Sustainable Connected House
Sustainable Connected House
FBK-MIT Mobile Experience Lab alliance
The MIT Mobile Experience Lab, within the Design Laboratory, signed a 3 years strategic alliance with the Fondazione Bruno Kessler on July of 2008. The alliance has been promoted by the Province of Trento, Italy. Our goal is to advanced research in sustainable connected homes, including subtopics of renewable energy systems, sustainable architecture, and also social sustainability and connected information system to optimize home behavior and peoples' life. At the end of the project, we want to build a full-scale prototype of a sustainable home with new technologies, materials, and applications.
Top view of three houses. The facade is oriented to the south in order to optimize solar harvesting.
View of the south facade. Each black circle is a solar photovoltaic panel. The distribution of these solar collectors is optimized to gather the maximum solar energy.
The profile of a house. The southern facade is covered with evacuated glass tubes to harvest sun energy. The north wall is highly insulated to reduce heat loss. It is also a 'mobile' wall that enables an extension of the house, making it adaptable to changes in the family structure.
The 2nd design in which solar energy is used to produce heat. In the earlier design, light was converted into electricity through photovoltaic cells; here the solar radiation heats a calorific fluid that circulates into evacuated glass tubes, thereby enabling a high efficiency conversion.
Inside view of the house showing the solar thermal configuration. The living room and kitchen is located on the first floor, and on the mezzanine is a bedroom and bathroom.
Design Process →
Brief
We began by looking at a selection of case studies and built designs of both architectural and energy systems that illustrate the emergent notion of critical radical sustainability.
We also conducted research on materials, investigating and developing procedures applied within an innovative technique to design and manufacture composite materials with variable properties.
Parametric Environmental Evaluation was conducted in order to create a repertoire of procedures to manufacture building components, and to apply those procedures to design site-specific configurations that would take advantage of these distributed performance materials under specific local environmental conditions. A parametric model enables testing and evaluation of different configurations to achieve an optimal design.
Finally we conducted Surface Analysis by linking previous explorations on material distribution and parametric form factors to converge on a landscape design strategy optimizing location, form factor, orientation, materials, and fabrication processes.
Please see our first presentation for more details on our process and findings.