Breaking from tradition Techstyle

RENEWED FOCUS: A team of students is building Techstyle Haus, a 750-square-foot prototype that produces its own energy. Above, from left: Rhode Island School of Design students Colin Wiencek, Kim Dupont-Madinier, RISD associate professor of architecture Jonathan Knowles and Brown University student Helen Bergstrom. / PBN PHOTO/RUPERT WHITELEY
RENEWED FOCUS: A team of students is building Techstyle Haus, a 750-square-foot prototype that produces its own energy. Above, from left: Rhode Island School of Design students Colin Wiencek, Kim Dupont-Madinier, RISD associate professor of architecture Jonathan Knowles and Brown University student Helen Bergstrom. / PBN PHOTO/RUPERT WHITELEY

The Techstyle Haus, which is, literally, a textile house with a flexible exterior using high-performance material with solar cells laminated to the fabric, is rising in a Providence warehouse.
There are no solar panels, no racks to hold them, no plywood, no wallboard – basically, no traditional building materials.
This 17-foot-high, 750-square-foot prototype of a leading-edge dwelling has to produce its own energy for a fully equipped kitchen, heating, air conditioning, lighting, computer and TV.
The light-filled, flexible shell residence is being built by a team of students from Brown University, Rhode Island School of Design and the University of Applied Sciences in Erfurt, Germany. It is one of two U.S. entries, and one of 20 teams worldwide, selected to participate in the Solar Decathlon Europe 2014 in Versailles, France, beginning June 28.
“The design is just so different. I think RISD has an innovative way of approaching architecture,” said Gareth Rose, a sophomore in mechanical engineering at Brown who began working on the project when the idea for a Solar Decathlon entry was being crystallized a year-and-a-half ago.
“If you look at the pictures of the other Solar Decathlon houses that have been built before, almost all of them are rectangular, or a series of rectangles, with high-tech energy efficiency, and they’re ugly,” said Rose. “Techstyle Haus is beautiful.”
Rose is one of a broad cross-section of what has grown to be about 200 students from the three colleges who have participated in designing, generating funding and building the Techstyle Haus.
About 40 of those students make up a core crew working on the project regularly, right through to the time they disassemble what they’ve built in Providence, pack it up for overseas shipping and have 30 members of that team reassemble it at the competition in France.
Students participating include RISD students majoring in furniture design, textile design and architecture, and Brown students majoring in engineering and environmental studies
“I’m interested in electric cars, sustainable housing, sustainable anything,” said Rose, who is 19 years old and is the sponsorship manager for the Techstyle Haus project, which has so far gained funding, supplies and expertise from 17 companies. “I was too young when we started to do much related to engineering. I was a freshman at the beginning of my engineering education, so I got into project management. I try to account for what our needs are and get sponsors, so I’ve learned to write lots of emails asking for money.” So far, so good.
About $550,000 has been raised already toward the total project budget of $710,000, which includes everything from the estimated $200,000 cost of building the prototype house to travel expenses for student teams going to France to construct the house during the 10-day competition, according to Techstyle Haus project manager Jonathan Knowles, an associate professor of architecture at RISD.
“This competition puts our students in a very real-world situation before they graduate,” said Knowles. “In addition to the design and construction, they do fundraising, they make presentations and they recruit the businesses.”
Corporate support is a critical element for competing in the Solar Decathlon.
“Shawmut gave us $10,000, but the value of their help is so much more,” said Rose. “They connected us to other sponsors, like plumbers and electricians.”
In addition to funding, Shawmut Design and Construction, which is based in Boston, has staff from its Providence office serving as advisers to the student team.
“Most of these students have had no real experience in building, so we safety-train all of the students working onsite,” said Kyle Lloyd, a Shawmut project executive based in Providence who is serving as an adviser. “All of them have gotten OSHA-10 certification.” That training is a basic construction safety course.
“They’re going to have to deconstruct the house and bring it over to Versailles, France, and re-erect it there, so they need a lot of practice in how the parts and pieces go together,” said Lloyd.
While the main photovoltaic skin of the house, the textile with solar cells laminated to it, has been used for large projects such as athletic stadiums or outdoor band shells, it has generally not been used as a primary material in residential building, said Lloyd.
The textile is from Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics in Merrimack, N.H., a division of the world’s largest building-materials company based in France.
The textile shell required complementary innovation to meet the Decathlon goal of a highly energy-efficient house.
“It’s really a challenging building problem to put something so atypical together, and even though the shell material has been used in other applications, for instance a pavilion for a concert, we’re taking the next step – no one has really tried to use it with insulation,” said Sina Almassi, the student project manager for Techstyle Haus, who has taken a leave of absence from his master’s degree track in architecture at RISD to work on the solar-decathlon project. “Normally walls are straight, but we have this curvilinear shape, so we’ve had to invent a way to combine that with insulation,” said Almassi. Designers devised a way to have insulation match the shell using a material like seatbelt strapping to secure the insulation.
Brown chemical engineering major Helen Bergstrom is working on energy systems for TechStyle Haus.
“The main point of the house is to have a lot of passive solar gain,” said Bergstrom. “We have two walls that are completely windows, on the north and south. They’re specially designed windows, using a triple-pane system that allows in light and heat, but keeps from losing energy through the windows.”
The U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon began in 2002 and grew into a collaboration with European agencies in 2007, when Spain hosted the first complementary event in Europe. The competition challenges collegiate teams to design, build and operate solar-powered houses that are cost-effective, energy-efficient and attractive.
The Solar Decathlon Europe 2014 will be held from June 28 to July 14, but Rhode Island’s visibility on the global architecture and sustainable-energy landscape won’t end there.
After the competition, the student team will once again disassemble the house and reassemble it on the campus of the art institute Domaine de Boisbuchet in Lessac, France, where it will remain and be used as a four-person dormitory.
There, Rhode Island companies that provided materials and expertise, such as Shawmut, as well as Bristol-based marine canvas producer Kinder Industries, Cumberland-based architectural woodworking company Herrick & White and the Warwick facility of German heating systems manufacturer Viessmann will remain in the international spotlight.
“That design institute is a very prestigious venue,” said Knowles. “Very famous designers teach there during the summer. We’re going to get a lot of exposure with people moving through our Techstyle Haus.” •

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