Reaction Housing Stacks Up Against Trailers
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto 
on 12. 9.08
In the prefab biz there is always the tradeoff between modular, where one has to ship a lot of air at great cost but it is delivered almost complete, and flatpack, where shipping is much cheaper because one can pack more units in a smaller space, but need a lot more assembly time and energy. That is why FEMA bought trailers; they may each have to be towed into place but they are complete inside.
The Reaction Housing System adds a new idea to the mix: they developed a tapered design that stacks up like a pile of coffee cups or take-out containers, delivering a finished building envelope without shipping a lot of air. Take what would be the coffee cup lid and put it on the ground as the floor, and you have an instant housing unit. Brilliant.
The basic unit, the Exo:
provides private living and sleeping quarters for a family of four within a climate-controlled environment. An Exo is durable enough to be stored on a long-term basis and flat packs for efficient storage and transportation. Electrical power is delivered via a special connector line that powers each unit's lighting and four wall outlets
The exo shells can be linked together with connector modules to make a virtually complete house.
However if I was Marianne Cusato of Katrina Cottage fame or even Michael "Heck of a job, Brownie" Brown of FEMA, I would take serious umbrage with the above comparison:
-to be comparable with either, the Exo would need three modules instead of one, making it $15,000 instead of $5,000;
-a Katrina cottage is not designed as temporary emergency housing, but as complete permanent housing, and is not comparable;
-just because the FEMA trailers were $65,000 and single use does not mean that all trailers are. Properly designed without toxic materials, and not ordered in a panic by incompetents, trailers cost a lot less and are as reusable as the EXO would be.
Such comparisons of apples and oranges do not serve them well, and taint what is a really interesting idea. More at Reaction Housing
The Hexayurt: Efficient Emergency Shelter
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I don’t want to be a troll here (or back at Inhabitat) , but this stinks of Accordion reCover:
http://www.inhabitat.com/2008/09/03/matthew-malone-recovery-shelter/
1. $5000 and reusable? Impossible.
2. Props for building a full-size prototype, but the lack of technical specifications is worrying. How long is this supposed to last? What is it specifically made of? How does it fit into a shipping container? Can it only be loaded/unloaded from a truck one-at-a-time? Where does this “special umbilical line” come from? How long is this supposed to last?
3. 1000 lbs of water in the floor isn’t helpful unless your slick click-in shell attachment points can handle 1000 lbs of force - extremely unlikely. The weakest link in the chain, etc.
4. Ventilation? Any at all?
5. The idea of lockable emergency shelters is poorly considered and a security nightmare.
Stuff like this is well and good for a student portfolio, but don’t try to pass it off as a real product. Besting FEMA a good emergency shelter does not make…
Maybe the designer could speak up in the comments? A perhaps a little earlier in the game and without the personal insults like the reCover guy?
Hi christolles.
I designed the Reaction Housing System and I tried posting a response back over on Inhabitant but the post would never go through. So here it is.
1. Mass production, fabrication methods, design, and materials will keep the cost below $5000 a unit. So far on paper, it should be possible to produce them well under $5000 a unit actually. Each Exo is actually very simple when compared to a travel trailer like the ones used by FEMA. The FEMA trailers actually retail for only $14,000 to $30,000 anyway so once simplified and mass produced the price point is not an issue.
A $100 laptop was also impossible a few years ago. Now we have the OLPC.
2. The lack of technical specifications is due to the advice of my patent attorneys. The entire system is currently patent pending with many more patents possible given the funds to pursue them. I can say that the shells and portions of the floor use a plastic composite and an aluminum super structure that is fully recyclable. The final production design is actually a very green product. The designs shown here are cleaned up views of the current prototype and not the final units. The production model is actually being rendered and RFP's being written now.
The Exos do not fit into a shipping container. They flat pack into stacks which are secured and transported as is. Flat packed bundles of Exos actually end up being the rough size of a standard shipping container. This allows them to be transported via truck along any federal interstate highway without a wide load designation. The packed size also allows them to fit on freight rail, cargo ships and aircraft. The most effective way to transport things is without packaging.
The umbilicals are used in mass deployments such as soft and hard deployments. They daisy chain a series of Exos together to provide A/C and power. They connect to each Exo back to central collections of power generators (or existing power at a facility) and portable A/C units. The portable power and climate control units are provided by companies like Aggreko if you are interested. This design eliminates the need for mechanical systems that require maintenance in each unit. This reduces production costs to your first point and allows for extremely long shelf lives.
3. The shell anchors work just fine and can hold actually much more stress than a dead load of 1000 lbs. The weight ballast actually wasn't the issue. Wind load of the shell is the bigger problem – which teh ancors are rated to handle just fine up to hurricane force wind speeds.
4. There is ventilation built into each unit to create cross breezes with in the interior of each unit.
5. The idea of a lockable emergency shelter is to protect what personal belongings that you were able to carry with you. In true mass displacements of populations after a major event, all levels society will be forced together and the ugly truth of human nature will be theft as seen in the looting after Katrina. Lockable units provide no more a security risk than blocks of hotel rooms or trailer trailers that FEMA provides today.
This system goes far beyond a student portfolio piece. Only the tip of the ice berg is covered in this article and the current stop gap of a web site so to speak. Hopefully, I will be able to build out the rest of the site to provide more details soon. I have been busy with RFP's for the next round of prototypes that will actually use the final production design, materials, and manufacturing.
As far as the comparison commentary above go, Lloyd you are right. It is a hard thing to compare. There simply is no other viable systems out there to compare it to.
In a mass deployment only 1 Exo unit would be needed not 3. Exo mass deployments are comparable only to cots in sports arenas, hotel rooms, and the leased cruise ships that FEMA uses. These are difficult to find figures on expenditure on by FEMA.
Individual deployments at someone's home are directly comparable to the FEMA trailers though. In this type of deployment any number of Exo units can be used depending on how the big the family is to be housed. Even if you deployed 3 Exo units, the total is only $15,000. The larger FEMA trailers retail for $20,000 to $35,000 even though the government paid $65,000 for the trailers.
FEMA trailers were not reused after Katrina because the cost to refurbish and store them made it cost prohibitive. They decided to auction them instead. That was before the toxic nature of their construction arose resulting in FEMA not using travel trailers now. With Hurricane Ike this year in Texas, FEMA has resorted to using only hotels and leased cruise ships to house those displaced by the storm.
The Katrina Cottages are brilliant and serve for long term housing and not short term housing. The Reaction Housing System could actually dovetail nicely with the Katrina Cottages for a complete response and recovery system to disaster events. Again, these were used for comparison because it was the closest thing to Reaction that has some public awareness.
Where's the kitchen? I still prefer a trailer at best. My brother-in-law lives in one. It is permanent. He can't take it anywhere. However it is a double-wide, with two bedrooms a kitchen, living room, adining room, and a small bathroom. We stayed there one winter night, when it was cold and rainy out. We awoke to wild turkeys eating just outside the living room windows. FANTASTIC!!
He's not saying they should replace anyone's permanent housing, just that in DISASTER situations there is a better solution than a FEMA trailer (which have made people ill for one thing). It's about shelter, not the view from living room windows. Just my opinion: But I don't think it's an argument against trailers in general, but an option for FEMA to provide a solution that can help more people, more quickly in serious situations. The question is: Would you prefer to be in the Superdome, or one of these?
Ive noticed on Treehugger that any new 'green' housing article is nearly always a detached house of some sort usually visulaized as having been dropped into some pristine wilderness. Is this not lunacy!. Its pointless having high insulation, PV panels or any other maguffin on your house if it still encroaches yet further onto new land. This seems a blind spot particularly for the US who seem to think they have so much wilderness its okay to consider ony detached houses but isnt this is a recipe for eve more suburban sprawl?
LA: Yes. We also try to show multifamily projects as well, but much of the most interesting stuff is being done by individuals in single family units (where people have control rather than waiting for landlords)