Earlier this year, Canadian prefabricated housing company CABN and B+H Architects announced plans for a community of 67 off-grid, net-zero prefab homes in Ontario’s Augusta Township—a project designed to address the climate crisis and ongoing housing pressures. Although off-the-grid communities aren’t new, the design methods implemented here—which include preserving mature old-growth forests and existing wetlands, and only building on agriculturally impacted land—set this project apart.
“Our master plan took a different approach,” says Jamie Miller, director of biomimicry for B+H. “We start all processes with a ‘living story,’ which is an attempt to understand what the land wants to do, what it will support us in doing, and what it will permit us to do. Instead of trying to do less harm, our philosophical basis is that it is expensive to try to fight nature, and the most resilient thing we can do for master planning designs is learn how to fit and contribute to a site.”
Rendering courtesy B+H Architects
Cabin photographed by Arash Moallemi for CABN