New Designs For Smarter Buildings

After two years of design, experimentation, fund-raising and building, the University of Arizona's Solar Decathlon team has completed construction of its 800-square-foot solar-powered house on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The UA's team will compete with entries from 14 other states, Puerto Rico, Canada, Germany and Spain.

The Solar Decathlon effort is but one of the UA's efforts to broaden the horizon of sustainable architecture and building.

"I think what you're looking at is a college that has made a strategic decision to really focus in on sustainability," said Janice Cervelli, dean of the UA College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture. "What we specialize in is the practice of – we're not theoretical, we're not conceptual."

One of the signature features of the Decathlon house – a water-filled Trombe wall that forms a solar thermal collector – came together in a capstone class. Eddie Hall, who recently earned an architecture degree but remains with the Decathlon team, said the idea evolved from his work with Álvaro Malo, director of the UA's emerging materials technology program.

"The principle," Hall explained, "is that you put a piece of glazing over something with high density." Sunlight comes through the glass and the radiant heat is absorbed by the mass and warms the air between the glass and the wall.

"At nighttime, when the temperature drops, that heat can't get back out through that glass. It has no direction to go but in." Warm air rises in the cavity and can be directed into the house through louvers in winter, or vented outside in summer.

With a particular interest in materials, Hall began investigating plastic packaging technology. "How do they make water bottles?" he said. "How do they make blister packaging? Why is it considered so cheap and throwaway and then it ends up in our ocean and causes all sorts of problems? Well, what if you were to take it and use it in a more permanent application?"