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The $1,000 House

  • September 15th 2011

by Mark Wellborn

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The $1,000 House: Figure 1
Pinwheel House. MITnews.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) recently reported that the first prototype from its initiative to build houses for just $1,000 has been constructed in China.

MITnews reports that the prototype, called Pinwheel House, actually cost about $5,900 to build (instead of $1,000), but it measures out at 800 square feet (rather than the originally intended 500), and it has “hollow brick walls with steel bars for reinforcement and wooden box beams” to withstand earthquakes up to 8.0 in magnitude. Conceived by MIT graduate Ying chee Chui, the prototype is part of MIT’s 1K House project, a program aimed at building homes for the poor for around $1,000.

More about the Pinwheel House from MITnews:

It has a modular layout, with rectangular room units surrounding a central courtyard space. “The module can be duplicated and rotated, and then it becomes a house,” Chui says. “The construction is easy enough, because if you know how to build a single module, you can build the whole house.”

See other articles related to: 1,000 house, mit

This article originally published at http://dc.urbanturf.production.logicbrush.com/articles/blog/the_1000_house/4161.

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