School of Architecture Team to Compete in DOE Design Competition

A team of UNC Charlotte School of Architecture students and faculty advisors will compete in the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) 2017 Race to Zero Student Design Competition. The competition challenges collegiate teams to design high-performance, energy-efficient housing in one of four categories: suburban single-family, urban single-family, small multifamily, and attached housing. It will be held at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colorado, in April.

The UNC Charlotte team will enter the urban single-family contest with “Healing House,” a reproducible, scalable, and adaptable prototype for low-income homes. Responding to the urgent need for affordable housing in Charlotte, the team has proposed a 1,100-square-foot home for a specific site in west Charlotte, near Johnson C. Smith University. The design meets the DOE contest requirements for energy efficiency and also meets high standards for affordability, accessibility, durability, and indoor air quality.

The members of the UNC Charlotte team are graduate students Lina Taheri, Dante Balassone, Mike Kekedy, and Alex Nelson. Faculty Advisors are School of Architecture professors Marc Manack, Mona Azarbayjani, Jefferson Ellinger and guest advisor Linda Reeder, FAIA, of Central Connecticut State University.

The Race to Zero Student Design Competition is an annual competition now in its fourth year. Fifty collegiate teams from four countries applied to participate in the 2017 Race to Zero competition. No more than 10 teams will compete in each of the four contests.