Brian Kish holds his breath as he looks at the top half of the house wobbling on the cable of a towering crane. When Kish arrived at the construction site at 5 a.m., the house was in pieces. In fact, it had never been whole, at least never outside the detailed drawings and computer renderings, never outside his imagination and that of his teammates. Over the course of the day, Kish had directed his teammates as they put the home together like a giant, ready-to-assemble piece of furniture. The last of the house’s five fragments now dangles in the air. Kish is about to find out whether his team’s vision for a sustainable, environmentally sound future will come together.
For a year and a half, he and 13 core members of his team have been designing and building this house, which will be powered by nothing other than the sunlight cascading upon its roof. Created as a model of energy efficiency and inventive architecture, the house will be one of 20 entries from universities around the globe in a competition that aims to expose the public to an alternative way of living.
The sun seems to bow in close, as if realizing its role in the undertaking. Kish, a senior architecture major and the project’s construction manager, had reviewed this day in his mind over the course of a mostly sleepless night. Beside him now, a film crew records the final section of the house lowering, inch by inch.
It fits. Kish can breathe, but just for a moment. There is more work to be done at the construction site—the parking lot of Construction Junction, a Pittsburgh non-profit that recycles construction materials and is one of the team’s biggest supporters.
For the next three months, Kish and his teammates use power tools, charged in a solar-powered tool trailer, as they flesh out the connected structure. The team’s work ethic is something that director Scott DeGraw notes while filming for the Discovery Channel documentary Solar Showdown.
“Their level of dedication, of craftsmanship, was impressive,” he says. “They didn’t let anything slide. We would sometimes be just showing up at the work site, and the students would have already been up all night working.”
Once the house is ultimately completed, and is deemed a success, the team has to break it down again. Its parts are loaded onto trucks for delivery to the National Mall in Washington, D.C., where a village has sprung up for the 2007 Solar Decathlon.
The teams, from other American universities, Puerto Rico, Canada, Spain, and Germany, have been invited by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). Each of the 800-square-foot houses—as diverse as exotic plants plucked from a rainforest—derive all their energy needs from a source that inspires no squabbling over quantity or price.
How well the houses harness the sun’s energy will be tested during the decathlon, which is an eight-day competition composed of 10 contests, ranging from categories in architecture, engineering, market viability, and interior comfort. The idea for the decathlon came from DOE’s energy concerns: finite fossil fuels, environmental degradation, and global warming.
Richard King, founder and director of the decathlon, believes that the competition can help alleviate those concerns. “We want to educate our students on energy efficiency and solar energy, on green building,” he says. “We’re training the young students who will design and build the houses of tomorrow—zero-energy, zero-carbon houses.”
For the decathlon to be worthwhile, King knew he had to recruit renowned architecture schools. Carnegie Mellon was repeatedly recommended to him and, in particular, Stephen Lee, an architecture professor who emphasizes sustainable, environmentally sound design. Lee accepted King’s invitation to participate, assembling a team for the first competition in 2002, and he is the faculty advisor again for Kish and his teammates. Carnegie Mellon is one of only six teams that have earned a place in every solar decathlon.
“Carnegie Mellon has always had dedicated and passionate teams who put every ounce of their energy into designing and building their houses, and they’ve always been successful,” says King.
The latest entry from Carnegie Mellon is put together again on the mall without a hitch. In the coming days, a line of visitors wind through the home, and the team overhears some gratifying exclamations:
This can’t be only 800 square feet! It has to be bigger than the other houses.
I could really imagine living here!
The guests witness the by-product of Carnegie Mellon’s multidisciplinary philosophy. Architecture students planned the home, while art, design, and drama students fused functionality with aesthetics to create the interior and exterior. Students from the College of Engineering and the Tepper School of Business also helped with the construction, management, and fundraising.
The structure is three wood-sided “pods”—kitchen, bedroom, and living/dining room—connected to a steel-clad “core.” Hence, the house’s name—TriPod. Visitors who open TriPod’s front door find an expansive area formed by the kitchen and living/dining pods merging across the core, which acts like an open hallway. In the kitchen, designed by industrial design students, stainless steel appliances reflect the core’s gleaming shell, complete with wine bottles perched in a rack on the broad counter. Across the blond highlights of the Pennsylvania longleaf yellow pine flooring, the living/dining pod opens up like a magazine foldout. Its shelving units, crafted by a School of Architecture design class, cover the walls in an array of quadrangular configurations, holding a laptop, a television, a collection of books. The home’s furnishings—the four-seat dining table, the couches, the numerous end tables—complement the home’s clean geometric box patterns. Plenty of green enters the house: Tousled spider plants lie about like festive wigs. Save for the colored mood lighting playing across the core’s lofted ceiling, TriPod’s warm glow derives entirely from sunlight diffusing through the house’s windows and glass doors.
Down the core’s hallway, past a frosted glass door, is the bathroom, also envisioned by industrial design students. A left turn leads into the bedroom pod, where even with a full-size bed made up in Tartan crimson sheets, six visitors peruse the room without brushing shoulders. Outside, a “greenscape”—a terraced arrangement of planters designed by School of Art students and watered by its own rain-collection tank—climbs the front of the house. In the marsh gardens at the base of the greenscape, fish dart like slivers of sunlight. A butterfly meanders among the bowing grasses.
At one point, the sun breaks out from the cover of gloomy clouds, gifting the crowded village with a brighter dose of the 45,151,524 trillion BTUs of energy sent to the Earth per year. Such a source could handle all of the world’s energy needs. The rays are welcomed into TriPod’s roof-mounted photovoltaics—solar panels—which convert roughly 18 percent of that energy into electricity. Stored in batteries for use on cloudy days, that energy is enough to power the house without any supplementary source. Also on the roof, the tubes of a solar thermal collection system draw on the sun’s rays to heat the water currently jetting from the house’s bathroom showerhead at a flow rate of 1.5 gallons per minute.
The Carnegie Mellon team needs every bit of that flow rate. The decathlon is under way, and TriPod is being put to the test.
In the bathroom, Kish and the team’s plumbing specialist, Rebecca Shore, a senior architecture major, peer anxiously at the steam in the shower stall. It’s the hot water competition. Can TriPod bring the heat: 15 gallons of 110-degree water within 10 minutes? Shore isn’t sure. She is suddenly worried that the pressure booster for the shower, which keeps the flow rate going, may be undersized. By now, though, Kish and Shore are used to odd problems and concerns cropping up at unexpected moments.
“Things sometimes didn’t work out in physical terms as they did in our drawings,” Shore says, “so every day we had to come up with new solutions.” Pipes not fitting into allotted spaces, doors not meeting building regulations, and materials arriving late. Even the original concept for the house was a months-long process of fits and starts and scrapped plans. “There was a lot of pushing and pulling about what would go in the house,” Kish says. The team traveled to Germany in June 2006 to brainstorm with the solar decathlon team from Technische Universität Darmstadt. (Students from that university had collaborated with Carnegie Mellon’s 2005 team, inspiring them to enter their own house in this competition.) By that fall, the design Kish and the rest of the team created in Germany encountered complications. Staircases took up too much square footage. The trapezoidal roof didn’t easily accommodate photovoltaic panels. So the team scrapped most of that plan for a new central concept: plug and play.
Imagine a computer motherboard. Different chips plugged into the motherboard can alter and enhance its functionality and performance. The core of TriPod contains all of the house’s mechanical systems: plumbing, electrical circuits, ventilation units. The pods are then “plugged” into the core; depending on the homeowner’s preference, varying sizes and numbers of pods can be connected. The centralization of the home’s essential systems, and the easy access to them behind floor and ceiling panels, makes servicing and upgrading simple. Even the house’s shelving system is fully modular, able to be plugged into the walls in any arrangement to meet the homeowner’s storage needs.
Practicality and consumer appeal aside, every aspect of the house was carefully considered for environmental impact. Construction materials were limited to recyclable metals and plastics. Wood was harvested using sustainable methods in Pennsylvania forests to reduce the energy expense of shipping. Through the pod windows, cool air flows in, and hot air rises through the higher core windows, limiting the need to use the home’s climate-control systems. Meanwhile, the structural insulated panels, the greenscape, and the additional plants that form a “green roof” on the kitchen pod all help maintain the house’s temperature.
Now, Kish and Shore watch eagerly as the judge clicks the stopwatch: 10 minutes passed. The pressure booster proved strong enough to reach the 15-gallon hot-water goal. The judge tells the teammates that TriPod has the most efficient shower in the competition.
A few days later, the decathlon ends. Carnegie Mellon placed first in the energy balance competition (TriPod produced more energy than it used), and the team’s German counterpart, the Technische Universität Darmstadt team, won the overall title. In their speech, the winners thanked the Carnegie Mellon team for their support and inspiration (the only team they mentioned).
For Kish, the competition goes beyond trophies and handshakes. He believes that TriPod offers a blueprint for lifestyles that conserve energy and produce less waste. He notes that systems like TriPod’s solar thermal collector are already inexpensive and easy to install, and other options like high-quality insulation, energy-efficient windows and appliances, and passive temperature-control strategies are all readily available to home builders.
“The cost of fossil fuels will be going up in the next 5 to 10 years, and the cost of things like photovoltaic panels will be going down, so there will be a critical point in the near future where renewable energy will become an economically viable solution,” he says.
TriPod’s future will be at the Powdermill Nature Reserve near Pittsburgh, where it will serve as an environmental classroom and lasting testament to the team’s innovation.
Kish’s future is intertwined with the past. He remembers one day in particular, in the Construction Junction parking lot, when rain started to pock on TriPod’s steel core like hundreds of nail guns firing. He ran from the ungrounded house as lightning flashed, joining his teammates under an overhang and watching in awe as the storm raged, the charged sky a dynamo of sheer power. As the storm tapered into a steady downpour, the water streamed in sheets down the nearby railroad jetty, and the greenscape’s rain barrels overflowed. Kish and his teammates gave up on work for the day. They ran out in the rain, stomped in puddles, splashed and laughed and drank it all in, the abundance of nature. It seemed to Kish like the springs of energy and enthusiasm inside them were replenishing. It seemed like a renewal.
Bo Schwerin is an award-winning freelance writer based in Baltimore and an adjunct professor at the University of Maryland, where he teaches writing.
