The SPARC House
Rethinking housing in Colorado’s mountain towns

CASE SUMMARY:
Many mountain towns face unique housing challenges shaped by climate, construction constraints, and tourism. This multidisciplinary project explores how those elements intersect and how a modular net-zero home can respond to them.

Over the course of three years competing in the Solar Decathlon, our team developed the SPARC House: a modular, all-electric home designed for real-world constraints and long-term community impact. Unlike many Solar Decathlon projects, the SPARC House was made for real clients and remains a lived-in, net-zero home today.

WHEN:
2018 - 2021

WHERE:
Fraser and Boulder, Colorado, USA

U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon 2020 Build Challenge
(now called BuildingsNEXT)

Competed with the University of Colorado at Boulder Team

MY ROLE:
Team Co-Lead and Project Manager

Housing Pressure in Mountain Towns

In many North American mountain towns, finding housing has become increasingly difficult for the people who live and work there year-round. Teachers, service workers, and small business employees help keep these communities running, yet many are being priced out due to rising property values, expensive construction, and a growing second-home market. In Fraser, Colorado, this pressure is especially visible. The town’s small permanent population is struggling to support a growing tourism economy while ensuring its own stable, local housing.

The paradox at play: the economies that prop up these towns are also making them unlivable for the people who depend on them.

Understanding the System

Early conversations with residents, contractors, and local officials revealed that the way housing is built in mountain towns makes affordable housing difficult to deliver in the first place.

Short construction seasons, labor shortages, and rising material costs make small-scale, affordable projects difficult to justify financially. As a result, developers prioritize high-end second homes with larger profit margins, even as local workers struggle to find housing nearby.

With this, we reframed the challenge. Instead of designing a more efficient and affordable home, we began to rethink housing as a system. The goal was to create a model that balances construction logistics, economic viability, and community needs simultaneously.

Defining the Strategy

As the project evolved, our team explored multiple ideas, including modular construction, high-performance systems, and the integration of accessory dwelling units. With over thirty team members collaborating across disciplines, it became increasingly difficult (and important) to align our decisions and priorities.

To establish a shared direction, I helped develop the SPARC framework: Sustainability, Performance, Attainability, Resilience, and Community. These principles became a tool for evaluating trade-offs and coordinating design, engineering, and financial decisions across the project.

Aligning, Coordinating, Facilitating

With a team spanning across architecture, engineering, marketing, and finance, I facilitated alignment between disciplines with different priorities, which ranged from structural feasibility to cost and energy performance.

A large part of my role involved bridging these perspectives and facilitating discussions so that decisions in one area would not create conflicts in another. The SPARC framework helped provide a shared language for these conversations, which allowed the team to consider plans through multiple lenses while staying grounded in the bigger picture.

For example, concentrating plumbing along central interior walls improved the system’s efficiency, but also introduced constraints to the architectural layouts. Navigating these kinds of cross-system trade-offs required continuous dialogue as the overall design evolved.

From Strategy to Design

The SPARC framework translated into a set of design decisions that responded directly to the constraints of building in mountain communities:

Modular construction
A panelized modular system reduces on-site construction time while balancing transportation constraints on narrow mountain roads.

Accessory dwelling unit (ADU)
Integrating a rental unit creates additional housing options within the community while providing homeowners with supplemental income, improving overall attainability. The extra space also provides homeowners with a unique, future-oriented opportunity to grow into their home as their needs change.

High-performance, resilient design
The integration of passive design strategies (e.g., a highly insulated envelope) and active energy systems (e.g., rooftop solar panels) allowed the home to produce renewable energy more efficiently while still maintaining comfort and resilience in extreme conditions.

Results and Impact

After three years of research, design, and construction, we completed the SPARC House, a fully operational home for a young, local couple in Fraser, Colorado.

The project was awarded 1st place overall in the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon 2020 Build Challenge, ranking in the top three across all ten competition categories.

In its first year of occupancy, the home achieved net-positive energy performance, generating more energy than it consumed (even with electric vehicle charging included).

Since completion, the project has been presented at the ACEEE Summer Study on Energy Efficiency in Buildings and continues to attract interest from builders and homeowners looking to utilize elements of the design.

The SPARC House continues to serve as a lived-in example of how high-performance, all-electric systems can be adapted even in cold-climate mountain communities.

Reflections

This project fundamentally changed how I approach complex design problems. Rather than treating constraints as limitations, I now see how effective they can be in guiding solutions.

It also emphasized the importance of alignment and storytelling in multidisciplinary work. With over thirty team members, collective progress depended on creating a shared understanding of what we were trying to achieve and how different decisions connected. The SPARC framework helped us organize a wide range of ideas into a coherent system rather than a collection of individual parts.