Advanced Modular Multi-Family

Housing Design Studio

This integrated design project addresses the enormous challenge of rapidly rebuilding communities that have been badly damaged and perhaps even destroyed by major storms. This problem will likely become even more challenging due to the increasingly powerful and more frequent hurricanes that are forecast to strike the U.S., and particularly coastal regions. The results of these events have been and will continue to be severely impact communities whose housing stock is essentially destroyed, leaving their population without adequate shelter, often for long periods of time. To address the problem of rapidly delivering large quantities of post-disaster housing, in this project, we have focused on “advanced design” of modular housing. In collaboration with manufacturing industry, we will develop the Advanced Modular Multifamily Housing Design (AMMHD) incorporating cutting edge design and construction technologies. The scope of project will be small multi-

family post-disaster housing with a focus on conditions in the Southeastern U.S. in general and the City of Port Saint Joe, FL in particular. The AMHD project will address the design of housing that can ultimately be rapidly built in factories, that can cope with future major events, and that can become a community asset. The environmental factors that we will consider in guiding the identification of technologies required for the AMHD include hurricane force winds, flooding, and storm surges. The attributes required for AMHD post-disaster housing include high levels of energy efficiency, energy self-sufficiency, appropriate structural strength, and construction flexibility (e.g. de-constructability and reassembly). In summary, the design project focuses on resilient, sustainable, and affordable post-disaster housing equipped with advanced technologies and process improvements. 

The design and development of affordable, highly energy efficient, and disaster-resilient manufactured homes for the City of Port St. Joe is significant since the city is prone to severe hazardous events, and there is an existing shortage of affordable construction labor and high cost of land. 

Design and construction analysis of six manufactured home complexes located in two different site in Port St. Joe.

Engaging the community for which the project is designed and developed from early stages of the project is essential. Engaging both architecture and construction management students in the design and development of the project from the first day of the project has been greatly beneficial. 

Senior students from the School of Architecture and graduate students’ from Rinker School of Construction Management’s designs focused on resilient, sustainable, and affordable post disaster housing equipped with advanced technologies and process improvements.

TEAM

Ryan Sharston, Assistant Professor, School of Architecture, Rinker School of Construction Management, Florida Institute for the Built Environment Resilience, r.sharston@ufl.edu

Collaborating Students: Julia Comeau, Kaitlyn Lintz, Kevin Mojica, Aida Muhibic, Patrick Palmer, Tessa Register, John Alligood, Ashish Asutosh, Tej Sanjaykumar Desai, Makayla Myers, Daniel Oak, Ruiying Wang.

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