Project:SmartDwelling

A true SmartDwelling is a completely different thing from a Smart House. The Smart House makes the shell of the house smart so the humans dwelling inside can be stupid if they like. A SmartDwelling, on the other hand, makes the acts of dwelling smarter, which engages the humans in those acts. A SmartDwelling requires those dwelling inside the shell to do things like closing heavy curtains on a cold night, throwing open the windows on a spring morning, or closing the shutters in advance of a storm. A SmartDwelling therefore makes those dwelling there smarter.

The Urban Guild met in January 2009 at the DPZ Guest House for its first Summit, focusing on our response to the October 2008 Meltdown and the ensuing Great Recession. In one day of intense deliberation we fleshed out the principles of Project:SmartDwelling.

Consistent with the generosity that has been a high ideal of the New Urbanism since the beginning, Lizz Plater-Zyberk of DPZCoDESIGN called soon after the Summit and said "the Wall Street Journal wants me to design a house for an article they're doing on the Green House of the Future. But because you'll soon complete the Original Green book, it would be more appropriate if you did the design." Naturally, the Green House of the Future design became SmartDwelling I.

Wanda and I designed SmartDwelling II for a competition we had no intention of winning; our design was a critique of the Gizmo Green-heavy program which Project:SmartDwelling's principles made clear were missing the big picture of true sustainability. But in the depths of the Great Recession, SmartDwellings were great ideas, but weren't getting built. That all changed in 2011 when a wonderful couple from The Bahamas who had been following the Original Green for years came to us to build the first SmartDwelling, to the delight of everyone involved. It won an Urban Guild Award after completion, confirming that the built work was as compelling as the idea.

For a few years, it seemed that all was lost, both from the Guild's Katrina Cottage work and also Project:SmartDwelling, but this post traces a story transforming loss to hope, resulting in hundreds SmartDwellings rising on distant shores. Today, there are SmartDwellings designed and built by Guild members in many locales.