Director & Professor John Quale

Aims and expectations

ecoMOD is a community-based research and educational effort to create high-performance affordable homes designed and built by university students. To date, the ecoMOD Project has trained 461 students to design, build or help renovate 19 affordable housing units. The projects are always completed in collaboration with affordable housing organizations. The project relocated from the University of Virginia to the University of New Mexico in 2014, and is about to embark on its first effort in the state. New Mexico’s unique geographic, cultural, and economic climate provides an ideal place for the extension of this important model for affordable housing design, research and development.

The mission of the ecoMOD Project is two-fold: to create high-performance affordable homes that can be replicated at the same cost of a conventional affordable homes; and to educate and train the next generation of designers and builders in rigorous sustainable design strategies, affordable housing development (both new modular homes and renovations of existing homes) and appropriate community engagement methods in partnerships with organizations and individuals in under-served communities.

Short CV

John Quale, Director and Professor of Architecture at the University of New Mexico School of Architecture + Planning, is an expert in sustainable design, offsite construction and public interest design. Quale is the Founder and Director of the ecoMOD project, an interdisciplinary design, build and evaluate project to create high performance affordable homes. ecoMOD was established in 2004, while he was a faculty member at the University of Virginia and it moved with him to UNM in 2014. Three ecoMOD projects have achieved a LEED Platinum rating and two certified under the U.S. Passive House standard – all within affordable housing budgets.

A Fulbright Scholar at the University of Tokyo and the Thomas Jefferson Fellow at Cambridge University, Quale is the author of Sustainable, Affordable, Prefab: the ecoMOD Project, and co-author of OFFSITE: Constructing a Post-Industrial Future, forthcoming from Routledge. He led the award-winning 2002 UVA Solar Decathlon Team. His work and / or teaching has been featured on National Public Radio, CNN and HGTV and in various publications including Architect Magazine, Metropolis Magazine, Architectural Record, Dwell and The New York Times. He has received over 30 design or education awards, including the 2013 Architect Magazine R+D Award, the AIA Education Honor Award, the NCARB Grand Prize, and the USGBC Excellence in Green Building Curriculum Award, and finalist status for the UN World Habitat Award. He was the UVA nominee for Carnegie / CASE U.S. Professor of the Year Award, and has given a keynote or public lectures at the National Building Museum and universities including Cambridge, Oxford, Sheffield, Tokyo, Princeton, Michigan and several others. He has twice served on the national AIA COTE Top Ten jury.