Outside the Studio: what about affordability?

As we struggle with affordability in housing construction, the Poche_Truss brings a modestly priced framing option to the table that significantly reduces material cost and installation time plus it sets up a super preforming building envelope. The challenge, however, to retain affordability throughout the entire construction, lands on minimizing complexity and, quite frankly, plucking housing out of the custom build business model that is emulating commercial GC construction instead of master builder construction. Master builder, that is how houses used to be built.

Here is how we are minimizing complexity: we are pulling the Poche_Truss projects increasingly into manufactured components (of which the Poche_Truss is one) and using flat-pack (such as IKEA kitchens) and off-the-shelf build out options (such as lumber yard interior panels). We are not, however, reducing complexity by creating generic boxes. That is the beauty of the Poche_Truss, we can custom shape space and form at no upcharge.

Plucking housing out of the current residential GC business model, turns out, comes right along with those same minimizing strategies, for you see, they all align with a more direct connection to the provider. Eliminating the middle man markup is like farm to table food. There are not many of us architects and industry professionals still practicing who worked in the master builder world. We want to align providers directly to the work.

As I have shared in previous posts, thinking beyond a GC model of building has been a learning curve. But not one I will leave as I find it. For you see, my work has always answered to the highest calling of my profession: create beauty. And beauty is inherently equalizing, because when you have the craft persons doing what they specialize in, everyone is a master. We are working hard to learn our lessons on this first build with the Poche_Truss framing system and to assemble our team of masters. With a goal of putting modest affordable houses smack into the crosshairs of a Heck Yea! project, we are preparing to help people find their joy.

Outside the Studio: the next intelligence

The building shedding water, without any fascia or soffits or added detail. Heck Yea!

On the one hand, one does not go into new building territory alone, it takes the entire construction village. On the other hand, however, the folks working from the outside didn’t have a dream that was burned into the back of their eyes for years. Then there is that surreal moment when that dream begins to take form. I scanned the surroundings in that moment and saw the village, hard at work doing their jobs. We hadn’t really invented anything, these are trusses after all, as old as 2X construction, and yet, the effect of the Poche_Truss system is beginning to trickle.

I met the fire suspension provider on site. And then I met the mechanical contractor. Both nodded thoughtfully as they saw that their job would be easy peezy without having to drill through walls to get their lines in. as everything is open and accessible in a truss. Like cogs catching each other as the wheels begin to turn, I can see the next intelligence of this system coming to bear. This is the part of my Poche_Truss dream that most relieved my impatience with stick framing. For you see, the mundane complex world of squishing and threading the mechanical and electrical systems through holes in the walls and ceilings had always found me biting my lips. It seemed so barbaric to massacre the lumber with holes holes holes to allow these utilities to serve. Even as I showed the Poche_Truss to a Passive Haus designer, he tried to talk me into an interior furred-out layer “to hold the utilities”. What is it about the familiar that makes it impossible to see it?

We might not have invented anything totally new, but we have vastly expanded the scope of a truss’s functionality. And although our Poche_Truss introduction video explains the conceptual intelligences; this build is revealing the experiential intelligences. The ones that those physically engaging the structure are finding joy in.  I think that is intelligence worthy of not only a patent, but of our attention.