The Temple University Tiny Home

Tiny Home Packed with Sustainability 

The Temple Tiny House, which students designed and built, packs a lot of sustainable design into its 175 square feet. The sustainability aspects of the net-zero home include a 1.9 KW solar array with salt-water battery storage, a high-performance thermal envelope, a passive solar closet for heating and cooling the building, Aquion Aspen 48S batteries, and an Outback FlexPower Inverter. Four rain barrels collect rainwater, while a 50-square-foot living roof provides storm-water management via native plants that require little maintenance while attracting beneficial pollinators. 

Natural daylight and ventilation, LED lighting, and finishes with zero-percent VOCs add to the project’s sustainability. The students chose to keep the home disconnected from city water and installed a compost toilet. The students recycled 80 percent of the construction debris. The exterior includes cork siding, a rapidly renewable resource. Inside, the students reused roof slate as a flooring material. 

Temple’s project was the first Living Building Challenge-certified home in Philadelphia. While working toward the Petal Certification, the students and the Office of Sustainability were also assembling a Climate Action Plan for Temple University. The Petal Certification was a symbolic way to push the envelope and think beyond sustainability to focus on regenerative methods. The team also wanted to lead the region and harvest the incredible energy of students by challenging them with the highest possible standard of excellence. 

A Teaching Tool 

Temple’s tiny home, while built to livable standards, functions as a teaching tool for students and the surrounding community. It's a small-scale showcase of sustainability for the university and provides co-curricular and community engagement opportunities. Every semester, the university hosts tours and demonstrations at the house, to teach visitors about the sustainable design strategies and renewable energy systems incorporated into the structure. The university also embeds home tours and presentations in a variety of courses—in particular, general education courses that allow students to see elements of sustainable design and regenerative architecture in practice rather than theory. 

Temple University has also hosted tours for local high school students exploring architecture as a career. A vocational training group toured the tiny home and studied its solar power array. Meanwhile, local groups and the City of Philadelphia are looking at tiny houses and other small-scale living solutions as potential solutions for its affordable housing challenges. The hope is that Temple’s tiny home can serve as design inspiration for future small-scale homes that prioritize sustainability and strive for zero net energy.

Temple’s tiny home also supports Temple’s Community Garden. The community garden is a student-led volunteer organization that provides an outlet for innovation and experimentation in organic urban agriculture. The garden and tiny house are on university property near a student residence hall and dining facility. The tiny home serves as programming space for the community garden, provides storage for the gardeners, space to dry herbs, and a place to start crops in the winter months. 

The garden’s weekly farm stand gives away food to students and neighbors to help address food insecurity. Together, the tiny home and urban garden create an ecosystem that teaches visitors about sustainable practices at home and on the land.