A five-member architecture student team from Texas A&M won first prize in a national contest for a “green” home design that allows a team of four to build a home in a matter of days.
The Texas A&M team and other winners in the national competition, the first annual Lifecycle Building Challenge, were announced at the September 2007 West Coast Green Conference in San Francisco.
The winning Aggies, all key members of the 2007 Texas A&M Solar Decathlon team, were Adam Fenner, a graduate student from Richardson; Jason Bond, a May 2007 graduate from Winslow, Maine; Thomas Gerhardt, a May 2007 graduate from Round Rock; Josh Canez, a junior from Spring; and Nick Schaider, a junior from Katy.
The Solar Decathlon is a biennial competition sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, in which university teams erect and occupy a solar home on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. while vying for the best energy performance in varied tests.
The Texas A&M’s Solar Decathlon home design, an open-source housing module dubbed the “groHome,” was the same design that garnered the Aggies a first place finish in the “Student Building Category” of the Lifecycle Building Challenge.
As an open-source building system, the groHome is fashioned for flexibility, allowing builders or homeowners to incorporate various and disparate elements into the design as needed to meet the changing needs of a family or a community.
Using the students’ groHome system, pre-manufactured components can be brought to a site and assembled. The home incorporates a specialized bolted connector joint that allows components to be plugged together or unplugged easily and without damage. This function facilitates easy expansion and makes the homes easy to move.
The student project also included a community-building game called Utopia 2.0, which demonstrates how neighbors can easily swap building modules as family and community needs change.
The 2007 Lifecycle Building Challenge was sponsored by Green Building Blocks and Green Building in Alameda County, in partnership with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Building Materials Reuse Association, the American Institute of Architects and West Coast Green.
EPA administrator Stephen Johnson presented the awards at the West Coast Green Conference in San Francisco.
For more details on the winning entries, visit the Lifecycle Building Challenge website at http://www.lifecyclebuilding.org/2007/winners.htm
