Early last year, Dartmouth College approached Unity Homes to discuss building four faculty residences on campus as part of an initiative called “Moving Dartmouth Forward” — a program to eliminate high-risk behavior and increase inclusivity. As described in Dartmouth Now, the homes are part of new residential communities that cluster student housing with nearby homes for professors, thereby fostering the type of academic and social interactions that are central to Dartmouth’s vision.
The four faculty homes are nearing completion and will be ready for occupancy this summer. Each has a Unity Värm design platform at its core, but at 3300 square feet, they are larger than typical Värms in order to accommodate faculty-student gatherings.
We began manufacturing the homes in January and assembled the weather-tight shells on site in March. We are now on track to complete all four homes by the targeted completion date of July 1. This will give the college plenty of time to launch the new housing clusters for the fall semester.
According to Tim McNamara, Dartmouth’s Associate Director for Campus Planning and Facilities, the college’s choice of Unity Homes was based on three factors: energy efficiency, speed of construction, and price. McNamara describes the college’s new Unity Homes as “solid, attractive, durable homes.”
Building energy guru Martin Holladay recently visited the Dartmouth projects to see for himself. His blog post about the homes, which is available* at GreenBuildingAdvisor.com, concludes that:
Unity Homes is building some of the best single-family homes in New England, and every employee I met is concerned with building a high-performance home. If Unity Homes represents the future of home building, we’re all in luck.
We are proud to be helping Dartmouth realize its vision for the future of student life on campus, while we continue to pursue our own vision for the future of home building.
*Note: this article is currently behind Green Building Advisor’s “pay wall,” but GBA offers free temporary subscriptions.
