The Solar Decathlon is an international collegiate competition in ten contests for a fully solar powered house sponsored by the US Department of Energy Solar Decathlon. University of New Mexico students have had the opportunity to compete alongside many of the best and brightest students in the nation to design, construct and operate a solar house under competition standards. A highly competitive evaluation will be held October 2013 in Irvine, CA.
The house is required to be affordable, attractive, and easy to live in, maintain comfortable and healthy indoor environmental conditions, supply energy to household appliances for cooking, cleaning, and entertainment. The house provides adequate hot water for everyday needs. Ultimately, the house produces as much or more energy than it consumes. These rather quotidian demands of a building has rallied the talents and interests of thousands of students in the US, now Europe, and in its inaugural year of competition, in China.
UNM's proposal acceptance allowed hundreds of students to participate in the the 20 month process to getting the SHADE house (so named for Solar Home that Adapts for Desert Equilibrium) to the competition site of Irvine, CA. Team aSUNm (collaboration between UNM and ASU) enter the competition with the SHADE house. As architecture faculty advisor to the project here at UNM School of Architecture Planning, I have the opportunity to design, think, plan, construct a building opus with students and faculty from different parts of the university campus. This experience in applications of research and teaching allows insight to the new nature of classroom, needs of the next generation of learners, the innovative potential of design and technology integration in New Mexico.
The UNM team has traveled to Germany, Solar Decathlon Europe 2012 held in Madrid Spain, and will travel to Solar Decathlon China and ultimately to the competition site of Solar Decathlon October, 2013, Irvine, CA. These research trips consists of extensive data collection as to how architecture and technology intersect to create many of the most interesting designs for solar powered housing. As a project located inside and imbedded in the university setting, the question of how students and faculty create, resolve, and collaborate concerning a very complex organizational project is an invaluable learning tool for teaching a new generation of designers.
For New Mexico, a beautiful conundrum of early design thinking surfaced. One of the most sustainable and elegant way to construct is with adobe. This building material reduces the need for energy to heat and cool comfortably. However, with the necessity for the competition house to travel to the site of the exhibition, Irvine, CA October 2013, ruled out the simple and elegant possibilities of adobe. The team seeks design solutions that allow the interpretations of this historically and culturally significant building tradition to be redefined in future solar building projects.
The design question ultimately is how the team meets the demands of energy efficiency and market appeal with the delicate arbitration of poetic and technical concerns to create a house. How is beauty of a building typified by a 'sense of place' where place is here in New Mexico and there, California? We attempt to address this question with the Solar Decathlon SHADE house.
We promise the search has been vigorous and spirited. All building projects require intense collaboration and conversation. We sought to temper technology with a sense of place that yield an appropriateness and fit unique to our landscape. This project continues to teach us that the process to constructing a building is an activity bigger than one self, with a thoughtful community centered on respect, technique and a desire to take risks, beauty follows.
Responses to “Solar Decathlon ingredients: College students + construction + competition”