This New House

With the world quickly using up its fossil fuels and driving itself further toward irreversible climate change, it’s easy to fall into despair about the future of domestic life. Cheap energy, land, water and building materials have made the last century of American homebuilding a story of ever-expanding luxury. Arguably, all of these will become scarce and expensive over the next 50 years. Will our children’s homes be anything as comfortable and expansive as our own?

The answer is yes—though it depends on how you frame the question. Our children probably won’t be able to afford to run conventional air conditioners all day long. Nor will they likely have access to unlimited water supplies, particularly in the parched Southwest. But that doesn’t mean they have to live without the same quality of life that their parents and grandparents have grown accustomed to. The key is to use smart planning and technological advances to not merely adapt the home, but rethink its most basic design and function.
To demonstrate what such a house might look like, our team of professors and students at Virginia Tech designed and built Lumenhaus. With functional spaces and a modest size that allows for efficient energy use, Lumenhaus won the 2010 Solar Decathlon Europe, a competition that brought together 17 college teams from around the world in Madrid. (To see a short film about Lumenhaus, click here.)

The competition challenged each team to design a solar-powered home. But Lumenhaus, which draws inspiration from Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, is about more than just solar power: its movable walls break down the barrier between inside and outside, making a small interior feel larger; it plugs into a smart-grid network that allows the excess energy it produces to feed back to the community; it features pre-fabricated expansion rooms, so it can grow and shrink with a family’s needs; and it draws on passive cooling and geothermal heating to maintain comfort at minimal cost—to both the owners and the environment.

The accompanying multimedia demonstration presents six of these features. Each of them not only rethinks the way the American home functions, but offers a compelling argument for how to use technology and plain common sense to guarantee that our children and grandchildren can enjoy the same quality of domestic life that we have.