As one of the winners of the Holcim Awards for Sustainable Construction, the PowerHYDE housing model, created by Prasoon Kumar and Robert Verrijt of Billion Bricks, India and Singapore, explores sustainable means and solutions to empowering and facilitating growth opportunities to people without homes around Southeast Asia.

A BillionBricks Community is the world’s first carbon negative solar home community to bring families out of poverty within one generation. It presents an extraordinary opportunity to shape the future of our world, where everyone can be a homeowner while mitigating climate change. It is a radical concept in housing designed for ‘energy sufficiency’ and ‘extreme affordability’. A BillionBricks home is built in an indigenous prefab assembly technique that makes it easy to assemble in remote locations.

The need for a radical approach - According to the UN, the housing need is worsening with over 1.8 billion people living in need of adequate housing today. By 2050, more than 3 billion people will need access to affordable and adequate housing around the world. Our current methods are obviously failing. Buildings and the building construction sectors combined are responsible for over one-third of global energy consumption and nearly 40% of total direct and indirect CO2 emissions. If we want to tackle the housing problem with least externalities, we also need to solve the energy and climate challenges.