Featured
The graduate students in Ivan Rupnik’s mass modular building studio spend a year learning techniques to plan and construct prefabricated homes, presenting their ideas to companies and policymakers along the way.
The first thing students learn in ARCH 7130: Mass Modular Studio is how to speak up. It’s the only way to be heard over the din of Northeastern University’s architecture studio, a long, open space with dozens of small group sessions meeting concurrently at large wooden tables and groups of chairs hunched around video monitors. The space is also attached to the Ruggles MBTA stop on the Boston campus; trains rumble periodically overhead.
It’s a coincidental lesson, but important: In addition to learning techniques for how to plan and build modular homes — dwellings built in sections in a factory then assembled onsite — the students in associate professor Ivan Rupnik’s graduate level architecture capstone get real-world experience explaining and pitching their ideas to companies and government officials.
At this session, students Michael Rahtz and Tyler McEvoy give a short presentation on Resolution: 4 Architecture, a firm that works with factories across the U.S. to design modular residential houses. Paige Roosa, who directs the Housing Innovation Lab in Boston Mayor Michelle Wu’s office, is visiting the class. Rahtz and McEvoy’s task is to explain how Res4’s business model might fit into some of the concepts the Innovation Lab — dedicated to solutions to increase affordable housing in Boston — is exploring.
“Until now, Res4 has done [mostly] single-family houses in non-urban areas,” Rahtz explains. “We’re trying to figure out how that can be translated into a more urban context.”
They show some examples of Res4 projects: rectangular, window-filled, modern single-family homes on a lot of land, and one slim two-bedroom in New York City’s Bronx neighborhood. “You can see the site is very narrow and how the boxes are fit into place,” McEvoy says.
There are some advantages to what Res4 does, the students explain: As a design-build company, it can tweak its process to the specific needs of a given piece of land. But Roosa points out some logistical pitfalls. Res4 is not a land developer, so it couldn’t work directly with the city; developers who work directly with communities tend to put forth more conservative designs than Res4’s boxy metal and wood aesthetic.
The goal of the conversations with Roosa was “to translate their disciplinary knowledge to someone from a policy background,” Rupnik says in an interview. “Someone who doesn’t know some of the technical issues, but who’s very interested in housing supply and inequity and sustainability.”
These conversations aren’t theoretical; the class is working with Res4 directly. The firm’s venture into bringing its modular construction designs into dense urban cities is new, and ARCH 7130 will hash out ways to help it and other firms fit their concepts to those environments over the course of the year.
An architect by training, Rupnik has been teaching on modular housing techniques since he first came to Northeastern in 2009. Modular building is much more widespread overseas, and for years his courses focused on international case studies out of necessity. Building projects almost always go one structure at a time in the United States, thanks to zoning codes and the wide diversity of regulations among local and state governments.
But due to factors including a worsening housing crunch in certain regions and increased focus on sustainability, modular building has gained significant domestic traction in recent years. Rupnik and other proponents champion its efficiency, speed and environmental upside — assembly line building means less wasted material and lower usage of carbon-intensive materials like concrete and steel.
Currently, ambitious modular developments are underway all over the West Coast, in Philadelphia and in Minneapolis. It’s still rare; modular construction makes up less than 6% of projects in the U.S. and Canada, according to industry statistics. But the fall 2024 semester marks the first time that Rupnik and his students have had entirely U.S.-based case studies to draw from.
“Ten years ago I couldn’t get experts in Boston to talk about this topic,” he says. “They’re very interested in it now.”
The building method necessitates a completely different way of teaching, too. Historically, architecture curricula in universities have been based around the one-off business model intrinsic to construction in the U.S. But modular housing requires what Rupnik calls a “platform approach,” where designs take reproducibility into account.
“You’re not designing for a single issue, but potentially multipIe issues that you are then able to customize,” Rupnik says. “So we spend a lot of time in my section just teaching them a different way to design.”
Sign up for NGN’s daily newsletter for news, discovery and analysis from around the world.
From the Boston campus, Rupnik’s students have an ideal training ground to think about how modular housing might work for a big, expensive city. According to Rupnik, 99% of Massachusetts residents are burdened by housing costs; the median price of a single-family home in the state is $610,000. The syllabus includes a visit to Reframe Systems, a modular housing factory in Andover, as well as close study of ubiquitous New England house models like the multifamily triple-decker.
Triple-deckers themselves represent a past solution to a housing crunch. Tens of thousands were built in haste around Boston in the late 19th century in response to industrialization and an urban population boom. Along with Roosa and her team at the Housing Innovation Lab, Rupnik’s class will think about how that iconic design might be adapted to a modern, modular framework.
“If you look at a triple-decker in Back Bay or Somerville, there’s a degree of standardization there,” Ruponik says. “They were designed using this mentality.”
At the end of this semester, the students will present again to Roosa and a representative from each company they’ve been assigned — a list that includes Res4, Reframe Systems, Seattle-based modular developer Green Canopy NODE and Connect Homes in Los Angeles. Rupnik hopes that experience balancing different perspectives and priorities will be invaluable, whether their architecture careers involve modular housing or not.
“It’s peer-to-peer discussions,” he says. “The students, someone from the city and someone from this company are all having a back and forth about how you translate this knowledge to where it’s valuable for a lot of different constituencies.”