Swedish firm Street Monkey Architects has unveiled new solar-powered, prefabricated modular homes in Örebro, Sweden. The row-house project was based on a similar award-winning construction project near Stockholm that was built using passive house principles but designed to complement the urban setting. The single-family structures are designed with energy efficiency in mind to promote lifestyles with smaller carbon footprints.
Each home is constructed using six factory-build prefab modules that arrive to the building site already complete with finished walls, bathrooms, kitchens and finishing materials. Onsite, the facade is assembled, and the seams between the modules are finished to remove any evidence of modular prefabrication.
The designers heightened the roof in order to better frame the street and allow the homes to stand up against some of the neighborhood’s taller buildings. The facades — which Street Monkey builds once the modular homes arrive to the site — are made from the same combination of wood, steel and plaster as the firm’s Stockholm project but with more exposed steel.
The materials used in the facades depend on the orientation, meaning the ones facing east or west have white plaster and the ones facing the north or south are made of either dark silver steel or steel with wood lattice. As a result, the row of modular houses presents three different versions of the same 150-square-meter home and provides a sense of individuality for residents without losing the overall visual cohesiveness of the row.
The highlight of the Örebro homes is the utilization of solar panels, the placement of which also depended on the particular house’s orientation. As the solar panels are designed to face south, the architects had to come up with a unique roof designed for both appearance and practicality. Houses that were east-west facing have sawtooth roofs with customized ridgelines and a 45-degree angle for the panels, while homes with north-south facades and east-west ridgelines have asymmetrical, mirrored roofs.
