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By TIM FAULKNER/ecoRI News staff This solar home features high-tech fabrics made in New England. It will soon be disassembled and shipped to France for a solar-home competition. (Tim Faulkner/ecoRI News) PROVIDENCE — A home that uses the same amount of power as a hair dryer is on its way to France for a student solar competition.
The futuristic Techstyle Haus, made of high-tech fabric and steel, is the culmination of 18 months of shared work by students from Rhode Island School of Design, Brown University and the University of Applied Sciences in Germany. The 200-square-foot structure is one of 20 entrants by university teams in the 2014 Solar Decathlon Europe, an international competition to build a full-scale, functional, solar structure. Techstyle Haus has one bedroom and one bath, a kitchen and a multi-functional open space that can accommodate more bedrooms. The competition requires the home to be off-the-grid and energy efficient. Flexible solar panels generate electricity and heat water. A rainwater collection system supplies water. Wastewater flows through a gray water system and is discharged through an on-site septic system. Super-insulated floors and walls and a energy-recovery system provide high efficiency. "For us it’s a way of pushing boundaries and questioning how homes are really built,” said Jason Askew, a third-year student in RISD’s graduate architecture program. The competition has a strong focus on architectural design to challenge the notion that solar and energy-efficient homes are boxy, with unsightly solar panels. Solar homes, Askew said, can be “exuberant, playful and beautiful.” The home’s shell, walls and insulation use innovative fabrics researched by RISD’s textile department. The fiberglass-based Sheerfill, made in New Hampshire, provides the fabric shell. The white fabric is commonly used as a cover for athletic stadiums and other large structures, such as Denver International Airport. The competition's homes also are designed to be mobile to challenge the concept of suburban sprawl and reduce impacts on open space. By mid-June, the home and about 40 student from the U.S.-German team will join the other entrants in a temporary solar community on the grounds of the Palace of Versailles. Each collegiate team's entry is judged on aesthetics, innovation, efficiency and livability. The structure was assembled at a local office park and is slowly being dismantled and stored in two shipping containers for an ocean voyage to France. Watch a live feed of the disassembly here. The Techstyle Haus team is one of two entrants from the United States. The other is a partnership between Appalachian State University and a French university.
RISD associate professor of architecture John Knowles first entered RISD in the 2005 Solar Decathlon in Washington, D.C. That home now sits at Portsmouth Abbey School in Portsmouth, not far from the private school’s wind turbine. The Solar Decathlon began in 2002 through the U.S. Department of Energy. It’s held alternate years in United States and Europe. China recently joined the program.
Their designs are generated by computer simulations that are based on processes and patterns found in nature.
Bob Thayer/The Providence Journal
Jonathan Knowles, associate professor of architecture at the Rhode Isand School of Design, right, describes the "soft house" during a critique session at the school.
BY ALEX KUFFNER Journal Staff Writer akuffner@providencejournal.com
PROVIDENCE — It’s not often that architects worry about a house blowing away, taking off like a kite caught in an updraft. But that was one possibility that couldn’t be ignored when the designers of a house made of a fabric that has the look and feel of sail cloth met on a recent afternoon at the Rhode Island School of Design. “It brings up an obvious point,” Peter Dean, assistant professor of furniture design, said as he studied a scale model of the house. “Does this whole thing become airborne?” His comment met with laughs but it also led to a serious discussion among the couple dozen students and teachers in the classroom about how to anchor the lightweight structure so it can withstand a strong gust of wind. It was an unusual conversation, but then everything about the Techstyle Haus is unusual. The 800-square-foot house will showcase the latest in sustainable design. It will use 90 percent less energy than the typical home. A 5-kilowatt solar array will generate all the electricity it needs. A small solar thermal system will provide all its hot water. The one-bedroom house will also be mobile, able to be taken apart in sections, moved and reassembled. And as the name of the house — pronounced like “textile” — suggests, the primary building material will be fabric, with the outer shell made of woven fiberglass.
The project, a collaboration between students from RISD, Brown University and the University of Erfurt in Germany, was conceived for the 2014 Solar Decathlon Europe, an international competition sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy to see who can design the most innovative energy-efficient homes. The house will be built in Rhode Island and shipped next summer to France, where the Palace of Versailles will become home to a village of 20 solar homes designed by teams of college students from Japan, India, Spain and other countries. The Techstyle Haus is one of only two U.S.-based entries in the competition. The project was started a year ago by Jonathan Knowles, associate professor of architecture at RISD and a designer of net-zero energy homes — homes that create all the power they use. Knowles helped lead the RISD team that entered a design in the 2005 Solar Decathlon in Washington, D.C. That house is now used for faculty housing at Portsmouth Abbey, the private school on Aquidneck Island. He had been wanting to participate again but the competition is expensive and the recession had made funding difficult. The partnership between the three schools allowed them to enter the 2014 competition. Four students at RISD and Brown initially signed up, but the team quickly grew to more than 60 members, expanding into many departments at the schools, including architecture, engineering, textile design, furniture design and landscape architecture.
Derek Stein, assistant professor of physics at Brown, is heading up his school’s contributions. Students at Erfurt are working on the energy analysis for the house.
“It started more as an extracurricular activity,” said Grace Wong, a senior RISD architecture student and one of the original members of the team. “It eventually became a much larger thing.” Their idea was to create a habitation that would meet the standards for what’s known as a passive house, a structure that is so well-insulated and sealed so tight that it needs little, if any, heating. “The analogy they use is that you only need a hair dryer to heat your home,” said Knowles. The tiny energy footprint is not the only feature that sets the fully-functioning house apart from traditional structures. It will also have a small materials footprint. It won’t use any drywall and only a minimum of wood. The curvy structure will be supported by a series of ribs, with an interior lined in a fabric designed at RISD and an exterior made of SheerFill, a durable fiberglass material that has been used on roofs for stadiums and shopping centers but never for entire houses. Flexible photovoltaic cells to generate power will be embedded in the fiberglass, so the roof won’t be encumbered by bulky solar panels. That has also never been done before, said Knowles. Part of the roof will be translucent to let in natural light. Walls of glass at either end of the house will also maximize light exposure and help create heat in the winter. Photoluminescent paint, which absorbs sunlight during the day and glows in the dark, will replace electric lights in places, such as the path to the hub that will house the bathroom, kitchen and mechanical systems.
“When you get up and go to the bathroom at night, you won’t have to turn on the lights,” said Kim Dupont-Madinier, a senior RISD architecture student. The house will cost an estimated $700,000 to design and build. So far, the project team has raised $500,000 in cash donations, materials and technical expertise from Saint-Gobain, the French manufacturer of SheerFill, and other companies, including Taco, the Cranston heating components maker, and Providence’s Shawmut Design and Construction. Ximedica, the Providence medical products company founded by RISD graduates Stephen Lane and Aidan Petrie, has cleared half its warehouse in Cranston to give the team enough space to build the sections of the house. A manager from Shawmut will oversee construction, which must be done entirely by the students. Team members showed their design at the U.S. Embassy in Paris in November and earlier this month gave a presentation to U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a leading supporter in Congress of renewable energy. The team is not just building the house for the competition. Domaine de Boisbuchet, an arts retreat in France associated with some of Europe’s leading design museums and schools, has agreed to take the structure afterward, place it in an apple orchard and test it out as a dormitory. If it works, the organization will commission up to seven more of the houses.
Under the rules of the Solar Decathlon, competitors are not allowed to build foundations for their houses or otherwise dig into the ground. They cannot pour concrete or drill holes. They can only hammer stakes in the ground if needed. While other teams will be able to sit their structures on the ground without much concern, the Techstyle Haus team will have a more difficult time. Unlike a tent that has guy wires holding it down, for aesthetic reasons, the house must be self-anchored. The exterior fabric walls will be cinched down to a steel I-beam. They will also be weighted with ballast. The idea is to create a type of modular home, one with a soft shell. “You can pick this thing up and put it anywhere,” Brett Schneider, a RISD professor of architecture, said at the final design critique last week.
But using fabric is a challenge. “It’s less material and a lot more engineering,” Knowles said. “It’s harder engineering,” said Montana Feiger, a senior structural engineering student at Brown who is coordinating the work with Saint-Gobain. So far, the team has built a mock-up of one of the house’s sections, but construction of the actual house won’t start until Jan. 6. The team must have everything ready to be shipped by May 1. Once the pieces arrive in Paris, the students will have only 10 days to put the house together for the competition that starts in mid-June.“We’ll have enough time — if we’re on time,” said Dupont-Madinier, who is serving as the assistant to the project manager. Summer weather in France can be volatile. Team members wondered what would happen to their creation if a nasty storm rolls through Versailles. “The beautiful thing about a big rainstorm is that everyone will run inside and hold the house in place,” said Dean.
Lewis Mumford, KBE (October 19, 1895 – January 26, 1990) was an American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and literary critic. Particularly noted for his study of cities and urban architecture, he had a broad career as a writer. Mumford was influenced by the work of Scottish theorist Sir Patrick Geddes and worked closely with his associate the British sociologist Victor Branford Mumford was also a contemporary and friend of Frank Lloyd Wright, Clarence Stein, Frederic Osborn, Edmund N. Bacon, and Vannevar Bush.
Mumford believed that what defined humanity, what set human beings apart from other animals, was not primarily our use of tools (technology) but our use of language (symbols). He was convinced that the sharing of information and ideas amongst participants of primitive societies was completely natural to early humanity, and had obviously been the foundation of society as it became more sophisticated and complex. He had hopes for a continuation of this process of information “pooling” in the world as humanity moved into the future. Mumford's choice of the word "technics" throughout his work was deliberate. For Mumford, technology is one part of technics. Using the broader definition of the Greek tekhne, which means not only technology but also art, skill and dexterity, technics refers to the interplay of a social milieu and technological innovation—the "wishes, habits, ideas, goals" as well as "industrial processes" of a society. As Mumford writes at the beginning of Technics and Civilization, "other civilizations reached a high degree of technical proficiency without, apparently, being profoundly influenced by the methods and aims of technics."
University of Rhode Island
Look into all your resources. Your teachers will be able to give you great advice and help you look for an internship. Many advisors are able to help as well. Job fairs are important to go to as well and they are held throughout the year and focus on different on majors. Workshops are held to help develop skills needed in order to get a job, such as how to take an interview and how to write a résumé and a cover letter. The Career Services Department is always there to help and advise any student. Read more: colleges.niche.com/university-of-rhode-island/jobs--and--...A LEARNING TOOL.The Rhode Island General Assembly ratified “An Act to Incorporate the Rhode Island School of Design” on March 22, 1877. “For the purpose of aiding in the cultivation of the arts of design.” Over the next 129 years, the following original by-laws set forth these following primary objectives: First. The instruction of artisans in drawing, painting, modeling, and designing, that they may successfully apply the principles of Art to the requirements of trade and manufacture. Second. The systematic training of students in the practice of Art, in order that they may understand its principles, give instruction to others, or become artists. Third. The general advancement of public Art Education, by the exhibition of works of Art and of Art school studies, and by lectures on Art. TECHSTYLE HAUS is first and foremost a learning tool. By choosing to work with textiles, we are inevitably challenging conventional architectural practices and approaching homebuilding with a fresh perspective. This challenge has encouraged us to consider the problem with playful and willing minds and has given us the opportunity to invent new solutions to old problems. By John Knowles RISD associate professor of architecture
STUDENT TEAM STARTS BUILDING TECHSTYLE HAUS FOR THE SOLAR DECATHLON EUROPE 2014 COMPETITION.
Team including representatives from Brown University, the Rhode Island School of Design, and the University of Applied Sciences of Erfurt, Germany begin building their entry to the Solar Decathlon Europe 2014 Competition, a passive house made entirely of high-performance textiles.
PROVIDENCE, RI, FEBRUARY 3, 2014.
BUILDING HAS BEGUN.
After over a year of designing, planning, and designing some more, TECHSTYLE HAUS has finally begun fabrication. The team has set up a build site to construct the pieces of TECHSTYLE HAUS at a warehouse in Providence owned by Ximedica. With the help of Shawmut Construction, students have learned about the essentials of safe building and site management.
While some students built model floor pallets, others completed a full scale mock-up of a section of the house to study the wall assembly and insulation composition. Other parts of the TECHSTYLE HAUS design have been finalized:
Design of the decks and foundation pallets
Design of the mechanical core, with help from Herrick & White
Design of the HVAC system, with help from Viessmann and TACO
Engineering specifications of the steel structure, with help from Chicago Rolled Metal Products and Simpson Gumpertz & Heger
Engineering and design specifications of the Sheerfill membrane, with help from Saint-Gobain and Birdair
Furniture and interior finish selections, with help from Vitra
Even though the team has much more construction ahead of them, they are all eager to don their hard hats to realize their vision for a new type of sustainable housing. Construction is slated to be complete by the end of April so that the project can be packed up and shipped (thankfully it’s made of lightweight textiles) to France, ready to be re-erected for the Solar Decathlon Europe Competition in June.
TECHSTYLE HAUS.
Challenging problems desire challenging solutions. The world is rocked by volatile climate change, resource depletion, and social upheaval; and architects must design in response to the needs of the times. We cannot hope to design for the new world if our ideas of architecture are mired in the definitions of the past.
SOLAR DECATHLON
STUDENT TEAM STARTS BUILDING TECHSTYLE HAUS FOR THE SOLAR DECATHLON EUROPE 2014 COMPETITION.
Team including representatives from Brown University, the Rhode Island School of Design, and the University of Applied Sciences of Erfurt, Germany begin building their entry to the Solar Decathlon Europe 2014 Competition, a passive house made entirely of high-performance textiles.
PROVIDENCE, RI, FEBRUARY 3, 2014.
BUILDING HAS BEGUN.
After over a year of designing, planning, and designing some more, TECHSTYLE HAUS has finally begun fabrication. The team has set up a build site to construct the pieces of TECHSTYLE HAUS at a warehouse in Providence owned by Ximedica. With the help of Shawmut Construction, students have learned about the essentials of safe building and site management.
While some students built model floor pallets, others completed a full scale mock-up of a section of the house to study the wall assembly and insulation composition. Other parts of the TECHSTYLE HAUS design have been finalized:
Design of the decks and foundation pallets
Design of the mechanical core, with help from Herrick & White
Design of the HVAC system, with help from Viessmann and TACO
Engineering specifications of the steel structure, with help from Chicago Rolled Metal Products and Simpson Gumpertz & Heger
Engineering and design specifications of the Sheerfill membrane, with help from Saint-Gobain and Birdair
Furniture and interior finish selections, with help from Vitra
Even though the team has much more construction ahead of them, they are all eager to don their hard hats to realize their vision for a new type of sustainable housing. Construction is slated to be complete by the end of April so that the project can be packed up and shipped (thankfully it’s made of lightweight textiles) to France, ready to be re-erected for the Solar Decathlon Europe Competition in June.
TECHSTYLE HAUS.
Challenging problems desire challenging solutions. The world is rocked by volatile climate change, resource depletion, and social upheaval; and architects must design in response to the needs of the times. We cannot hope to design for the new world if our ideas of architecture are mired in the definitions of the past.
SOLAR DECATHLON COMPETITION.
The 2014 European Solar Decathlon is an international competition that challenges 20 university teams to compete in ten contests to build a completely solar-powered house. Contests include Innovation, Architecture, Sustainability, and Energy Efficiency.
TEAM.
We are a dedicated and diverse team from Brown University, The Rhode Island School of Design, and the University of Applied Sciences of Erfurt, Germany. Together, our goal is to challenge the very definition of sustainable building design, harness new material potentials, and embrace the spirit of innovation.
VERSAILLES.
The competition takes place in Versailles, France between June 26 and July 11, immediately after a short assembly phase starting June 13.
BOISBUCHET.
Following a brief breakdown at the competition, TECHSTYLE HAUS will be moved to Domaine de Boisbuchet, a prestigious campus for art and design workshops in Lessac, France. The house will serve as a prototype that will be aggregated, creating a dense student commune for 40 students. Following assembly, TECHSTYLE HAUS will be continually monitored and studied to not only test its performance, but its viability as a new kind of sustainable development.
A LEARNING TOOL.
TECHSTYLE HAUS is first and foremost a learning tool. By choosing to work with textiles, we are inevitably challenging conventional architectural practices and approaching homebuilding with a fresh perspective. This challenge has encouraged us to consider the problem with playful and willing minds and has given us the opportunity to invent new solutions to old problems.
PASSIVE HOUSE.
The house may inspire active experience, but will be built to the Passive House Standard, the premier benchmark for energy performance. TECHSTYLE HAUS will challenge the typical idea of a passive, high-performance house (with its four thick walls and highly insulated ceilings), to one with sweeping arches and an innovative textile wall enclosure.
TEXTILE SKIN.
Our most innovative invention is our textile wall assembly. Textiles intelligently layer to create a high-performance exterior enclosure suitable for Passive House Standard, while integrating textural interior textiles.
SOLAR ENERGY.
We are utilizing textile-integrated flexible solar photovoltaic cells and solar thermal units to harness energy, making for an entirely off-the-grid house.
LIFESTYLE.
TECHSTYLE HAUS features an open and flexible plan suitable for multiple lifestyles. Aside from the compact core for utilities, the house can be adapted and defined by its inhabitants. The design will incorporate Saint Gobain’s Multi-Comfort principles to ensure a maximized interior environment.
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Textiles created by Corinne Okada Takara and garment by Colleen Quen. TECHstyle SoftWEAR: Surface & Shape, San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles, 2010.
Model, Brittany Armstrong, struts down the runway wearing black and white dress with a flower umbrella, made by Alexis Kruse, a senior apparel design major from Austin, during the TechStyle 2013 Senior Fashion Show, on Saturday in the Allen Theater in the Student Union building.
Photo of people standing outside Techstyle Haus at the ribbon cutting ceremony, viewing the house's southern facade.
Photo of the kitchen and living area of Techstyle Haus with interior lighting. Credit Kristen Pelou.
Photo of people on the boom lift and roof of Techstyle Haus installing the flexible solar PV panels on the roof.
By photographer David O'Connor.
Photo of people carrying the flexible solar PV panels to the house, including RISD trustee Stephen Metcalf (left in yellow hard hat), RISD Faculty Advisor Jonathan Knowles (center in black with orange hard hat), RI Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (center in suit and tie with yellow hard hat), Brown Faculty Advisor Derek Stein (second from the right with green hard hat), and RISD student Kim Dupont-Madinier (right with orange hard hat).
By photographer David O'Connor.
Photo of RISD student Kim Dupont-Madinier (left) giving Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island a tour of the house.
By photographer David O'Connor.
Photo of interior work, including preparing for insulation and windows, at the Solar Decathlon site.