He won $120,000 for a wooden car. Now this teen plans to spend a year living in his next invention
An Ontario student is living in a modular home prototype for a year to test whether his one-day build could offer lower-cost shelter.
An 18-year-old engineering student in Ontario is putting his own housing idea to the test in the most direct way possible. Ribal Zebian says he will live in a modular home he designed for a full year, hoping to prove it could become a lower-cost shelter option.
Zebian, from London, Ontario, is already known for another unusual build. In 2025, he drew attention for creating an electric car out of wood, a project that led to a $120,000 scholarship.
Now, while studying engineering at Western University, he has turned to housing. He says rising homelessness in his community and the broader increase in housing costs pushed him to come up with a modular home concept that could be made more quickly and cheaply than many traditional builds.
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What the home is made from, and why he is living in it
His prototype uses fiberglass panels and thermoplastic polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, foam. Zebian says fiberglass allows molds to be reproduced, making duplication possible, while the insulated PET foam is part of a roofing system intended to support the roof's structure without relying on a standard truss setup.
He believes the design could be assembled in a single day. Just as important to him, it is not meant to look like a bare-bones box. He has said he wants the home to stay affordable while still offering design features that feel intentional and visually appealing.
Since May 2026, Zebian has been living in one of the units himself as a year-long test. The idea is to see how it performs through summer, winter, spring and fall, while also giving him time to spot flaws that only show up through everyday use. He has said that living in it for that long should help reveal mistakes and make it easier to improve the design before taking the idea to manufacturers.
What he says it can, and cannot, solve
Zebian is not presenting the homes as a complete answer to homelessness or the wider housing crisis. Instead, he sees them as a potentially lower-cost shelter option that could help people in the short term while larger policy changes are still needed.
That distinction matters. His proposal is aimed at offering a practical place to stay, not replacing permanent affordable housing. Even so, his decision to test the unit himself for a full year makes the project stand out. Rather than just pitching the concept on paper, he is trying to show how it holds up in real life before asking others to build it at scale.
