'Whole house' performance criteria framework and its application

It is difficult to effect change in a complex industry such as home building. This is due to fragmentation of the industry, lack of new techniques and involvement of a large number of trades in the building process. Therefore, the inefficiencies, which are inbuilt into the production process, have remained. Each building system is dealt with separately such that there are inevitable negative interactions among them.; The "Whole House" approach promotes the idea that the home be viewed as a system that is composed of different components which must work together and therefore comes across as a credible direction to take with the intent of revolutionizing the homebuilding industry in the long run. The challenge it addresses is to use the synergies among building systems to better the performance of the home. Integrative systems thinking or systems integration is fundamental to the generation of a design and in the approach to its implementation. The aim is to be able to achieve both, total system unification and complete independence while designing for flexible programming.; A "Whole House" performance criteria (WHPC) framework was developed through research, based on the building systems integration approach, which assists the user in systematically tabulating the building systems interactions. The WHPC framework was then used to develop a sample "Whole House" criterion which was applied to three case study designs one each for site-built, factory-built and hybrid home to determine which design comes closest to being an ideal "Whole House" design.