2026 Award Winner - emerging designer (student)

common ground cottages

Gorham, Maine • Academic year completed 2025

Project Team:

• Julia Davidson, student, University of Maine at Augusta

Project Description:

Maine is in the middle of a housing crisis. Home prices have climbed sharply since 2021 while wages have not kept pace, leaving students, young families, single parents, and retirees increasingly priced out of stable housing. Common Ground Cottages responds directly to this gap: a net-zero, prefabricated modular home community designed to be affordable, resilient, and adaptable to the people who live in it.

Each cottage is built off-site in a climate-controlled facility, eliminating mold growth and weather-related construction damage while reducing material waste. The small, single-story footprint, sized for one to two occupants, keeps construction and land costs low while minimizing environmental impact per household. Zero-step entries and non-slip flooring make every unit accessible from day one, without retrofitting.

The design's defining strategy is modularity. Pre-framed openings with knock-out panels allow a unit to expand as a resident's life changes, a growing family can add a bedroom, a remote worker can add an office, without demolishing or replacing the original structure. Because the module design stays consistent across the community, construction scraps from one home can be reused in the next, reducing waste further as the neighborhood grows.

Materials were chosen for both performance and regional character: locally sourced cedar shingles and panels, red oak flooring, recyclable gypsum plaster, and recycled-aggregate concrete tie the homes to Maine's building traditions while keeping embodied carbon low. Double-insulated walls and double-glazed windows, combined with passive solar orientation, reduce heating demand in Maine's cold climate, while renewable energy and heat pumps bring each home to net-zero operation.

Beyond the individual unit, the project rethinks what a starter home neighborhood can share. Homes are clustered on a single lot around a shared solar bank, greenhouse, and utility/maintenance shed, infrastructure too costly for one household alone but easily distributed across a community. Residents share a rainwater recycling system and lawn equipment rather than duplicating resources unit by unit, lowering both cost and environmental footprint at the neighborhood scale.

Sited in Gorham, Maine, the project treats housing affordability as inseparable from sustainability and resilience. It reduces the strain on new construction places on the land, delivers homes designed to survive Maine's climate without high-carbon systems, and creates a path to homeownership for people the current market has left behind. Common Ground Cottages is  a model for how a community can grow together, sharing both infrastructure and responsibility, one modular addition at a time. This project was the winner of the 207 AIA Maine Home Design Competition, University Student Category, fall 2025.

Key Sustainability Features:

• High-performance envelope

• Net-zero energy

• Renewable energy

• Low-carbon materials

• Healthy materials

• Water conservation

• Other: Universal accessibility & housing affordability

Highlights from the Judges: