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Ekihouse is a project for an efficient and sustainable dwelling, in which some fifty students of Architecture and Engineering from various faculties of the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU have participated on its design and construction. At the moment, notwithstanding the finishing touches, the dwelling is practically finished, after the assembly of its structure and which was carried out this summer at the Laboratory for Buildings Quality Control that the Basque Government has in the capital of Vitoria-Gasteiz.

The assembly of Ekihouse was undertaken in record time, on terminating the academic year, the participating students taking Marathon morning, noon and night shifts to finish the job on time. The final dwelling has a number of technical innovations that enable it to be energetically sustainable and generate minimum waste impact during its useful life.

Having been quite a task to find the best design solution on paper, the building phase was an even greater challenge for the UPV/EHU team of students. During the first part of summer, the work focused mainly on assembling the structure and, over the last few weeks, they were able to carry out other tasks such as the laying down of installations, the finishing touches, assembling the façade, etc. The person responsible for communications within the project, Victor Araujo, stated, “the students spent their summer working intensively in order to have the house ready and, at the moment, they are arranging the transport and the strategy for competing in Madrid”.

After two years in the design and construction of Ekihouse, this dwelling will be able to represent the Basque University at the international Solar Decathlon Europe competition to be held in mid-September in Madrid. To this end, and with the help of two enormous pantechnicons, the house finally travelled to Madrid on Monday, 3 September.

Solar Decathlon Europe competition

The competition will be held at the Casa de Campo in Madrid from the 14 to the 30 of September and will be evaluated especially with regard to the reduction in the energy consumption of the house, as well as its capacity for energy production using solar power and without reducing standards of comfort or quality of design.

The competition will be held in an open-air public space, with the dwelling having to confront ten trials – thus the name “Decathlon”- and which will finally decide the winner of this, the second, year of this international university competition. The competition will have the participation of twenty proposals from fifteen countries, eleven of these being European (Germany, Denmark, Spain, France, Holland, Hungary, Italy, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom, Romania), apart from another four: China, Japan, Brazil and Egypt.

2012-09-20 12:50:21

Source: http://nanopatentsandinnovations.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-green-and-futurist-house-from.html