residential

Stock house plans are as American as apple pie. Andrew Jackson Downing and Alexander Jackson Davis's publication of the pattern book "Cottage Residences" in the mid-19th century, for example, fueled the first nationwide romance for suburban living. And now, approximately 30 percent of all American homes are built from stock plans, says Free Green co-founder Ben Uyeda, "but most of the plans out there are very dated. So we try to sell things around contemporary themes."

Since Free Green launched in April 2008, customers have downloaded more than 47,000 house plans from the website. As a result, the Boston-based company calls itself "the world's largest provider of home design."

Uyeda says he and his team add approximately one new plan per week and the designs are based on housing and trend data. Styles range from Cape Cod cottages to Mediterranean-style mini villas (the website tell users which region is best for a particular house), with some jaunty modernist boxes mixed in.

The contemporary theme they all have in common is energy efficiency. When constructed correctly, Free Green homes beat energy codes by 30 to 50 percent.

Kent Griswold hasn't turned his dream into reality – yet – but he's making a living blogging about it. His passion? Tiny houses. And he may have hit on something.

Griswold, 51, started his blog, Tiny House Blog, a few years ago just to have a place to put his assorted photos and links collected during years of fantasizing about owning a cabin home in the mountains.

Now, in just the past year, his blog is receiving triple the number views, from five to 6,000 unique visitors each day. Griswold tries to keep up a steady nearly-daily posting of interesting tiny home solutions, from build-it-yourself options that range from a 102 sq. foot number with a building plan that starts at $859, to a 16' x 20' Vermont cottages to micro lofts.

And there's an ever-increasing amount of readers who are more than happy to share their own stories. Griswold thinks the economic downturn is responsible for the building-small craze.

Once the residents of Port-au-Prince are medically stabilized who is going to help rebuild Haiti? A design-build team at Clemson University's School of Architecture has a green solution for quickly finding homes for the thousands of displaced Haitians following last week's catastrophic 7.0-magnitude earthquake and today's 6.1-magnitude aftershock. Empty shipping containers.

Motivated by the recent devastation of hurricanes in the Caribbean and the U.S., the SEED Project began experimenting with the repurposing of empty shipping containers. The surplus of massive, weather-withstanding empty containers sitting in the ports of Haiti and the Dominican Republic could quickly and easily be converted into sustainable emergency housing.

Making shipping containers into residences isn't a new concept. In fact, it can be a pretty nice place to call home. Projects like Tempo Housing's Keetwonen complex in Amsterdam is home to 1,000 students and has amenities like personal balconies, free wi-fi and dedicated bike parking. Urban Space Management conceptualized Container City and Container City II in London, a complex of four- and five-story buildings -- Container City II even has an elevator and is handicap accessible. There's also the uber-lux Redondo Beach House by De Maria Design -- eight prefabricated, recycled steel shipping containers refashioned into some really fancy living.

But the work by the Clemson crew isn't about bells and whistles.