KB Home, KTGY, and BUILDER to Team on Innovation Program

On Earth Day eve 2016, we're excited to announce a partnership with KB Home, architects KTGY Group, and a group of national products manufacturers intent on creating, designing, and building an innovative idea home-like installation that will be a life-sized lens into the future of sustainable living.

The initiative--the Greenbuild KB Home ProjeKt--is headed for an unveiling and discovery tours at October 5 and 6 at Greenbuild International Show and Expo at The Los Angeles Convention Center.

The Greenbuild KB Home ProjeKt offers a time-travel look ahead to the years 2020 and 2050 as a way to bring new perspective and strategic scenario-planning opportunities to builders working today. The display at the 2016 Greenbuild Show and Expo will boast vignettes that feature assemblies and systems, home tours, interactive educational features, and a digital wall display.

The Greenbuild KB Home ProjeKt asks that partners in its development--KB, KTGY, BUILDER, and its manufacturers--stretch bounds of imagination and fabrication, carrying forward elements we see trending, and inventing new elements where we see no such trends.

The project will explore--in both structure and design--a forward-looking series of ideas around how people want to live vis a vis issues like health, transportation, utilities, food, privacy, and adaptiveness itself.

"At KB Home, we've got a history of initiatives and focus around innovations in building homes for sustainability dating back to the development of the KB Home Green House: An Idea House with Martha Stewart in 2011," KB Home CEO Jeff Mezger says. "The path we've taken since then is one of leadership around sustainability, and the KB Home ProjeKt is an acceleration and expansion of that commitment."

Key to the KB Home ProjeKT strategy, Mezger says, is that "we balance the innovation and advances in the features and functionality of our homes so that they align with what our customers can and will pay for."

“A critical aspect of the design and production of this home is creating a model that is sustainable and affordable,” said Manny Gonzalez, principal at KTGY. “Green living is often associated with privileged buyers with a higher income stream. We are working with manufacturers and KB Home to change the dynamic. We want to develop homes that can be produced at volume and available to many socioeconomic populations and can be profitable to the builder as well. And, with that being said, we are never taking our eyes of other mandatory home assets like comfort, safety and even customization.

Mezger, KB Home sustainability, strategic sourcing, and technology chief Dan Bridleman, and Gonzalez note that, by "pushing the envelope" and working with national manufacturers on ambitious new ideas on materials, new capabilities, new technologies, ProjeKt will become a strategic template for collaboration on concepts such as "interoperability" for home systems, and modularity, which can allow homeowners to adapt and personalize their living spaces to changing needs, both real-time and over time.

"It's not often that we get an opportunity to work at such an engaged, high-level, and operational level with all of our partners on innovation--everybody together stretching what they can do to go beyond their current capabilities," Bridleman says, noting that national manufacturers like Owens Corning, Whirlpool, Kohler, and Sherwin Williams have already been working on ways to collaborate in developing a game-changing look around the next corner.

"When you come up with a technical concept, and develop innovative new parts of a home, the next step is to learn how to scale it," says Mezger. "Our focus on the ProjeKt initiative will allow us to take these ideas that push the envelope and scale them in our homes and throughout our enterprise, and hopefully, impact all of home building."

The ProjeKt casts a developmental line out far forward from the present to explore the futuristic thinking – generations of transformation and trending, around automation, materials science and social road-mapping, risking projections and predictions that may stray far from the mark. Building in assumptions for such risk, The Greenbuild KB Home ProjeKt will change the game, broaden the conversation about making high-performance, sustainable, resiliently-built and efficiently operating homes attainable to those who are pursuing the American Dream of homeownership.

“We knew we couldn’t approach a project like this from a single perspective,” said Jacob Atalla, Vice President of Sustainability at KB Home. “For a project like this to make a lasting imprint on the way we think about providing sustainable homes, we had to essentially dismiss all of our current thinking and start with a fresh slate. Then we had to assemble a process that would not only provide improved solutions for today, but offered solutions that will shape the future.”