RDI’s Tiny House Village Design Charrette

On June 25th, 2018 at the TDS Center at Keene State College over 25 individuals across a variety of disciplines gathered to ask the question: If a resilient tiny house village were to possess qualities of being passively survivable through major power outages and suited to a cold climate, what would be the best design for the sleeping pods and central building?

Overall, the experience was very enriching and we came away with a number of insights and deeper understandings. View the video below for a summary:

In summary, the top three challenges that emerged were:

The lack of a specific site or population, and that hindering more specific design.
Questions left unanswered specific to septic, plumbing, and zoning, also related to not having a specific site.
The inability to prevent massive air exchange in the sleeping pod each time it is entered or exited.

To this last point, it was determined that it would be practically impossible to make the sleeping pods passively survivable during cold periods without power. Instead, the central facility was identified as the location that could provide passive survivability. This changes the parameters of the design challenge, and heightens the importance of the central building’s design, where previously we’ve been primarily focused on the sleeping pods.

In conclusion, we intend to return to this design challenge by holding another charrette in spring of 2019, once we are able to identify a specific site (or two) and population, and better understand of how we would navigate the unique challenges involved. Keene State College’s architecture program is eager to help us in this effort, through the leadership of Professor Donna Paley. We’re grateful for the partnership and for the potential of this project’s next steps.

David W. Orr, Ph.D

David W. Orr is Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies & Politics, Emeritus. He also served as “Counselor to the President” of Oberlin College for ten years. He is the author of eight books, including Dangerous Years: Climate Change and the Long Emergency (Yale, 2016) and Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse (Oxford, 2009) and co-editor of three others. He has authored over 220 articles, reviews, book chapters, and professional publications. In the past twenty-five years he has served as a board member or adviser to ten foundations and on the Boards of many organizations including the Rocky Mountain Institute, Bioneers, and the Aldo Leopold Foundation.

He is currently a Trustee of the Alliance for Sustainable Colorado, Children and Nature Network, and the WorldWatch Institute. He has been awarded nine honorary degrees and a dozen other awards including a Lyndhurst Prize, a National Achievement Award from the National Wildlife Federation, leadership awards from the U.S. Green Building Council (2014) and from Second Nature (2012), and a lifetime achievement award from Green Energy Ohio and the North American Association for Environmental Education. He has lectured at hundreds of colleges and universities throughout the U.S., Europe, Latin America, and Asia. He headed the effort to design, fund, and build the Adam Joseph Lewis Center, which was named by an AIA panel in 2010 as “the most important green building of the past thirty years,” as “one of thirty milestone buildings of the twentieth century” by the U.S. Department of Energy, and as one of “52 game-changing buildings of the past 170 years” by the editors of Building Design +Construction in January, 2016. He was instrumental in the design and funding of the Peter B. Lewis Gateway Center. He is the founder of the Oberlin Project and a founder of the journal Solutions. His current work is on the state of American democracy.