“Module Housing with Brian Gaudio”
With Brian Gaudio, https://www.linkedin.com/in/briangaudio/
https://oembed.libsyn.com/embed?item_id=16947014
This week, Tim and Carolina meet with Brian Gaudio, Founder of Module Housing, to talk about his experience in the building industry, along with his perspective on the industry today and advice he would give to people entering the field.
More About the Show
The Build Perspectives podcast shares insider knowledge to build connections and community in the building materials industry. Tim and Carolina are friends, colleagues and former coworkers who love the construction industry and their clients, and want to share their passion and insights to attract future talent to the industry.
In this episode, Brian discusses how he got involved in the building arena and what inspires him to get to be the creator he is today, in addition to opening up about his outlook on how the industry can improve.
Introduction
Brian is the CEO of a company called Module based in Pittsburgh. They think of themselves as human-centered home building; they make the process of buying and building a new home more attainable and more accessible.
They have a series of floor plans that they’ve developed as a builder that are more efficient, both from an energy perspective and from a design perspective. Their ultimate goal is to provide quality design with a more attainable price point. They leverage prefab construction to build all of their homes as they believe prefab is the future and where the industry is headed.
They leverage existing modular manufacturers and panel manufacturers that exist in the United States to build their homes and have become supply chain partners of Module. The last part of their process is they try to make the process for the customer as simple as possible, as engaging as possible and as transparent as possible.
Their website takes customers through the home buying process. They are upfront and transparent about the pricing, and they’ve built a design configurator that clients can use as they’re thinking about the purchase of their home.
Getting Into Design
Brian started developing a love for design in fourth grade. He grew up in Pittsburgh and his family went on vacation nearby in the Laurel Highlands. There were a couple of homes there that are designed by Franklin Wright. His parents dragged him to these houses, but he was upset because he wanted to play mini-golf. As a fourth-grader, he didn’t want to go see these houses.
However, they went to a home called Kentuck Knob that Frank Wright designed. When they walked in and took a tour, Brian was amazed by it. There’s this hexagonal pattern that’s throughout the house and as a kid studying geometry, he thought it was incredible.
At that point, Brian knew he wanted to be an architect, and he did his fourth-grade report on Frank Wright. That’s what really brought him into architecture, initially. He went to school at North Carolina State. They have a program there called Park Scholarship. It was a great scholarship program where Brian didn’t have to go into debt as college students. NC State also has a really great design program. There’s a great modernist kind of movement in North Carolina. Brian attributes this to NC State’s designed programs.
He graduated from NC State, and in architecture school, he knew that he was going to pursue the traditional path to licensure like a lot of his friends were doing. He was fascinated by how people could bring design to those who don’t necessarily have design or don’t have access to an architect.
After graduation, he did a little side trip. He interned at Walt Disney Imagineering in their Blue Sky department, which was fun. It was a very creative group of people working on things like Avatar and The World of Pandora. As someone who was really motivated by bringing good design to more people, he wanted to work in more of the public interest field of architecture.
He spent some time interning at the Gulf Coast Community Design Studio in Biloxi, Mississippi, which was started after Hurricane Katrina. It is a nonprofit architecture firm research center there. After that, Brian actually lived in the Dominican Republic as a Fulbright Scholar. He was doing research on green infrastructure and disaster recovery again, but this time in the Caribbean. It was more of the urban design landscape architecture side of things.
While he was doing this traveling, he and a friend directed a documentary about housing and the housing crisis, particularly in South America, and seeing what architects, designers, governments and builders were doing to solve the housing crisis in their city. They traveled to several cities in South America to see really interesting projects. They traveled to Lima, Santiago, Sao Paulo, Rio and Bogota.
These were all heavy population centers. There was this mass urbanization that was happening, and these informal settlements started to grow. It’s sort of architecture without architects, so a lot of people would be building their homes themselves with materials they could find on the outskirts of the city. One thing they learned was the attitudes about those areas changed over time. In the beginning, the city government put a giant white space and said that those things don’t exist.
Over time, they realized that those are important residents, and they need to find a way to bring infrastructure, transportation and public utilities to those spaces. Once the city started trying to integrate the informal city with the formal city, there were some interesting design implementations that happened in those areas. That’s some of the projects that they were seeing, along with housing.
Learning From Brian’s Travels
The most interesting ideas that Brian saw in South America was with the concept of incremental housing, and the idea that you buy as much space as you need today and as many materials as you can afford today. Mortgages weren’t necessarily a thing for a lot of these households in South America, so they assembled money to build one room and then they added onto that room over time. If they had another kid, they added more space.
If they got a new job, they added more space. They would grow their homes vertically. In some cases, this rebar metal would stick through the concrete block because they planned to add on to the house. That was being done by residents themselves and then by some architects in South America. It made Brian think about why America doesn’t build public housing that way? If people are already doing it, why not enable that process and make it even more safer?
When Brian started Module, the initial concept was a home that grows with you. In certain parts of Latin America, the codes are much less stringent than the United States. America is highly regulated compared to many other countries from a building perspective. They started pursuing some intellectual property around a home that can grow, and they actually patented a roof system that allows you to take the roof off of your house, add another story and put the roof back on. They were designing floor plans to adapt and change over time.
Incremental housing and an ever-growing home is a really fascinating concept. It is a formative cultural identity in the United States where bigger is better. Americans have these things called a mortgage, which allows you to buy a lot more house than you can afford, especially right now. Brian learned that people would call his company not because they wanted an expandable home, but they actually just wanted a beautiful home.
They wanted to move into a walkable neighborhood and didn’t need as much space as they thought they did. A lot of people weren’t thinking necessarily about the expansion part of Module’s homes, but the fact that they felt they were well-designed, had an efficient floor plan and that suited their needs at the time.
Home Placements
Right now, they are building projects in Pittsburgh, primarily. The designs on their website are really tailored for Pittsburgh: skinny infill lots. They have almost 30,000 vacant lots in the city because as a rust belt town, half their population was lost when the steel industry died. Now, they have higher-tech industries coming back in and starting to repopulate those lots.
Module’s units are specifically designed. A lot of their homes are designed for that infill lot. They started to create some other models because they’ve had some customers now coming from other parts of the country, or even just outside of the city and the suburbs, especially with COVID. They have some wider models, but initially, it was looking at the Pittsburgh urban lot. If it was the homeowner that they’d work with would be buying a lot, they’d help advise them on available land in the city. Sometimes, they act as a developer, where they will go and build three homes at once then sell them to customers.
Tim points out that it started out as an elegant design and that elegance was probably an extrapolation of incremental housing. Doing something simple and elegant is really difficult. Once Brian started down that mindset, people probably recognize that with the design and say, “I don’t really need expandable housing, necessarily.”
Module’s “Rebar”
Tim asks Brian’s about his earlier remark about “incremental housing”, that the rebar sticking out of the roofs and walls of the shelters in those communities signified future expansion. So, as a matter of inspiration, application and metaphor, what is Module’s “rebar”?
It started out with this removable roof system and expandable home design – incremental design. They actually patented this roof system that could basically build the roof as a separate piece of the house. The floor plan can be designed such that someone could bring in another box from the factory, take the roof off, bring in another box, put the box on top and put the roof back on.
Today, their core competency is around high performance. They build their homes for the Department of Energy. They have a spec called the Zero Energy Ready Home program, ZERH. Module builds homes to that quality.
For their first home, they got a 42 or 42 HERS rating. On one of their next projects, they got a 51 HERS rating. That means the house was about 50% more efficient from an energy perspective than a normal new construction home, which is a pretty sizable difference.
Brian and his team hear a lot from customers that their brand, their floor plans and even how they represented them on our website are very approachable. It doesn’t feel necessarily represented the way some architects might go about their website, where it feels almost like architects are designing for the other architects in the room.
Module’s audience is the average home buyer. Their website is laid with an understanding of the homeowner journey, making it more understandable and palatable to the average person out there. Their site targets more of the B2C market and presents the audience with what is possible. That’s Module’s rebar.
Dealing With Plumbing and Electrical
Their homes are normally two stories and, in Pittsburgh, you can do three stories or 40 feet tall. The addition process that Module designed, at least for the urban Pittsburgh home, is basically adding another story onto the house. As they thought about utilities from the electrical perspective, it is still tapping into the same electrical connection. But from the plumbing side, they are stacking the bathrooms. Essentially, they are capping the stacks at the top. Then, the bathrooms from the third story would sit directly above the second story and run those directly in.
They haven’t had a customer put an addition on yet. They did test their roof system on the home that Brian is talking from. They actually built two stories, put the roof on and shipped another box from the factory all in the same day. They didn’t have the time or budget to do that outside of the construction process. They did test the kind of viability of taking the roof off, setting it on the box from the factory and lifting both of those together.
Tim brings up that there is a real lack of prototyping. Even if you don’t have the budget to buy land and do a model home and prototype, do a show about how you take the house apart and put back together. You’re still prototyping as opposed to just kind of doing this same old thing.
Latham House
The Latham house was almost like an accessory dwelling unit (ADU). Essentially, it’s a backyard home that’s on the same property as the primary residence. In this case, Pittsburgh has not allowed ADUs. It is an ADU at heart because the couple who was building the house bought the vacant lot that sits directly behind their house on the alley. They were building a home for their parents who were getting older.
The concept of the Latham house was really an age-in-place, in-law suite: one bedroom, one bathroom and all one story. The client wanted to push to passive house standards. So with Module’s typical home, if a code-built home is over here on the left and the Department of Energy home is in the middle, the passive houses push the standards as far as you can really push from an energy efficiency perspective.
That house was built with a panel manufacturer out of New Hampshire called Bensonwood. They build a really high-quality building envelope with a ton of insulation. The goal with the passive house was to have as little penetrations, like nails or screws or openings in the envelope, meaning the walls that are the exterior walls of the house. They really optimized that building envelope and had some very high-quality windows in that house to make sure that heat was not escaping.
That was one of the unique factors of that house was the high-performance side of it, the energy side and then the designing side of it. It was what’s called aging in place — thinking about someone who might be using the house as they’re getting older. It might need to adjust to getting a walker into the shower. There’s no step to go into the shower in the hall, the width of the hallway is wider and even the cabinet poles. They designed thinking in that fact.
Pros and Cons of the Industry
Brian loves a couple things about the process overall. He loves the team that’s been built. They haven’t been traditional builders in that they just started out renovating homes and just slowly built up a business over time. Their goal was to build thousands of homes around the country while being a startup company.
This distributed model of enabling small mom and pop builders to be building our product in other cities is also their ultimate goal. They have a brand of homes and a network of distribution partners and a network of factories that allow the mom and pop builder in all the way in Seattle to be delivering a really high-quality house.
To get started, they raised some money, and they went through a local business accelerator program. They went through another program called Techstars, which trains people on how to start a business. However, their team isn’t the traditional team; Module is filled with people with different backgrounds. Brian’s background is in architecture. Other team members have different backgrounds, ranging from civil engineering to construction management to urban planning and interior design.
Building a really talented team of people that are very dedicated to this mission is probably what Brian loves the most. He also loves engaging with neighborhoods. They get to talk to neighbors and learn about a community’s vision.
What he doesn’t like about the startup industry is that people look at startups as quick hits. People think about the next Amazon or Facebook, and they think people need to be moving really fast. It is not the software industry, it is the building industry. Being a home builder means things can move slower, and the industry is different overall. Just learning some of the information in the startup incubator programs about raising capital and the startup mentality can be off base.
Think in the building industry in general, Brian doesn’t like it that the quality sometimes has decreased over the years when he hoped it would go up. Part of the reason why Brian started this company is because the purpose of building homes should be for people to have a space to live. Culture has institutionalized housing in the sense of it’s made it this investment asset class, and now people build housing to make a profit, and building it for people to live in comes second. Brian thinks those should be flipped around.
Tim mentions that most builders hate neighborhood meetings and don’t want to hear from the neighbors or anything like that, but Brian has flipped that narrative. He builds a community by listening to them and building something that fits and it’s going to last.
Resiliency Regarding People, Planet and Profit
Module believes that good design is good business. From a resiliency perspective, they look at red lists, free materials and try to be conscious about the supply chain, too. They’re working with manufacturers that are within a certain mile radius of the city, in efforts to support a closer supply chain. That’s challenging sometimes. If someone wants a product that is made by European manufacturers that are far more advanced than the United States, they think about it from a total embodied energy perspective.
If they are sourcing things from Europe, they calculate the shipping and embodied carbon that would happen there. It’s really challenging to hit all of those metrics. The cost of sustainable or environmentally friendly materials has come down, but it’s still a premium. That’s still a challenge with the industry. People are putting on vinyl siding because it’s inexpensive and maybe that will change in the United States in the next four years. He hopes the products that are better for the environment lessen in costs and start to compete with other products on the market.
They approach resiliency by material sourcing. Instead of building into the suburbs, they’re focusing on land that’s already been built on. That’s another way to think about resiliency. When Brian hears that term, the other important part of it is economic resilience and resiliency to the crazy pandemic that everyone is in. People are paying attention to housing, having a good space, and people are going to become more housing secure. Module actually created a COVID-19 housing initiative at the beginning of the pandemic because they were trying to figure out how to be a part of the solution.
They created this unit that was designed to be temporary housing for those that have been infected and can’t go back to their home. Then, long-term, it can be converted into affordable housing. They created this prototype, which was on their website. They talked to the local government and local healthcare officials about it, trying to figure out a solution. They found at the very beginning that there was a lot of concern about what housing supply was available. Some of the solutions like bringing in a FEMA trailer are not very resilient solutions.
Important Topics
A topic that Brian thinks goes unnoticed is the roadblocks to creating affordable housing. It’s so challenging and it’s not just a cost, materials and a lumber surcharge conversation: It’s a zoning and regulation in cities conversation. There are also challenges with the financing of homes. Institutionalized racism has occurred with even the financing of homes — who were able to get mortgages, who had the ability to get financing and own land throughout the history of the country.
There are so many factors that are involved in it because when someone builds a home or a place for someone to live, there are all of these different entities involved, from realtors to builders to appraisers. It’s so messy that it’s really hard to look at it. The challenge of affordable housing has come about in all of these little pieces.
In addition to what people can do for getting better regulations around housing, giving more people access to financing, lowering the construction costs and convincing developers to take lower returns, people need to recognize the wage gap. If someone makes $8/hour, it will be impossible for them to buy a house.
Affordable housing generally applies if someone is spending a third of their income on housing. If their income is so small, it’s really going to be impossible to get into homeownership. The complexity of affordable housing isn’t talked enough about, and then the need for wages to rise needs to be more of a reality.
Tim adds that maybe people can lower the cost of housing on a regulatory side, but people need to have more income. One of the top fastest-growing buyers of homes are single women, but also women are 40% less likely to invest in real estate, in stocks or to start a business. That is a hit to the income really, and that’s probably true for other minorities.
Carolina mentions that there has to be a lot of communication from the developers, the designers, the infrastructure, the government, and then access. She lives in Southern California and almost half of her paycheck goes toward her house just because she has three kids. She doesn’t want to live in a closet, so it’s hard even for her, and she is highly educated and makes a really good income.
Brian brings up that startups are supposed to disrupt industries. There’s just this cultural weight in the country. Older, white men were writing the rules and creating these industries in general. But what if there’s an increase in the percentage of women in the real estate industry? From the percentages now to doubling it, that would disrupt the industry alone. Getting more people in a particular industry that don’t look or come from the same kind of background as those that are in power is one way to make change.
Advice
If Brian was speaking to like a young architecture student or someone who’s thinking about becoming an architect, he would want them to do research on the entirety of the building environment and how that’s delivered and created. He went into architecture and in design school where they talk about the power of good design and students are doing projects assuming that they are the only person in the room making decisions about what’s built, which is a great academic exercise.
But after they graduate, many students get frustrated because they realize that they don’t have the influence or they’re not able to make the decisions that they believe are the right decision. He would want to educate his younger self on more than just what good design processes.
Look at programs. If you are going to go to college, then it’s going to university and taking classes outside of that. Discipline is really important to get a more holistic view of it. If you’re going into the construction trades, then having conversations with other stakeholders in the process that affect your scope of work will be helpful.
When Module initially worked with Nichiha on the lithium house, Tim and his team had a great understanding of how products were to be installed, the questions around installation and how the different colorations might affect the kind of design intent of the project. In Tim’s case, it was a more holistic picture. For young folks out there, look at other stakeholders involved in their discipline.
With neighborhood engagement, Brian had a community meeting about one of his upcoming projects. He wanted to talk to the people in that community meeting who said, “I disagree. I do not support this.” He wanted to hear from them because they have a reason for why they’re saying that. He wants to understand what’s behind that. Without that conversation, it just promotes the same cycle.
Inspirational Trip Experience
He traveled to this rural area of the Dominican Republic and was staying with a host family. He worked on some public art and an immersion program that Brian and one of his co-founders started this group at NC State. He spent about three summers with Marino, Ellie, Emily and Evelyn and remains grateful to them for that experience. They took in someone who came from the suburbs outside of Pittsburgh with a privileged upbringing.
He was 18 to 21 years old in those three years he spent with them. They helped him see another perspective on the world, which is incredibly valuable. He wanted to help give that family a better outcome like the way they helped him. That really stuck with him, and having those experiences has helped him get out of his bubble and gave him a new perspective on life. He learned a lot from them and helped him grow into who he is today.
Join the Conversation
We’d love to hear your thoughts on this week’s episode! Shoot us an email at buildperspectives@gmail.com.
Resources:
Module Housing Website
Contact:
brian@modulehousing.com