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| 'Solar 7' nears completion in a Cambridge, Mass., parking lot near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The house is
now displayed on the Mall in Washington, D.C. Solar 7 |
Students compete to design solar homes
Full-size 'Solar Decathlon' entries populate Washington's Mall Oct. 12-19.
from the October 11, 2007 edition
Page 3 of 4
While engineering is important, it must be successfully combined with architecture. This was a challenge for SCU, Bickford says, since their school has less of an architecture focus than other schools in the competition do. Some of the team's civil engineers had to learn how to become architectural artists and seek the advice of professional architects in the area.
And while the capacities and efficiencies of the homes are more important than aesthetics, the team's architects tried to make the design as attractive as possible. Often the teams' designs include a nod to their university's geographic home: While MIT's exterior cedar siding makes it blend in with many New England homes, SCU's has a "modern mission" feel, a tribute to California's historic mission architecture.
"Every school has a different culture that is really expressed in their house," says Bickford.
While the planning and design for an ecohouse may be right up MIT's alley, the practical concerns proved the most challenging, Dunn says.
One reason the home took so long to build was that many of the obscure products and materials used in the home took months to order and ship to Cambridge.
Another practical issue was the fact that building materials had to withstand a 400-mile truck trip to Washington, D.C. Thus, the team chose to mount the bathroom tiles on a resilient plastic material.
Another part of the competition's challenge came from the fact that the team must include student volunteers with a variety of skill sets. In total, about 60 people have worked on Solar 7 since planning began last year, but the core group was 20, Keville says. One of the most challenging parts of the process was finding students with a background in manual labor and construction.
Home-building priorities changing
One person they found was Samina Ali, a Cambridge resident and environmental studies graduate from Oberlin College in Ohio. She volunteered to help with MIT's house anyway she could. "This is what I want to do as a career – designing and building green homes. I've done carpentry for Habitat for Humanity and other homes before, but this is great experience for me to learn about new products and local materials that are available," she says.
Nick Gayeski, a building technology PhD candidate at MIT, worked on some of the architectural plans for MIT's home even though he didn't have a background in architecture. Part of his interest in participating sprung from his trip to the decathlon in 2002 with Cornell, where he did his undergraduate work. Another incentive for joining the MIT team this year is his interest in pursuing sustainable engineering in the future and perhaps living in such a house himself.
He says the reason zero-energy homes aren't built commercially is not because we lack the ability or technology, but because homes are built with speed and size as the main priorities.
But those priorities are changing as homebuyers want more ecofeatures, says Amy Tighe, a "green" real estate agent and volunteer construction worker at Solar 7, as she labels pieces of cedar siding for reassembly in Washington.
"My friends all ask me where I got my tan and I say, 'I didn't go to the cape; I got in on the job!' " she says, and laughs.
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