Project Description
civitas is a case study home on the banks of the Mississippi River, currently under construction. It aims to embrace cultural, climatic, and economic challenges. The home will set a precedent for Southeastern high-performance design. civitas seeks to inform the typology of the southern dogtrot for a 21st century home to once again be a carbon-neutral solution for hot, humid climates. It will be one of the first homes in America to meet AIA2030 Challenge, Zero Energy, Zero Emissions, and LEED Platinum requirements. The southern vernacular of the 19th century was defined by the shelter that engaged the environment through responsible building techniques and passive strategies. These were net-zero, carbon-neutral homes. Much of the south is inhibited by a hot and humid climate and economically depressed conditions. It has diverse demographics. 21st-century southern dwellings are often style based, poorly constructed, reliant on air conditioning, and void of cultural vernacular. Market-driven housing found adjacent to civitas appeals to the public-as-consumer rather than as engaged citizens. civitas seeks to interrupt this tendency and the decades-long trend of architecture growing more disconnected from the construction industry. It will demonstrate that a home can be free of utility bills while having a more significant connection with nature. civitas seeks to deliver an architecture that meets return-on-investment approaches at a reasonable cost—with less waste via pre-fabrication and well-crafted components. Under construction and already educating a curious community, civitas is positioning high-performance design as an answer to solving climate change through scalable economic solutions. civitas alone is unimportant compared to helping advance work in this region. The breadth of research and design collaboration is an unpackaged blueprint for how to passively and actively embrace the environment and economic structures to perform beyond future benchmarks. Inspired by commonsensical strategies of the creation of personal environment documented in the book, Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo. The team prioritized achieving high-performance through layering and composition in a region of the country that is lacking commitment to the necessary research and execution of global based solutions.