It was once on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., and is now being reborn in the parking lot of the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum in College Station — it’s the groHome, the Texas A&M College of Architecture’s award-winning entry in the 2007 U.S. Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon.
Students in Jill Mulholland’s ARCH 205 and 406 studios have been spending afternoons rebuilding the groHome with oversight from project manager Chuck Tedrick, a veteran of the Washington, D.C. competition.
“We’ve been getting all the parts and pieces, getting the decking, the steel, hanging stuff off the steel,” said Mulholland, visiting assistant professor in the Department of Architecture, who’s been in the parking lot along with the students rebuilding the home one bolt at a time.
During the home’s rebirth, Tom Regan, dean of the College of Architecture, took his counterparts from architecture colleges in Big 12 universities to the site Feb. 1 as part of a dean’s meeting hosted at Texas A&M.
Tedrick said the groHome’s reconstruction should be complete late Saturday, and plans are under way to make the home available for public tours.
The Aggie groHome won the Solar Decathlon Student Choice Award from the American Institute of Architecture Students and the American Institute of Architects’ Committee on the Environment at the 2007 event.
The home was also garnered a first-place finish in the “Student Building Category” of the Lifecycle Building Challenge; the award was announced at the 2007 West Coast Green Conference in San Francisco.
As an open-source building system, the groHome is fashioned for flexibility, allowing builders or homeowners to incorporate various and disparate elements into the design as needed to meet the changing needs of a family or a community.
For more information on the groHome and the 2007 Solar Decathlon competition, visit http://archone.tamu.edu/solardecathlon/.
