Little Samples of Solar's Future

A design by Germany's Technische Universitat Darmstadt won the Department of Energy's Solar Decathlon, which judged 20 prototype solar-powered houses. (By Elizabeth Razzi -- The Washington Post)

They sure weren't the kind of homes that we're used to seeing around here. The 20 prototype solar-powered houses built on the Mall for the Department of Energy's Solar Decathlon earlier this month were models of all that is good and green.

But they were much more: They were small. They were modern. They were portable. They were versatile. And many of them were beautiful.

I wonder if they would stand a chance in the Washington-area market, where so much of the housing stock is cookie-cutter Colonial or gaudy mini-mansion.

The competition winner, designed by Germany's Technische Universitat Darmstadt, was a stunner, in no small part because it didn't look like a solar house. There were no impossible-to-ignore shiny solar panels attached to the roof, no appendages jutting into the sky. This house was stealthily solar, without ducts or mechanical structures announcing its techno-geek heart.

The flat-roofed, rectangular house looked like a fine piece of furniture, with the exterior clad completely in fine-grained German oak. Solar panels were integrated into the slats of floor-to-ceiling wooden shutters on the east, south and west sides of the house. On the north side, in the sun's shadow, the shutters lacked solar panels. A computer could change the tilt of the slats to catch the sun's rays and generate electricity throughout the day, storing as much as possible for use at night.

The shutters' dual purpose, shading and insulating the interior while generating electricity from the sun, reflects the twin tasks of a solar house. It is as important to conserve energy as it is to generate it. Design competitions such as the decathlon are intended to hasten the marketability and affordability of green technologies and solar-power generation.

Construction cost for the German house was as stunning as the appearance, even when you consider that it was a prototype. According to the university's Web site, materials and construction alone cost $733,444. That works out to about $917 per square foot -- outrageously expensive.

Compare that to the $448,470 cost, or about $561 per square foot, for the house built by the University of Maryland, which won second place. (If you were wondering, the German house was built in Europe, wrapped in plastic and packed into a freight container for shipping across the Atlantic. The round-trip cost was almost $279,000.)

Like the German house, Maryland's entry included some floor-to-ceiling exterior shutters, but without the photovoltaic louvers. Could such shutters be the start of a design trend?

Igniting design trends is the whole point of the competition, after all. Major home-building companies, professional consultants and suppliers were heavily involved with the teams.

Beazer Homes USA, headquartered in Atlanta, helped build Georgia Tech's entry in the decathlon. The company has new-home developments throughout the Washington-area suburbs.

According to Tony Callahan, senior vice president for national purchasing, planning and design at Beazer, we can expect more solar energy and other green building features to appear in new homes soon, especially as energy costs rise. Fans of the center-hall Colonial will be pleased to know he thinks those features will come to market in traditional forms of residential architecture.