2011 Solar Decathlon

The second time was the charm for University of Maryland. The school took second place in Solar Decathlon 2007 and parlayed its experience into a very solid first-place finish in the 2011 edition, which wound down on Sunday in Washington, D.C.’s West Potomac Park after almost two weeks of site preparation and installation work, visitors, and evaluations in the competition’s 10 contest categories.

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p>After being in the construction business in one form or another for more than 20 years, I often feel jaded by our lack of progress in building long-lasting, energy-efficient homes despite decades of trying. Well, my trip last week to the 2011 Solar Decathlon has given me renewed hope. The young people who designed and built the 19 homes in the event had more smarts and enthusiasm than I could ever have anticipated. And they made really nice houses, too. Even the designs and features I was skeptical of proved thought-provoking and interesting.

The newest of the 2011 Solar Decathlon’s 10 contest categories – affordability – has become an impressive showcase for design ingenuity, and powerful evidence that building energy-efficient homes doesn’t have to bust the bank.

The rules are simple: homes that cost $250,000 or less to build earn the contest category maximum of 100 points, while homes costing more than $250,000 lose points on a sliding scale that tapers to zero at the contest limit of $600,000.

For the next several days, “home” for the 19 teams competing in the 2011 Solar Decathlon will be a stretch of the National Mall West in Washington, D.C., that separates the Potomac River from the Tidal Basin.

University of Tennessee’s Living Light is among the 2011 Solar Decathlon’s more straightforward expressions of form and function, with heavily glazed north and south walls and a compact, steel-framed rectangular shape that allows it to be lifted onto a set of truck-trailer wheels, coupled to a road tractor, and hauled down the highway like a moving van.

A flood, tornado, hurricane, or earthquake might dissipate relatively quickly, but the damage it causes can last for years. That concern is at the heart of Re_home, the Solar Decathlon project developed by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Team Tidewater Virginia set out to build a house that will work exceptionally well as a stand-alone home. The modular house is also designed to work as one of six units in a multifamily project being designed for the Park Place neighborhood of downtown Norfolk, Virginia.

The University of Maryland is a veteran Solar Decathlon competitor, with three contests already under its belt — including a second-place win behind Technische Universität Darmstadt in the 2007 competition.

Densely packed and pricey as it is, New York City usually isn’t thought of as fertile ground for single-family-home development, particularly if the goal is to keep construction costs low. And yet Team New York – a collaboration of students and faculty at the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture and the Grove School of Engineering, of the City College of New York – has found a comfortable place in the city for the single-family concept to roost: the rooftop.

The target market for Team New Jersey’s entry in the 2011 Solar Decathlon is a couple (perhaps retired) who wants a small, durable, energy-efficient house suitable for the Jersey shore. And in practical terms, trying to appeal to home buyers longing for respite somewhere along New Jersey’s long, lively, and mostly pleasant Atlantic coastline probably isn’t a bad idea, provided you’re willing to put up with allusions to MTV’s “Jersey Shore.”