Upward Mobile-ity
Photo: Michael Deleon
When it comes to small spaces, nothing conjures up images of design-impaired living like the words “mobile home.” Add to that a reputation for flimsy construction, and the bad rap seems well deserved.
Yet when architecture professor Michael Hughes talks about trailers and the traditional urban trailer park, he sees another picture: affordable, small-scale homes in a high-density neighborhood. “Mobile homes came into being as a low-cost housing solution, serving that niche in between an apartment or condo and a standard suburban home,” says Hughes. “Their typical design, however, has been fundamentally flawed, with structural and spatial issues.”
Hughes was given the chance to retool a trailer into his vision of a well-designed, budget-friendly residence when a defunct 1960s-era unit in Boulder’s Mapleton Mobile Home Park was donated to the design/build architecture program at the University of Colorado. (Hughes has since relocated to the University of Arkansas.) With a leaking roof, rotting wood and pitted metal siding, the two-bedroom, 489-square-foot unit had little left to salvage. Since local zoning codes required that dwellings within a mobile-home park must remain portable, the team kept the original steel chassis and sent the rest of the dilapidated structure to the scrap yard.
Determined to build the trailer back better and slightly bigger than before, Hughes and his class worked with structural engineers to devise a substantial system of concrete tie-downs to tether the unit to the site and withstand high winds. They added cross-bracing and metal columns for further support, which allowed them to extend steel tubing beyond the original frame to create thicker, insulated walls and gain a few more feet of living space.
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