A team university students and faculty has made it to the finals of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon, embarking on a more than year-long process to design and build a solar-powered home.
The team, which has moved on to the finals along with 20 other groups from around the world, will now need to design and construct the house that will be displayed on the National Mall for the final judging of the Solar Decathlon, a biennial contest that challenges teams to build an energy-efficient home, in October 2011. The construction will not officially begin until January 2011, with completion scheduled for July of that year, followed by a two-month period of testing. The team’s effort in 2007, LEAFHouse, earned it second place overall in the competition.
Group leader Amy Gardner said the team’s goals are “connection of building and site as a system, the stewardship of water a precious source, building on the efficiencies gained from the interconnectedness of engineering, architecture and site systems and making nature visible in the way that everyday activities in the house are designed.”
The new design —named WaterShed — will feature an edible wall, a garden and technology that allows the house to run on solar energy alone, creating essentially what the group is calling a “mini-ecosystem.”
“While I like all the living components [of WaterShed], I am especially proud of our level of integration,” said Dave Tilley, a professor leading the Living Systems part of the team. “We are really focused on using rainwater wisely and hope to demonstrate that treasuring water can start with the homeowner.”
About 300 students and volunteers from various majors, including architecture, engineering, environmental science and policy and landscape architecture, will help to build WaterShed along with the help of faculty members.
Team member and architecture graduate student Peter James said he enjoyed and looks forward to working with students from other departments.
“We rarely get the chance to get out of the architecture building and make connections across the campus,” James said. “I have also enjoyed the collaborative nature of the design process. No one person owns the design, but we all play a part in it.”
Gardner said the organization of the massive group is like a “flat hierarchy of concentric rings.”
“At the center of this structure lies the consensus-derived team mission, principles and goals. Centered around the project goals in the first ring are the student team leaders.
Each of these leaders oversees a different area of expertise, such as communications, architectural design, construction or fundraising,” Gardner said. “These students are committed to the project long-term and are supported by a team of core faculty.”
The rings continue to student supporters of each area and then to the team of mentors, many of whom Gardner said have participated in past decathlons and are there to provide professional guidance and expertise.
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