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Click here to view the Retail Cost of Prototype and Product List For The BeauSoleil Solar Home. |
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Since January 2008, when it was announced that TEAM BeauSoleil was selected to participate in the Solar Decathlon , the TEAM has vetted over 20 different design scenarios and has arrived at a design that is a regionally-appropriate, an energy hybrid of passive and is active systems, and affordable. The overall house form is known as a "dog-trot" for the passageway that extends through the home, allowing for cool breezes. This dog-trot space, or transitional porch, can be enclosed as additional interior living area or left open as an exterior entertainment space. At only 800 square feet, BeauSoleil is a highly efficient starter home for singles, young families, or empty-nesters. Subsequent versions of the BeauSoleil Home will also offer additional bedrooms for growing families. The BeauSoleil Home will generate all of its power from roof-top solar cells, collect its own drinking water from rainwater harvesting, and heat the water with solar energy. Structural Insulated wall Panels (SIPS), low-energy appliances and lights, and a highly-efficient air-conditioning system will reduce overall energy use. |
BeauSoleil Design Diagram
PDF 1.74 MB
Download Adobe Reader |
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The Roots |
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The design principles of the BeauSoleil Home are rooted in housing strategies derived from the region’s early settlers. Following their 1755 expulsion from British-occupied Nova Scotia (Acadia), the Cajun settlers established themselves in the area west of New Orleans now called Acadiana. This inhospitable region of broad, marshy plains and swamps was where the Acadians would demonstrate the resourcefulness we recognize in today’s Cajun descendants. Early Cajuns (as Acadians are called in Louisiana) built raised, gabled-roof cottages with an in-set gallery across the front constructed by hand of cypress, timber posts and boussillage. Bousillage, a mixture of clay, lime and Spanish moss, was used as infill between the posts and braces. The BeauSoleil Home is based on these early forms of the Cajun cottage. However, the home also draws upon Louisiana’s modern industrial tradition as well. |
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Process |
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The design process has involved more than 200 students and will have required more than 200,000 hours when it is concluded in October 2009. The design process began with the collaborative writing of the proposal by faculty and students in November of 2007. In January of 2008, the process moved to a school-wide charrette, utilizing students in their second through their fourth year in architecture, interior design and industrial design. A subsequent senior architecture studio did an analysis of the existing Cade Solar home (built in the 1980’s by Profs. Cazayoux and Lasala) and produced a research document. Next, the studio produced a precedent study of several building types for single-family homes including: climate-belt, vernacular, off-the-grid, affordable, and prefabricated. Following the research, a group of twelve senior architecture students each developed a design scheme. Through a series of school-wide and open community charrettes, the schemes were narrowed to two designs. Finally, the twelve combined into one TEAM for the final design presented in May 2008. Next, nine of the initial twelve architecture students and two engineering students worked over the summer as interns to produce the design development package, research design issues, and build mock-ups. As graduate students, the core TEAM has continued to work and now build the BeauSoleil Home, some of them as a part of their individual theses. The construction documents were completed in December 2008 and construction began in January 2009. |
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Development |
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In many ways, the BeauSoleil Home reflects the melding of culture and industry. It is both new and old. The design of the home relies upon the most advanced technology for energy generation and climate control. But it also relies upon the adaptation of traditional building forms and materials as well as passive cooling strategies. Like the frotoir, or musical rub-board, the BeauSoleil Home is not extravagant or over-wrought. It is simple and modest. The BeauSoleil home is, first and foremost, functional. Just as Cajun culture has traditionally done, it makes the most of a little. Social interaction, entertaining, and cooking are the daily rituals that inspire its form. The home adapts to the unexpected, whether it be an unexpected guest, a crawfish boil, or a hurricane.
Architecturally, the BeauSoleil home is not overly formalistic or rationally ordered. Its small size (800 square feet) requires a certain degree of order and efficiency, but the home does not forsake its roots. The home has a generous kitchen and bathroom. These are two areas that modern architects have tended to label as “service” spaces with thickened “walls,” and barely habitable spaces. The BeauSoleil Home does not divide its spaces into “served” and “service” spaces as some modern architects have done. Mechanical spaces do not drive the use of space. These pieces of equipment are placed in lofts and mechanical penthouses, out of the way of human habitation, yet easily accessible if repairs are needed.
In a competition where rules tend to dictate form, The BeauSoleil Home refuses to ignore the culture from which it springs. Although space requirements discourage porches, The BeauSoleil Home has two, a dog-trot, or transitional porch, and a kitchen porch where fresh herbs can be grown for cooking. Louisianians enjoy and use porches for day-to-day living, the better to appreciate and connect with the natural beauty that surrounds us. |
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Logistics |
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The University of Louisiana at Lafayette TEAM BeauSoleil is challenged with not only designing a functional home, but doing so within a budget that is affordable to the median family in Louisiana, as well as transporting, assembling and disassembling the Solar Home as part of the 2009 Solar Decathlon. The home must travel 40 hours on two flatbed trailers and be reassembled in just four days in Washington DC beginning October 1st, 2009! |
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Design Conclusions |
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The BeauSoleil Louisiana Solar Home is a culturally-relevant and regionally-appropriate prototype for mass-customized, sustainably-designed, prefabricated housing in Louisiana.
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- The BeauSoleil Home is culturally-relevant through its insistence on the primacy of the exterior spaces and the kitchen as well as its generous accommodation of entertaining.
- The BeauSoleil Home is sustainably-designed and performs as a balanced hybrid utilizing active and passive systems.
- The BeauSoleil Home is regionally-appropriate through its adaptation of vernacular building types, forms and materials.
- The BeauSoleil Home is a viable prototype for housing through our close collaboration with a modular home manufacturer from the design conception till the present.
- The BeauSoleil Home will be available to median-income families in Louisiana.
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