The Stanford Start.Home competed in the U.S. Department of Energy's 2013 Solar Decathlon in Irvine, CA. The home is now permanently installed near Stanford campus at the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve, where it is the home for visiting researchers. While Cloud Architecture Studio had not been formed yet in 2013, four current members of Cloud were team leads on the Stanford Solar Decathlon team.
More on the architecture of the Start.Home below.
The Core
The core design concept of the Start.Home is creating a space in which occupants are easily afforded, perceive the opportunity for, and create sustainable habits. The activity of the home centers around the Core, a module that houses all of the primary mechanical, electrical, and plumbing fixtures including the kitchen, bathroom, and utility room. The Core concentrates the systems of the home into a single modular unit that houses a majority of the energy consumption for the home. The Core then offers interactive feedback through a display as well as a mobile application. By centralizing the points of energy usage in the home in a single location and offering immediate feedback the residents of the Start.Home are able to dynamically alter their consumption to meet self-set energy goals and understand their energy usage and trajectory over a period of time in an easy and simple setting. The Core serves as a architectural, mechanical, and symbolic heart of the home. The architectural cladding for the Core reflects this by using sleek metal siding to wrap the complex mechanical systems seamlessly into a single, easily visually identifiable package. The Core increases the visibility of energy consumption and provides opportunities to make sustainable living choices.
Scale, Proportion, and Flexibility
The architectural space around the core is designed to seamlessly integrate the Core into a familiar and comfortable home environment. The large open great room offers a spacious, well lit, and flexible space for the daily needs of residents. The high ceiling makes the room feel more spacious and open. The simple floor plan allows furniture to be arrange to dynamically adjust to changing needs of the residents. The tables can be rolled partially underneath the kitchen island to create a breakfast bar, shifted to the center of the room to create a dining table, moved into the studio to provide workspace, or onto the patio for outdoor use. The studio annex is partially partitioned, creating an architectural threshold to define a creative workspace for the residents, but it is left open to allow the room to be used as part of the larger great room. The bedroom is purposefully separated to provide a private retreat from the public space of the home.
Finishes
The simple reclaimed wood trim and finishes on the interior and exterior offer an architectural counterpoint to the more industrial Core, introducing a more familiar, natural feel to the house. Reclaimed redwood exterior siding, reclaimed douglas fir flooring and interior trim, and reclaimed decking provide visual warmth to the space. The reclaimed wood flooring serves as a reminder to the occupants of recycling and reusing precious natural resources by purposefully showing the visual evidence of prior usage and nail markings on its surface. The interior walls and ceiling are painted white to help bounce natural and artificial light about the space to reduce the energy required to light the space.
Indoor - Outdoor Connection
The Start.Home also encourages the occupants to take advantage of the outdoor environment. The fourteen foot folding door on the south wall of the great room allows the residents to expand their home onto the spacious outdoor south porch when the weather permits. The wide opening allows the occupants to move the rolling tables from the kitchen island area onto the patio to enjoy outdoor dining or host a party outside easily, which reduces heating and cooling loads for the home. Flanking the core on a north-south axis are two sets of windows that offer a visual axis to connect the front landscaping, through the great room, to the planters surrounding the south porch. Besides creating a strong visual connection to the surrounding landscape, these axis serve to architecturally emphasize the connection of the Core to the interior and exterior living spaces in the Start.Home.
The planters around the Start.Home provide the residents with space to grow their own vegetables and herbs using greywater and rainwater collected from the roof and overhangs of the home. The planter on the north side of the bedroom houses a large rainwater collection tank that allows the residents to build up a store of rainwater during the wet winters in the Bay Area to help reduce water consumption during the dry summers.
Natural Lighting
Artificial lighting is a large portion of the daily energy consumption of a traditional home. The Start.Home ameliorates this by providing ample natural lighting. The high north-facing clerestory windows in the great room offer access to constant diffuse natural light through the day and serve to make the home feel more open and spacious. The shaded south-facing windows and doors also offer copious indirect natural light to create an evenly lit space during the day without having to use artificial lighting. The bedroom and bathroom also have access to natural light to help reduce the lighting load as much as possible. The two windows in the bedroom offer access to early morning sun as well as diffuse northern light. The bathroom is partially illuminated by two skylights.
Artificial Lighting
When the residents do need to rely on artificial lighting, the Start.Home uses banks of energy efficient LEDs along the length of the great room to bathe the space in an even, indirect light suitable for most simple tasks. When the occupants need to cook, kitchen countertop on the core can be illuminated by an efficient LED strip and the dining area can be lit by the four hanging LED pendants for more intimate lighting. The soffit that runs along the west, north, and east walls of the great room and studio spaces house a set of LED downlights that offer accent lighting for artwork or task lighting for reading at the desk.