Charette: Sustainable Home

Thursday I attended the Eastern PA chapter of AIA's design charette for students (and architects) in the area. I served as a "sketchup facilitator," which meant my sole job was to create a sketchup model of whatever design my team of 15+ students and professionals came up with. I wasn't allowed to participate in the designing portion. I will offer that 15+ people in an hour and a half wouldn't have afforded me much opportunity to participate anyway! However, it was still interesting. My only qualm was the communication that seemed to lack between my group and I, for example literally 2 minutes before the models were "due," some of my team members came up to me and said that we needed some skylights on the roof... And of course they weren't just ordinary skylights, they had to be some funky shape. Needless to say, that did not make it into the model.

I will admit it was kind of fun to fiddle in sketchup, and as a bonus I received a Dunkin Donuts gift card as compensation for my services. As another bonus, I can hopefully count the experience as 4 hours towards community service for my IDP.

I have included some screenshots of the model below for your viewing pleasure. To give you a sense of the design challenge, the teams were to design a home for a group of 4 (college students, family members, roommates, etc.) incorporating various sustainable technologies. This challenge was inspired by the Decathlon. The site was an open lot on Hamilton Street in Allentown, PA. My team decided on a mixed-use facility where the family who lived upstairs owned and operated the bike shop/gym downstairs. Part of their design was the implementation of stationary bicycles rigged to generators to produce electricity... I swear I had nothing to do with this concept!






For the record, my team was a "close second." Out of 3 teams we received Gold (as you know, with LEED the ratings are silver, gold and platinum).