- Howdy and welcome to the Design for Health lecture series.

My name is Dr. Greg Luhan.

I'm a fellow in the American Institute of Architects, the Ward V. Wells Endowed Professor of Architecture, and the department head of architecture.

Today's lecture is called Design for Health and Passive Survivability.

Passive survivability re refers to a building's ability to maintain critical life support conditions in the event of extended loss of power, heating, fuel, or water.

The design of our house enables one week of battery storage to enable communication, illumination, and refrigeration so that families can still survive, eat, and live, and be able to communicate beyond the house.

The idea proposes that designers need to incorporate ways for building life and continued sheltering inhabitants for an extended period of time after a disaster situation, whether it be a storm that causes a power outage, a drought that limits water supply, or any other possible event.

Our rainwater collection system enables irrigation.

Should we have the extreme weather that we've been having in Texas over the last summer.

As follows are the stated learning outcomes of this presentation.

In the wake of weather extremes, housing shortages and increasing interest rates, economically vulnerable families struggled to secure shelter.

This presentation will demonstrate how the Solar Texas project, a collaboration between Texas A&M's, department of Architecture, department of Construction Science, and the College of Engineering Multidisciplinary Engineering program enabled the capacity for health and passive survivability that helps to break the community's cycle of poverty.

The learning outcomes will focus on health, safety and welfare, using collaborative project-based co-curricular activities to involve inter multidisciplinary faculty and students as they research and design a sustainable, healthy environment that meets the project's stringent energy and decarbonization goals.

The presentation presents new opportunities for academic and industry partnerships that re-envisioned a new walkable neighborhood for the most vulnerable populations in Texas.

The design references regional vernacular architecture aligned with passive and active design solutions that balance energy consumption through adaptive and controllable system design and reduce the homeowner's dependence on non-renewable natural resources and thus improves the built environment and the human condition.

The Solar Texas project received a director's award finished fourth in energy performance and finished 11th overall in the International Design Competition, and today's presentation will focus on the lessons learned from that event as relates to health.

Solar Texas is an interdisciplinary team of students and faculty from the all departments in the School of Architecture and in the Department of Multidisciplinary Engineering in the College of Engineering at Texas A&M.

It is also a partnership with the Bryan College Station.

Habitat for Humanity, a nonprofit organization that brings resources to the working poor, provides hands-on experiences and interprofessional experiential learning for students and skill development for its workers.

The Texas A&M goal was simple, to design and build a safe, attainable, high performance, carbon neutral, net zero energy generating workforce housing while fostering community development, lifelong living, health, wellness, and financial stability of the economically vulnerable classes that break their cycle of poverty and amplifies the quality of life, health and wellbeing.

The project's mantra was net zero begins at home.

Designed as a prototype, this Workforce House fosters community development, lifelong learning, health, wellness and financial stability of the economically vulnerable citizens of Brazos County.

To help break their cycle of poverty and amplify their life, health and wellbeing.

Prior to working with the BCS Habitat for Humanity, the Solar Texas team examined homelessness and the lack of affordability in the state of Texas, including working with the invisible Aggies who work for the Texas A&M University system, but are challenged with their need to break the cycle of poverty.

The Texas Solar prototype will need to suit the family's financial and economic needs.

The team placed a heavy emphasis on creating a structure that focuses on energy efficiency to help remove the burden of high energy costs, and ultimately to provide a long-term resilient design to protect the health, safety and welfare of its occupants.

Our research indicates that only 9.6% of the local areas attainable housing needs are being met, essentially, meaning that there is 90% of the need that is being unmet.

The target clients for this prototypical home are often economically vulnerable families and individuals who cannot qualify for traditional mortgages based upon their low income.

To address these concerns, our team conducted a market analysis that examined affordability, cost-effectiveness, livability, and innovation.

On average, the city of Bryan residents spend $148 a month on electricity averaging almost $2,000 a year in equivalent homeownership, which essentially means for Habitat for Humanity homeowners, they're paying a twice mortgage in order to live in their house.

The Solar Texas project helps families save money by reducing monthly energy bills and allows family to put money towards investing in their future.

Another added benefit is the impact on removing a home off the already strained electric grid of Bryan Texas and thus using energy to help offset the shortfall.

In terms of durability and resilience, the design evaluates the long-term availability to endure local environmental conditions, anticipate, withstand respond to and recover from disruptions.

Durability includes the ability of a building envelope to maintain long-term performance despite routine environmental conditions.

Performance includes the extent to which the house provides occupants critical load capabilities and the ability to withstand and recover from potential disasters.

Resource management includes the extent to which the building relies on external supplies of energy and water and how much that the design integrates passive strategies, reduces lifecycle impacts, enables reclamation and reuse of water and requires less energy than a comparable code compliant building.

Resilience includes the ability of the building to maintain critical operations during disruptions and quickly restore to normal operations.

Ultimately, innovation with regard to unique and innovative approaches to building resilience, occupant safety, home house performance, and occupant health.

You'll demonstrate in these ensuing slides how our project was able to achieve that.

The primary structural elements of our house start at its core with a FEMA compliant safe room that serves as a centrally located bathroom.

Solar Texas incorporates high quality and durable materials on all surfaces and systems selected for their environmental stewardship, recyclability, reuse, repurposing, and remanufacturing capabilities.

The house uses a pretension concrete slab to address structural issues in the areas response to expansive clays.

In addition to structural concerns, the team also incorporated lifecycle methodology and environmental performance declarations that support organizations to better understand and improve while communicating environmental impact of their products and services.

A question that we asked ourselves, do you want to report your carbon emissions, including greenhouse protocols?

Or would you rather have your building offer sustainable approaches and understand better how your design connects to the United Nations sustainability developmental goals?

One, increasingly popular strategy is to confirm environmental and energy efficiency using environmental protocol declarations or EPDs as a way to help decision making, evaluate and specify products for low carbon environmental footprint.

EPDs are now an industry standard using product category rules or PCRs to help them to better understand lifecycle assessment of our designs.

In terms of innovation, our product took this head on 'cause our goal was to break the cycle of poverty for our targeted audience, but we also wanted to leverage the knowledge from the region's vernacular architecture that aligns passive design strategies with integrative and active design solutions.

In order to do so, we are able to balance natural and artificial light with adaptive and controllable systems and design approaches that reduce the region's dependence on non-renewable energy sources, and it also enables us to integrate leading edge research that improves the built environment and develop new opportunities for academic and industry partnerships and ongoing research.

Our embodied environmental impact evaluates communative environmental impact of all processes over the course of a building's lifecycle.

Think of it from an understanding of cradle to cradle or cradle to grave.

Our design decisions and conclusions include a number of initial approaches through analysis and consideration of reclamation, refurbishment, repair, reuse, and recycling and materials throughout the building's lifecycle.

We incorporated lifecycle assessment to calculate the whole lifecycle energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, and other environmental impacts that enable the quality of analysis and determination of environmental impact of material production, manufacturing, house operation, and end of life.

Ultimately, our embodied environmental impact includes the expected or likely total impact of material extraction, manufacturing, transportation, construction, use, and end of life decommissioning of the building.

In terms of innovation, we looked at this through the lens of circular economies or reuse of all operations and the buildings in total environmental impact.

Solar Texas incorporates high quality and durable materials on all surfaces and systems that were selected for the environmental stewardship, recyclability, reuse, repurposing, and re-manufacturing capabilities.

It harnesses solar energy to maximize the efficiency of ASHRAE and DOE energy standards or the Department of Energy energy standards.

We also incorporated LEED for Homes certification systems, measuring it against its eight categories to help to evaluate and identify our level of sustainability.

The design features of the house enable building orientation, energy efficient systems, energy efficient windows, wall to wall ratios, roof and wall insulation, reduce HVAC loads, use of energy efficient utilities, low infiltration rates, implementation of photovoltaic and building integrated photovoltaic panels for clean energy production, and again, the intent was to reduce our energy consumption as much as possible before providing active solutions.

Compared to the latest Habitat for Humanity project, the Solar Texas inspires to reduce embodied energy by almost 80% and energy consumption by 90% to increase the possibility for achieving net zero.

When we analyzed our project in terms of carbon emissions, we noticed that we are reducing our carbon emissions significantly and observed that it'll most probably emit less CO2 than a typical structure.

According to our lifecycle assessment report, the building's adverse impacts on human health will be much less in our Solar Texas project than a typical non-solar building.

In terms of innovation, our project used LEED or leadership in energy and environmental design standards and incorporated a LEED for Homes approach.

Our home design and construction plan will earn 93 points achieving a lead platinum status.

As previously mentioned, our tagline was net zero begins at home, and the project was also driven by a resilience in relation to passive survivability.

To reach our target audience, we tackled affordability head on noting that unaffordable housing is one of the nation's most pressing crisis.

We have over 580,000 homeless people in the United States with 70,000 of them being in Texas.

We prioritize low-income families that have transitional housing needs in the hopes of reducing their energy costs.

Sponsored by Archiseeker, a digital media company with a strong online presence.

Our 12th man tradition at A&M provided an oversight for possible ways of improving our user experience.

We have over 16 million media impressions just during the competition alone.

As you can see, our team reached out not only through social media, but also through a website presence and actively communicated with the community.

As we started to understand better the environmental needs and the needs of our community.

Solar Texas caught the media attention of multiple companies that wanted to help our cause.

Beyond the Department of Energy and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, these include GroundFORCE, RWB Consulting Engineers, Source Advisors, AO Smith, Daikin, Legrand, Hinkley Lighting, Luxal, Lutron, Texas Masonry Institute, and many others.

We also partner with the local architecture firm, BRW and Dudley Engineering to help to understand better the structural performance and the design of our building as a valuable learning experience for our students.

This was an invaluable learning experience for many students.

We had 165 students involved in the lifecycle of the project.

It wasn't just to design a high performance residence, but rather to understand better how we can actually design into a community across a variety of ways.

In an aspirational building typology.

We had faculty such as Dr. Sophia Ruski from Construction Science, Phil Walters from Architectural Engineering and myself leading an interdisciplinary team throughout the entire lifecycle of the project.

We worked with the Habitat board of advisors, as well as faculty and students that work with Habitat on a daily basis.

We're able to bring these lessons into our classroom and test and calibrate them against environmental concerns.

We have light shelves on the outside of our building that bounce light deep into the space.

We have oculi at the top of our living spaces that allow light to come in and meet the overall goals of illumination on the inside, thus balancing our internal concerns against circadian rhythms.

This was really important for our design, not only because of the way that we thought about architecture and its impact, but also with the Covid impact forcing our students to stay inside.

This became a valuable learning experience for all students of all ages.

In terms of architecture, the Texas Solar is more than a building.

In our opinion we're making architecture that provides shelter and elevate spirit.

The Solar Texas design is inclusive, accessible with safety and efficiency at its core.

As discussed earlier, we had a FEMA compliance safe room that also served as a bathroom.

This bathroom was also outfitted with water, blankets, towels, as well as pillows, should a environmental catastrophe take place that the entire house could go away, but the family's occupants would be safe inside of its core.

It also meant that the building was also structurally isolated and had its own mechanical system supplied directly there.

It also house the batteries for passive survivability, for illumination, communication, and electrification as a power outage would cause up to one week's worth of supply.

It also enabled us to design public and private thresholds throughout the building around the central utility core, while providing spatial continuity between the living room, dining room and kitchen, while enabling a minimized amount of hallways that enable maximum use of space for this three bedroom to full bathhouse.

In order to reduce the region's dependence on non-renewable and natural resources, we leveraged knowledge from the region's vernacular architecture aligned passive strategies with our integrative and active design solutions, balanced, natural and artificial light, and provided new opportunities for academic and industry partnerships.

The butterfly roof that you see at the top harnesses all the rainwater and allows it to focus to below ground cisterns and be able to be used during times of drought.

The structural system also enables an adaptability treating the house like a machine for living.

The walls on the outside, easiest way to think about them is like a cooler with a view and at the base the structural core around the utility structure enables for the house's occupants in order to remain safe while providing adaptable living on the inside.

We also incorporated leading edge research that improves the built environment to develop new opportunities not only for academic partnerships, but a deepened way of understanding the live condition.

Since we had to provide entertainment, cooking as well as housing and living, we were able to enable a very strategic core, creating a threshold between the inside and outside of the spaces with constant connection to the exterior.

The mantra build a tight ventilate it right enabled the design to be carbon neutral and net zero.

A rainwater harvesting system with landscape design also enables landscape irrigation needs.

We had dedicated stations for electrical vehicle charging and we reduced the load of design using fixed external shading devices to limit heat gain and glare exposure.

The system was holistically designed in order to balance and calibrate energy analysis in real time.

Our goal is a healthy house that saves energy.

Overall our home design and construction plan has a tight thermal envelope that buffers against the harsh Texas climate while creating an uninterrupted airtight space that results in a well insulated and quiet environment.

The house also uses an energy recovery ventilation system to maximize indoor air quality.

The engineering goal on the other hand, was to design and build a safe, attainable, high performance, carbon neutral net zero energy generating home.

We maximize comfort throughout by minimizing energy consumption and its carbon footprint.

The house to us was really developed as a prototype that meets the expectations that it can adapt to any site orientation thanks to the roof eyelets that support the solar panels.

These solar panels can be calibrated to achieve true south, thus maximizing the amount of energy production and hot water energy production.

Passive strategies such as maximizing natural light autonomy is optimized.

Careful design and placement of the solar array and fenestration eyelets provides solar heating on cold days while minimizing the solar heat gains on hot days.

Structurally, there was an innovation in terms of the roof design, we'll call the butterfly that enables water collection and the reuse to support indigenous species.

In terms of the innovative, unique roof design, it also enables access to natural day lighting, high performance, low emissivity windows with low solar heat gain, also provided performance values that are not typical in a typical Habitat for Humanity house.

The smart electrical panel also used as a smart thermostat to meet all of the demands of the occupants, and each space of the house has its own controllable independent zone, thus maximizing quality and comfort of the spaces.

Our energy performance has an expected annual savings of a HERS rating of -37.

A typical net zero house is zero, and as you can see from our house that we're overproducing the amount of energy for this house, but we did that for a strategic purpose.

As we mentioned earlier, a typical Habitat for Humanity homeowner pays two mortgages, one to the mortgage company, which is Habitat for Humanity, and the other to the electric company.

If we can eliminate the need for the electrical production by providing photovoltaics, it'll help us to reduce the cost of the home ownership significantly.

So as you can see that our typical numbers before range between 148 and almost $225 a month depending upon the season for the electrical, and we were able to calculate a savings of $2,111 or roughly it's free to live in your house.

This is significant because now the homeowners can use that for other means such as education, which otherwise would've been impossible.

The solar panels mounted on the butterfly roofs and the eyelets and the airtight insulation contribute to the -34 HERS rating.

A combination of both active and passive strategies.

The Solar House also uses a thermal system in order to preheat hot water, thus reducing the amount of need for hot water production.

The key aspect to note in this slide is that other than performance, it is substantial reduction in CO2 emissions, - 3.9, meaning that our house also benefits the neighborhood within which it situates.

In closing, I'd really like to thank my collaborators, Dr. Sophia Rakowski from the Construction Science Department, and Phils Walters from Architectural Engineering and the 165 students and the countless community partners that made this project a reality.

Since the competition, this faculty team has collaborated on new curriculum across disciplines, achieve net zero energy designation, making us the fifth university in the country to have that such a designation and presented numerous outcomes to national and international conferences that demonstrate the extended impact of this building.

I look forward to answering any questions that you may have, and thank you again for your contribution and your time.

(upbeat music)