Housing for the Hopi Community: Designing Sustainable, Affordable and Energy Efficient Housing in the Hopi Community, Linking to Cultural Patterns of Sustainability

Abstract

This case study examines housing on the Hopi reservation, both traditional and contemporary and aims to create a future type of housing that will contribute to addressing the critical housing needs and alternative solutions addressing substandard housing on and for the Hopi people. Westernization has created a plague of substandard housing on the reservation that ignores pre-existing vernacular architecture and thus, the environment and the culture of the Hopi people. Rather, Westernization has created a move toward inexpensive, and quick but highly inefficient types of housing. The housing situation on Hopi presents a critical need for solution, an alternative to the substandard housing by creating a housing design that is sustainable, affordable and energy efficient. This solution can be found by (re)linking to cultural patterns of sustainability, essentially the history of a cultural people which includes traditional housing methods and materials. Traditional Hopi housing was studied and a list of common strategies was compiled from traditional houses on the reservation into a Basecase. Modern strategies were applied to the Basecase to create a Newcase. The percent savings in annual energy use and annual operation costs were compared between the two cases, however, it is important to note that the results were skewed due to a variety of factors that are discussed as limitations in the study. Nevertheless, the study offered an alternative housing solution, one that demonstrated significant savings in annual energy use and operation costs.