Building on History: Call It A Son of a Shotgun

"It's quicker for developers to rip an old house down," says Brett Zamore, 34, who renovated a house built in the shotgun style--first used by African-American settlers in the early 1800s--for his Rice University grad-school thesis. "But houses like the shotgun have strengths and character" as well as the potential, he says, to be prototypes for responsible modern living--and for rebuilding hurricane-hit communities on the Gulf Coast.

The shotgun is smart. Take its ventilation. The house, perched above the ground on concrete-block piers, has doors in the front and back, windows in all rooms and wood-sheathed walls with no insulation. In a hot, humid clime like Houston's, that "allows air to continually circulate under the house and through the house," says Zamore. "This was the old way of getting AC, before electricity."

The shotgun inspired Zamore to develop the Shot Trot, a new design he touts as a historically relevant option for urban Southern communities. It's a crossbreed of the shotgun and the dog trot, a similar house with large side doors "so the interior feels like it's spilling outside," he says. The Shot Trot retains the shotgun's basic shape but replaces its railroad-style rooms with an airier, more open-plan layout. Just 16 ft. by 80 ft., it's perfect for narrow inner-city lots. And to cut cost and complexity, it uses standard component sizes, like 4-ft.-by-8-ft. plywood sheets.

Zamore is working on an easy-to-build Shot Trot kit home, aiming for a price tag of $100 per sq. ft.--less than half the cost of a typical modern prefab house. Some affordable-housing advocates see it as an answer to the housing needs created by hurricanes. Zamore is thrilled. It's "high design that's affordable," he says, "not cheap."