Royer Jade - Solar Futures

For 15 months, my teammates and I have been working on the Solar Decathlon Build Challenge 2023. This worldwide competition consists of finding innovative ways to build sustainably. Our three main challenges are climate by avoiding traditional construction that is wasteful and harms the environment, cost where Los Angeles has one of the highest housing prices in the nation, and homelessness with over 69,000 unhoused individuals now living on the streets of LA county due to market fluctuations, construction cost increases, and low supply/high demand for housing. Therefore, we decided to build the first permitted 3D-printed house in Southern California located at Woodbury University in Los Angeles. The design is formed from the data and research we did to have the most efficient project to save energy, for a passive system, modularity, open layout, to waste less material, to have a cleaner and faster printing time for the walls, and to be innovative and have interesting details. To be net positive, we are recycling and reusing as much water as possible by using a filter for the greywater and capturing the rainwater for the landscape. There are also photovoltaic panels on the roof. The materials chosen are also sustainable where we are recycling and reusing as much as possible to lower the embodied environmental impact. We did research on how to make the concrete environmentally friendly for instance using CarbonCure which captures the CO2 that goes in the concrete mix which also contains 40% of fly ash, a by-product of coal, or trying to use nanofoam to tailor our mix.

Instructor: Kishani De Silva & Hector Rodriguez

Software: Revit, Rhino, Sefaira, Climate Consultant Lumion,

Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere

For more info: https://solar.woodbury.edu/

Instagram: @solar_futures_wsoa