The permanent residents of mountain towns like Fraser, Colorado, are being pushed out, and affordability is just the tip of the iceberg. Short construction seasons, labor shortages, and rising material costs make smaller, attainable housing difficult to justify, while tourism and the second-home market continue to drive high-end development. The people who sustain these communities can no longer afford to live in them.
Using the U.S. Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon as a platform, our team chose to confront this local housing crisis by asking: how can a house strengthen a community?
We spoke with residents, reporters, town officials, and contractors to better understand local needs and constraints. Instead of trying to design a more efficient and affordable home, we began to rethink housing as a system.
I helped develop the SPARC framework to structure decisions and align priorities across our multidisciplinary team. This created a shared way to evaluate trade-offs and ensure that decisions met our goals.
Our team designed and built the SPARC House: a modular, all-electric home for real clients in Fraser. The project achieved net-positive energy performance in its first year of occupancy and was awarded 1st place overall in the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon, ranking in the top three across all ten categories.
Today, it continues to serve as a lived-in example of how high-performance housing can be adapted to cold-climate mountain towns.
2018 - 2021
WHERE
Fraser and Boulder, Colorado, USA
U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon 2020 Build Challenge (now called BuildingsNEXT)
MY ROLE
Team Co-Lead and Project Manager
Competed with the University of Colorado Boulder Team
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.