Team Ontario/BC Faculty Leads Geoffrey Thün and Kathy Velkov’s firm, RVTR, has been awarded the 2009 Canada Counci Prix de Rome in Architecture! The prestigious travel grant will be used to travel to Japan and Northern Europe to continue their research in factory built high performance housing for northern climates and to present some of the research from the North House project at international conferences and universities in 2010. Press release.

Team Ontario/BC Faculty Lead Kathy Velikov (University of Waterloo) presented a paper co-written with Faculty Lead Lyn Bartram (Simon Fraser University) at the 2009 PLEA - Passive and Low Energy Architecture - Conference at Laval University in Quebec City on June 22 2009. The paper was called “North House: Developing Intelligent Building Technology and User Interface in Energy Independent Domestic Environments”. Decathlete Chris Black (UW Architecture Grad) was also at the PLEA conference and presented research at the SBSE (Society of Building Science Educators) retreat following.

Team Ontario/BC has just received two custom heat pumps for heating and cooling the building from Ecologix in Cambridge, Ontario. They have produced a custom sized heat pump for the North House as all the commercially available heat pumps have been sized for much larger loads and spaces. This will help us save energy and meet the comfort zone targets of the competition. Thanks to University of Waterloo Professor John Straube and Graduate Engineering students Andrew Marston and Sebastien Brideau who worked with Ecologix to design the heat pumps and our innovative 3-tank heating system.

Team Ontario/BC Faculty Lead and North House Primary Investigator Geoffrey Thün has been awarded a $125,000.00 grant from the Ontario Power Authority’s Technology Development Fund! This funding will be used toward building the North House and advancing its technologies in five key areas: Sustainable Housing Demonstration, Energy Efficient Building Envelope Assemblies, Building Integrated Solar Power Generation, Smart Building Controls and Mass Custom Prefabricated Home Construction.

Team Ontario/BC wants to thank Gaggenau for their donation of gorgeous kitchen appliances which arrived today, as well as the washer and dryer that have been donated by Gaggenau’s parent company, Bosch. We cannot wait to take these out of the boxes!

Team Ontario/BC wants to send a big THANK YOU to everyone that worked so very (VERY) hard in the last month to make the June 2 deliverables deadline for the 2009 U.S. Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon.

We submitted our Construction Documents set, our Project Manual and our Communications plan.  It was a sprint but we made it!

Thank you to to all our volunteers and team members that pushed so hard to get everything completed.  We could not have done it without you.  Thank you to everyone that dropped everything and helped us.  We are eternally grateful for your committment to Team North and the North House project.

Architecture & Engineering students drawing in the North House office (left); A team that eats together... (right)