SAN DIEGO — A tiny house could offer a big solution to climate change and housing shortages.
Professor Daniel López-Pérez is the architecture program director at the University of San Diego. He designed a fire-resistant home he calls the Polyhaus, a 540 square foot home which consists of just sixty-four panels.
Instead of traditional lumber, Daniel says the Polyhaus was built using mass-timber products, which offer half the rigidity of reinforced concrete, while weighing a fraction (20%), and has a burn rate of hours (1.5 inches per hour of char-rate).
“Fire cannot enter. It has a harder time entering,” López-Pérez said. “So it’s char rate, given its massiveness of weight and the fact that it has no air cavities.”
He said all the Douglas Fir came from Washington as part of a collaboration with a reforestation project, creating a plug-and-play housing model that slashes construction costs and helps keep forests healthy. Traditional home construction requires thousands of two-by-fours and extensive manual framing.
The Polyhaus system simplifies this process significantly.
Joaquin Ramirez has been working to reduce the impact of wildfires and extreme weather through his company Technosylva. He also works with the International Association of Wildland Fire analyzing wildfire risk and working with agencies like CAL Fire to make operations safer.
“I feel like it’s a genius design,” Ramirez said. “You have a structure there are no holes, which that is really critical.”
He said right now there is a great need for innovation in making communities safer in the face of climate change, and this design is an example of an accessible solution.
“I think it’s important that our citizens understand that everybody needs to be a part of the solution. This is not a firefighter job only,” Ramirez said. “It has to start by the house, then our community, then the surrounding communities.”
López-Pérez built the first model of the Polyhaus in his own backyard, a reminder of the work to be done to build climate-resilient communities.
“The recent fires have reminded us that we have to have that consciousness, we have to have a direct link between our housing production and the health of our forests, the health of our environment,” he said.
López-Pérez said these homes are comparable to current construction costs.
The polyhedron designs range in sizes from 540 to 2,500 square feet and can be built in a matter of days. Prices start in the mid-$200,000s.
