Affordable Housing Takes a Turn

Affordable Housing Takes a Turn
A traveling design exhibit takes the question of affordable housing and asks not what it is but what it could be.

What it could be, according to some, is homes with exciting designs that are built with materials that would lead to lower energy and maintenance costs.

With square footage and cost of Habitat for Humanity three and four bedroom homes as a starting point, hundreds of designers from the United States and six other countries submitted plans with a new take on affordable housing. The 100 designs making the tour range from playful to traditional to high tech.

The exhibit, called the HOME House Project, opens Friday with a reception at 5:30 p.m. in the atrium of at the Public Works Building on Charlotte Street. Admission is free.

The exhibit, which has been to cities in Virginia and Texas and will travel to El Paso, Texas, Baltimore and Minneapolis, is the result of a contest organized by the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston Salem.

"Our main thrust was trying to provide inspired design," said SECCA curator David Brown, who organized the contest and will speak at the reception.

One design, from a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is of a tree house whose construction is an organic process that continues along with the growth of the tree. Another architect conceived a house of insulated, translucent poly