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" The University of Louisiana&amp;#039;s BeauSoleil House has been engineered to not only blend into and celebrate its home state&amp;#039;s environment but also to work with and, in some cases, defend against it. On the east end of the house a cistern collects rainwater for irrigation. A cypress rain screen is separated from the home&amp;#039;s structure by 1-in. furring strips, and a vapor barrier behind it eliminates moisture and allows air to circulate between the siding and the wall. A privacy screen disassembles and fastens over windows on the north side of the house, becoming hurricane shutters. &amp;quot;We thought we should try to make the home a permanent residence for people in Louisiana,&amp;quot; says Catherine Guidry, a graduate student in architecture and one of eight team leaders out of the 200 students who worked on the house. That also meant including a &amp;quot;dogtrot,&amp;quot; a breezeway separating the two halves of the house that lets air flow through and provides a place to socialize--a feature that&amp;#039;s important to the culture of Louisiana, Guidry says. Six glass doors--three on either side of the breezeway--can be rotated 360 degrees around the space. This turns the dogtrot into an interior room, extending the space for the rooms adjacent to it. When opened to the kitchen, for example, it can be used as a dining room; when opened to the living room, more entertainment space. Flat-plate solar thermal collectors span a skylight on the south side of the dogtrot, featuring fins designed by students and fabricated by a local company. Now in the process of being patented, these fins serve the double purpose of integrating the solar thermal system into the roof and providing shade for the space below. An 8-kilowatt solar array covers the roof on either side. &amp;quot;The heart of the Louisiana house is the kitchen,&amp;quot; Guidry says, as she points out a beautiful striated butcher block made from scrap wood left over from constructing the deck. On the other side of the dogtrot is the living space, which can be separated from the bed and bath by translucent sliding doors. &amp;quot;We surveyed to see what features are important in a home and the bathroom right here is because of that survey,&amp;quot; she says. The bathroom would feel spacious for a home twice the size, but it didn&amp;#039;t feel as though the size of the other rooms in the 800 square feet of living space suffered. After the Solar Decathlon, the house will be sited on campus for two years of research and development and then relocated to a neighborhood in Louisiana. It may not be the only one there. Louisiana System Built Homes wants to reproduce the BeauSoleil House after the competition, Guidry says, and it will sell for $120,000 to $150,000--about what a median family income in Louisiana can afford. So far, the plan proves promising, as earlier this week the BeauSoleil House won the contest for market viability. &amp;quot;Each of us had to extend our boundaries to include engineering, or landscaping, or communications,&amp;quot; Guidry says. &amp;quot;Before this project I had no construction experience. We built the house in a warehouse. I was cutting steel, grinding. I feel so proud standing in the house because we not only designed it, we built it and put so much thought into it.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a4805/4334041/>