The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has selected the Center for Offsite Construction to bring two exhibits to the 2026 Innovative Housing Showcase on the National Mall, September 22 to 24.

The Showcase puts housing innovation directly in front of the public, policymakers, and press, on the Mall between 7th and 10th Streets, in the nation's 250th year. Most of what gets shown there is a building or a product. What we are bringing is the connective tissue: the standards, the data, and the workforce that determine whether factory-built housing can scale at all.

CfOC's exhibit: The Handshake and .CTO

America's factories can already build bathroom pods, kitchen pods, and volumetric modules faster and cheaper than site construction. What they cannot do is guarantee that any factory's module connects to any builder's structure. Every pairing of manufacturer and builder is a custom engineering exercise, and that friction is a hidden tax on housing supply.

We hope to bring the first physical prototype of the coupler defined by the draft CfOC/ICC 1220 standard: eight feet long, displayed at touchable height. Visitors can put their hands on the exact point where structure, plumbing, electrical, and data pass between a factory-built module and the building that receives it.

The comparison we keep coming back to is the electrical outlet. A standard outlet is why any American appliance plugs into any American home. Nobody thinks about it, which is the point. A standard coupler does the same thing for factory-built housing. American builders have always scaled their craft by standardizing it, from dimensional lumber forward, and the module interface is simply the next chapter.

The standard is being developed through CfOC's ANSI-accredited consensus process under an agreement with the International Code Council.

Alongside the coupler, the same exhibit shows what a house's data could look like if it were complete. Every product Americans buy carries data: a car's VIN traces its parts, a grocery barcode traces its origin. Housing is the largest purchase most Americans ever make, and it carries almost none.

We want to show that gap physically. We are excited to talk with our senior research fellows about showing three tiers, side by side: a raw material tagged with the handful of lines a legacy drawing file holds about it; a wall assembly tagged with its model data, fragmented across separate files for structure, finishes, fixtures, and services; and a scale model of a complete factory-built bathroom pod tagged with its .CTO file, printed in full as a continuous scroll.

The .CTO format describes an entire purchasable unit in one file: structure, wiring, plumbing, fixtures, finishes, plus chain of custody, cost, schedule, and energy data. Visitors see data density as sheer physical length of paper, a comparison a layperson can grasp in five seconds.

It matters for reasons well beyond elegance. Complete machine-readable component data is the precondition for automated code compliance, factory quality assurance, and scaled offsite production. It is also what lenders and insurers need: a persistent barrier to factory-built housing is that they cannot verify what a factory-built unit contains or when value is created. And because the format carries chain-of-custody fields, a .CTO file can document that a housing component is made in America, component by component.

The .CTO and .CIS formats are developed in the open as the Configurator File Type Project, a series of the Joint Development Foundation, alongside Custom Building Configurators, Matechi, and Cascadia Structural.

Who Builds the Next 250 Years?

Every innovation at this Showcase shares one dependency: skilled Americans to design, build, and install it. Research, including HUD's own, consistently identifies the shortage of specialized crews as a leading barrier preventing factory-built housing from scaling across markets.

Factory-built housing needs a workforce trained differently from traditional construction, blending trade skill, manufacturing process, and digital fluency. Today there is no national map of where that training happens and no common benchmark for its quality.

This exhibit hopes to show the emerging answer: a large-format national map of American colleges and universities with offsite construction education programs, drawn from a national census of institutions, alongside a plain-language career pathway. The jobs in a housing factory. What they pay. What training they require. How a high school graduate gets from here to there.

It is presented by the Accreditation Board for Offsite Construction Education, a nonprofit co-founded by CfOC and the Modular Building Institute. The premise is simple: the same way engineering and nursing programs carry accreditation so employers and students can trust them, offsite construction education is gaining its own national standard.

Come find us

September 22 to 24, on the National Mall between 7th and 10th Streets. The Showcase is free and open to the public.

If you work in offsite construction, housing policy, building codes, construction education, or housing finance, we would like to see you there. And if you want to help us make these exhibits as good as they can be between now and September, get in touch.

The Center for Offsite Construction is a research center at New York Tech's School of Architecture and Design.