There are certain innate characteristics about the island of Maui that make it irresistible: its smallness, remoteness, the expanses of ocean in all directions. But many of those same things make it a difficult place to build housing: a scarcity of materials, limited available labor, long lead times, and erratic weather. Unsurprisingly, housing in Maui is expensive, the options are limited, and the quality is often quite low. This puts a lot of pressure on the housing market, making large portions of the population vulnerable to substandard housing. On the islands that popularized SPAM, meat fabricated in Minnesota and sent over in small iconic metal shipping containers, there’s a clear symbiosis for the remote production of many things, including building materials.
The Kauhikoa Core house is a prefabrication hybrid, combining different methodologies of prefabrication around a centralized Core, to make a house that is deeply of its place, but just as importantly, from another. This island home is also known as V002-02, the first prototype of a larger body of research into The Core House, a system designed to concentrate the technical complexity of a house into a dense prefinished prefabricated module, freeing up the rest of the structure to respond simply to place, allowing for a deeply specific contextual living experience, while benefiting from economies of space and mass production processes.