“ResilientHub,” a project by a team of Harvard Graduate School of Design students, received third place in the Office Building Division of the 2021 U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon Design Challenge. The competition seeks to “challenge students to design and build high-performance, low-carbon buildings that mitigate climate change and improve our quality of life through greater affordability, resilience, and energy efficiency.” The winning projects come from “teams that best blend architectural and engineering excellence with innovation.”
Located in Boston’s Seaport District, the design by Kuan-Ting Chen (MDes EE ’22), Sihui (Iris) Chen (MArch I ’21), Andrew Gibbs (MDes REBE ’21), Kritika Kharbanda (MDes EE ’23), and Lara Tomholt (DDes ’22) is a future-ready building that operates at maximum energy efficiency and comfort levels for its users. The building’s adaptability is responsive to increasing urban density and a changing environment due to climate change. According to the project brief, “The innovative, high-performance design solutions ResilientHub employs are directly applicable to the vast majority of the future global building stock that will be affected by the same environmental changes.”
The project was initially conceived for “Advanced Applications in Sustainable Architecture,” a new elective seminar led by Holly Samuelson, associate professor of architecture. The course seeks to “provide a deeper dive into issues of evidence-based, high-performance, sustainable building design.”
Learn more about “ResilientHub” and view the proposal’s presentation.
