Efficiency

This house strives to work efficiently, from its consumption of resources to its use of space. It conserves resources through construction methods that use less material (such as the wall panels, which need just 3" to provide the strength and insulation of a 15" thick wall on a typical Miami house) and techniques that minimize the energy needed to operate the house (like providing lots of natural light to over 90% of the house, and shading the windows to avoid excessive heat gain). Between conserving and generating electricity, the house should only use a quarter of the energy of a new house built to code. Prefabricating most of the shell of the house will help us produce just a fraction of the on-site waste that conventional construction creates, and using recycled materials will reduce the amount of new resources consumed in the building process.

Efficiency isn't just about technology, however. The plan of the house minimizes the space lost to circulation - there's just two short corridors and a kind of vestibule in front of the kids' rooms. The corridors serve double duty as access to storage, and the vestibule functions as a laundry room. The living areas all open onto outdoor spaces that effectively double the amount of living space in the house.