The New York Times-20080127-Solar and Relatively Affordable-

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Solar and Relatively Affordable?

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MODULAR homes, which are manufactured in a factory and then delivered to a building site and assembled there, are nothing new on Long Island. On the East End, in fact, they can be cavernous mansions, complete with parapets and high-ceilinged great rooms.

But one Manhattan architect is combining his modular aspirations with alternative energy technologies to create a Hamptons house that he hopes will marry modernist design with reasonable cost.

The architect, Laszlo Kiss, has designed a four-bedroom prototype in Sag Harbor that he says uses the constant temperature of the earth and the power of the sun for heat and electricity. The house, which he is calling About Saving a Planet, or ASAP, was built in a Pennsylvania factory, delivered in three sections by truck to a quarter-acre lot in Sag Harbor and assembled there in late December.

The foundation was delivered separately in preinsulated concrete slabs, and builders are finishing the interior and exterior details on site.

Mr. Kiss plans to sell the house to anyone who seeks both modernism and green living in a customizable design of either 2,000 or 2,400 square feet. But the prototype will also serve as the his family's new house. Mr. Kiss, along with his wife, Lisa, and their two young daughters, will move in when it is completed in mid-February, he said.

He has paid close attention to cost. At $265 a square foot fully installed, the high-on-design, low-on-carbon-emissions ASAP house is a bargain -- at least for the East End.

In Sag Harbor, the cost of building a home starts at about $350 per square foot and can run up to $2,000, according to Robert Evjen, a longtime real estate broker in the Prudential Douglas Elliman office there.

Ms. Kiss, a photographer, said builders' estimates on a house made in the conventional way -- called stick building -- had run as high as three times the cost of the prefabricated home.

Mr. Kiss, whose Manhattan firm, Kiss & Zwigard Architects, has been involved in both residential and commercial projects, once worked and lived with his family in Lower Manhattan, near the World Trade Center.

After the terrorist attacks of 2001 destroyed the Kisses' apartment, they moved to Ms. Kiss's parents' house in East Quogue, in Southampton. There, Mr. Kiss quickly developed a distaste for some Hamptons summer homes that he saw as energy hogs.

Once they decided to live on Long Island full time, we wanted a house that would decrease our carbon footprint, Mr. Kiss said during a recent tour of the nearly completed ASAP house.

There are neat design elements that are standard in the house, like the front and back cedar porches totaling 800 square feet and the translucent fiberglass-topped pergola that rises above the roof. But the house is distinctive mostly for its green components: a geothermal heating system and solar panels.

The panels, to be installed on the nearly flat roof, will power the house during the day and feed electricity back into the Long Island Power Authority's electrical grid.

At night, when there is no light to convert to electricity, the house will take power from the grid, drawing from the surplus it supplied earlier.

The geothermal system is predicated on the fact that, below the frost layer (about six feet underground), the earth's temperature remains relatively constant. Water passing through pipes laid deep underground picks up heat or deposits it before heading back to a heating or cooling device in the house. The system greatly decreases the cost and energy of heating or cooling.

There are other energy-efficiency features built into the design. The light fixtures, for instance, will accept only energy-efficient bulbs, and five sets of floor-to-ceiling sliding glass doors in the living room and L-shaped windows in the bedrooms make passive use of the sun's light and heat.

But Mr. Kiss's main challenge in the design was to have as much open living space as possible, but to have private spaces at the same time. The flexible layout allows for a study or play area near the children's bedrooms down the hall from the master bedroom, as well as a separate work space for the couple.

The house also relies on many storage, bookshelf and closet systems from Ikea, the Swedish furniture chain. They fit in with the modernist aesthetic and helped keep the cost down, Mr. Kiss said.

While his venture scores points in terms of price and practicality, he is not the only one trying to market prefab homes.

Empyrean International has been building more traditional modular homes for 60 years. Two years ago, the firm created the Dwell House, a modernist, glassy home whose architects won a prefab design contest run by Dwell Magazine, which is helping to market the house.

In that design, each house is manufactured as a collection of panels, delivered on a truck and configured and assembled at the home site. Using stacked panels removes the height constraint on a modular house (trucks traveling American roads cannot be higher than 13 feet).

Shelter Island is the site of Long Island's first Dwell House, and the foundation for it has been poured, according to Patrick Gilrane, president of Empyrean.

Joseph Nangle, who is managing the project, said the bayfront house would have 4,400 square feet of space over several stories, and would have several suites with bedrooms, living spaces, decks and views of the bay.

The Shelter Island Dwell home will be completed in a little over a year, Mr. Nangle said, adding that it had been bought for about $300 a square foot by a couple with a large extended family.

Mr. Kiss's design, by contrast, is somewhat less expensive and much quicker to assemble. It has only one story, and ceiling heights are limited to eight feet, so it can arrive relatively intact. Mr. Kiss estimates that the factory can prepare it in two weeks.

The Kiss house design is exactly the kind of innovative thinking we need to make green homes that large numbers of people can embrace and afford, said Neal Lewis, president of the Neighborhood Network of Long Island, a nonprofit alternative energy organization. (The network has been credited with helping several Long Island towns draft laws requiring that new homes be built to the federal energy efficiency standard called Energy Star.)

The cost of the ASAP house is a key, Mr. Lewis added. We don't want green homes to be something that only people with lots of money can have, he said.

[Illustration]PHOTO: EAST END ALTERNATIVE: The architect Laszlo Kiss and his wife, Lisa, at the site of a prefab house (rendering above) designed by Mr. Kiss to cost $265 a square foot. They plan to move in next month. (PHOTOGRAPH BY DOUG KUNTZ FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)