identifies advanced strategies for the modular building of homes and/or their parts. The first confines the limits of the module to the production of an easily configurable ‘utility core’, the second focuses on opportunistic alterations to the module’s envelope made possible by the ‘inside-out’ construction sequence used in modular housing manufacturing, and the third engages the energy-saving potential of modular construction at the scale of the building and community.