Construction officially began last Tuesday on a solar house that produces twice the energy it consumes.

The house, called a GRoW Home, was designed by a team of students from the University at Buffalo and the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry. GRoW stands for Garden, Relax or Work, the lifestyle message behind the home and one that Martha Bohm, a professor at UB, is trying to promote.

This project is being built for the Solar Decathlon, which is a competition held every two years and sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy that challenges collegiate teams across the globe to design, build and operate a house that uses less energy than it produces. The next part of the competition will take place in the fall in Irvine, California when all the pieces will be shipped to California and construction will continue there.

“It is a collaborative project, it is interdisciplinary and it has been a really fun experience for me as a faculty member to have something that is not just the genius of one person, but is the genius of many people who have many different skills that are coming together,” Bohm said. “So hopefully with all of that genius pooled into one project, we’re going to make our schools proud.”

The architecture team at UB partnered with the landscape architecture department at SUNY-ESF in order to discover the best design for the house.

“In simplest terms, the architects design the building and the landscape architects design everything that is outside the building,” Bohm said.

Jamie Vanucchi, an assistant professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture at SUNY-ESF, said landscape architecture is not a major that is offered at all schools; it is different in that the program deals with ecological systems.

The goal is to create a house in a landscape where both the house and the landscape are active parts in creating a more sustainable environment, Vanucchi said.

Vanucchi said it would be hard to find a landscape architecture project that was not multifunctional; the architects consider the ecology, the social and cultural aspects, the history of the region and the aesthetics of the project on the whole. She said the department at SUNY-ESF looks at all of this but focuses more on the sustainable and ecological design side.

The GRoW Home has been in development for two years. There was a seminar class in spring 2013 to figure out what a sustainable house would look like in Buffalo. Those involved observed the history and architecture of Buffalo, the demographics in the area, as well as any energy concerns from an availability and cost perspective to find emerging trends in the community.

The upstate New York area predictably had very high energy costs and extreme energy demands due to climate which drove the students to create a very high-performing house.

Another thing they noticed is there was a lot of land in Buffalo being recaptured by communities for gardening purposes, including community gardens and productive farms. The team liked the idea of incorporating the garden landscape into the design of their house.

“It wasn’t just about a house as an object, but a way of living,” Bohm said.

Bohm hopes the project inspires people to think about ways of living — where food comes from, growing and purchasing food locally, reducing the energy that the entire community is spending, not just the one homeowner.

Said Bohm: “We’re not trying to change everyone’s mind but to get people thinking in a new direction.”

Published on March 29, 2015 at 10:44 pm

Contact Anjali: acalwis@syr.edu