Philipp Klebert celebrates with the rest of Team Austria after learning they were the overall winners of the 2013 Solar Decathlon.
Team Austria’s house, Living Inspired by Sustainable Innovation (LISI), blended the competition’s goals of “affordability, consumer appeal, and design excellence with optimal energy production and maximum efficiency.” A net-zero house, LISI’s design consisted of three major components: a service core, a living area, and adjacent patios.
“The core of our house was the bedroom and bathroom, designed to be one unit that can be picked up as it is and put in a container and shipped anywhere you want,” Klebert said. “Then we could build up the rest of the house behind it.” This central core, which included all of the mechanical systems for the house, was one of the ways Team Austria addressed shipping constraints with its concept. Shipping the house more than 10,000 miles to the California event took six weeks, so working within a tight timeframe was one of the most challenging parts of the competition, according to Klebert.
The house, however, was not the only victory for Team Austria. The team also won first place in the juried Communications Contest, which evaluated websites, public tours, signage, and presentations about the entries.
“How we managed to come out on top was not just one single thing but the whole concept because we tried to look at it holistically and cover all our bases,” Klebert says. “We ranged from architecture students to engineering to interior design and construction to media and communication.”
Communicating with DOE organizers was a larger challenge for Team Austria than for most of the other teams. As one of only two European participants, team members had to write out all of the plans and drawings so the organizers could work with them, but then they also had to translate them into English and redo the calculations using U.S. units of measurement.
“In the two years leading up to the competition in California, hundreds of emails went back and forth about the smallest details,” Klebert says. “If it was just one word within the rules that we weren’t sure exactly what it meant, [the organizers] were great and quick about helping us out.”
On-site execution