Designed and built for the 2009 U.S. Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon, this solar-powered, 800-square-foot prototype house is tailor-made for northern climates. The project combines a responsive louver and building-integrated solar-panel skin with a savvy interior that contributes to the overall building performance.
Any architect pursuing LEED points knows that the actions of the occupant can have more impact on a building’s energy performance than any single technology, so the team concentrated on developing a building management system—called the Adaptive Living Interface System (ALIS)—that is both easy to use and informative. The program collects data and monitors energy use and production, water use, and indoor and outdoor environmental conditions. This information can be accessed via a Web-based application that parses the data and can track patterns over months or years.
Since changes can be made and monitored in real time, touchscreen panels are integrated throughout the house and translate information into a dollar figure of savings or expenditures for the day. And to make monitoring simple, the design team based the system on open-source calendar and social networking softwares that are easy to use and require no new learned skills. It was this level of integration that intrigued juror Cristobal Correa. “They looked at all the systems and they talk about the user. It’s very important for these things to actually interact with the user—this house is like a living thing,” he said.
Energy usage is also minimized by the smart interior design, which incorporates elements such as a custom cellular ceiling. Composed of 4,500 individually formed cones, the ceiling is made from window-shade material that helps to absorb reflected sound and direct light from the perimeter further into the core of the space, an added functionality that impressed juror Frank Barkow. “I really like the ceiling idea,” he said, “especially the components that made it and how it was conditioned by local and general lighting conditions.” The jury admired the house’s overall combination of form and function, but it was the monitoring system that especially caught their attention.
