How Modular Buildings can Help Tackle the Global Housing Crisis

Brief 

Eva Talbot is an architect and U.S. product director for Modulous, a construction technology firm creating the first globally scalable model for the design and delivery of affordable and sustainable homes. She spoke to Doreen Lorenzo for Designing Women, a series of interviews with brilliant women in the design industry.

Insight

Doreen Lorenzo: Tell us about your interest in design. Were you a creative kid? Did you always know you wanted to go down this path?

Eva Talbot: I can’t think of a time when design wasn’t a component of my daily life. I’m an architect by training, and I’ve been interested in the built environment from early childhood. I grew up on a dilapidated dairy farm with 10 acres, a bunch of outbuildings, and an endless supply of junk.

I had the freedom to build the structures I wanted to build and just create things. Making spaces is something I have always enjoyed.

My mom is a fiber artist who raised me with an appreciation of tactile craft, so I had the freedom to go outside and be messy, and no one cared. But then I would return to the inside of the house and the threads of historic craft started to come together. I became really interested in systems, because even weaving thread is a system.

What led you to the architecture field?

Taking systems and applying them to design and creative endeavors led me to what I’m doing today.I attended the University of Detroit Mercy, which has a small but amazing architecture program. You don’t learn what to think in college, you learn how to think. I learned new approaches to creative problem-solving in the real world.

When I first started working as an architect, I was detailing and designing these high-rises that you see on the cover of magazines.