Theory meets 'reality': an energy-effective House Design course

This paper describes a studio design course involving design of a house for a 'real' volunteer client. Students collaborate in small groups for the brief and site analysis, but produce individual house designs. The course involves lectures / tutorials, studio sessions, and class presentations / critiques. Lecture material, technical information, digital evaluation instruments etc. are available on the course web-site, which is also the context for student collaboration. The project demonstrates the trade-offs, compromises and conflicts between the theory of 'low-energy' building design and the real world of client expectations, attitudes, sites and budgets, highlighting the importance of building-inhabitant interactions. Students' proto-professional communication skills benefit from dealing with clients; a building-industry- sponsored poster competition challenges their capacity to communicate to the public the rationale of their projects. Group work simulates (if imperfectly) the teamwork of architectural practice, while seeing others produce different responses to the 'same' brief, combined with exposure to client assumptions and attitudes, encourages students to interrogate their own. However the project raises issues about the adequacy of specifically architectural approaches to ESD. The clients tend to be 'environmentally-aware', but many sites are in 'bush' areas: how ecologically valid are individual houses, however environmentally responsible, which involve alienation of natural environments and require extensive car travel for access?http://www.unige.ch/cuepe/html/plea2006