By JENNIFER LEWANDOWSKI
Reporter Assistant Editor

Amid the new residential buildings being erected around campus, there's a new house under construction—one that members of an eco-friendly student club are hoping will serve as a model of environmentally efficient quarters for the university and the community at large.

 

	Samuela Franceschini dumps gravel into a trench for the foundation of the house, a more eco-friendly choice than concrete.
	Photo: Dymaxion Ecohouse, SA

Construction of the Dymaxion Eco-House near the Baker Chilled Water plant on the North Campus has been a work in progress since the spring. (Dymaxion is a composite word coined by a friend of 20th century inventor Buckminster Fuller, who when describing his ideas, frequently used the words "dynamic," "maximum" and "ion".)

The project, undertaken by members of the Dymaxion Eco-House Student Association, is intended as a research tool to examine the viability of environmentally efficient, low-budget homes, says Seth Galley, club president and a senior mechanical engineering major. The idea was conceived some two years ago, when club founder and then-undergraduate Micah Allen recruited a small group of students who were interested in designing—and eventually building—a structure made of sustainable resources that would have minimal impact on the environment.

Although that concept has been developed on a handful of college campuses, the UB group says its project will include a unique feature—a geodesic dome, measuring 21 feet in diameter and 22 feet high once completed, that will serve as the roof of the structure.

The dome was patented in 1954 by Fuller, who claimed his tetrahedron design used volume more economically. The design affords very little surface area on which to lose heat, says Allen, a mechanical engineering graduate student who is spending this year in Denmark on a Fulbright Fellowship studying low-energy structures.

"(It) has the lowest surface area-to-volume ratio, which means it not only conserves energy by having less exposed surface, (but) also conserves materials because less materials go into building it," he says.

The core group working on the house, both graduate students and undergraduates from a wide range of academic disciplines, expects construction—which involves laying the foundation, assembling the dome and building the walls—to be completed sometime this fall. With construction costs estimated at nearly $6,000, the group has raised roughly half that amount, including an $850 grant from the Air & Waste Management Association and $900 from the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. In-kind support has been provided by the UB departments of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering, and Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, as well as from UB Green and University Facilities, which aided in the design process and signed off on the group's use of UB land at no cost to the club.

In addition to its original concept for the roof, the group also is employing a unique heating-and-cooling system consisting of barrels, louvers and glass, Allen says. Fifty-five-gallon steel barrels, painted black to absorb sunlight and act as thermal storage units, will be built into the wall of the house. The louvers—situated in front of the barrels and controlled by a digital processor—will open, close or rotate, depending on the sun's location and intensity. During the winter, the louvers will be open to absorb the sunlight, thus generating heat; during the summer, they'll be closed to keep the house cool.

"That's one of the neater aspects of the project," says Allen, noting that while the setup will not serve as an absolute heating system throughout the winter months, it does provide an effective amount of heat for very little energy input.

The group hopes that its project will prove that low-budget, environmentally sound building techniques can be efficiently and inexpensively applied in Buffalo, thus raising community awareness—both on and off campus—of the benefits of environmentally efficient design.

Allen says traditional building techniques deplete natural resources, damage the local and global ecology, and often can be costly to employ.

The group chose to build the walls from bales of straw because of their ability to insulate significantly better than traditional techniques, Galley says. The bales, a renewable resource, are stacked and compressed into walls, then coated with stucco for protection. Additionally, the house's rubble trench foundation is a more eco-friendly choice than concrete.

With the long-term goal being an eco-house that is fully functional, the students expect that the structure will continue to evolve, serving as a foundation on which future groups could improve.

For more information, visit the eco-house Web site at http://wings.buffalo.edu/sa/dymaxion.