Where are the Solar Decathlon Houses Now?
The Architecture winner for 2009, the Refract House by Team California (Santa Clara University and California College of the Arts) will be reassembled in front of the San Jose City Hall for public tours. Colorado’s bio-based house, the all-around winner in 2005, hopes to settle in Greensburg, Kansas, as part of the town’s post-tornado green revitalization.
Like many teams, the entrants from the University of Virginia hoped their 2002 house would provide affordable housing to a family, but the costs and complexities of maintaining such as house made that unrealistic. RISD’s radical 2005 rowhouse lives at a private school in Rhode Island which has alternative energy facilities. The winning 2009 house from the Technical University of Darmstadt will eventually join its equally successful predecessor on campus, as part of the university’s Solare Lichtwiese, or Solar Campus, project to feed the sun’s power into the German grid, but first it will summer in Madrid, competing in the newly franchised Solar Decathlon Europe in June.
Virginia Tech’s 2002 house has retired to academia, serving as a laboratory for engineering and architecture, but its descendants have been traveling. After touring the state, VT’s 2005 house became the temporary home for State Senator Frank W. Wagner (R, VA-7) on the grounds of the Thomas Jefferson-designed State Capitol in Richmond, before returning to campus. The 2009 Lumenhaus, also by Virginia Tech, spent the month before the Decathlon on the west lawn of the National Building Museum, where visitors were able to witness the final stages of its preparation. After the Decathlon, it sat in New York’s Times Square for about fifteen seconds of fame on Good Morning America. Next, the Lumenhaus heads to Spain as one of two US entries—the other from the University of Florida—to face a global field, including rival Darmstadt, in Madrid.
