A Prototype E.S.D. Home: Towards a Model for Practice in Solar Sustainable Design

The design of an urban house located on the Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia has been completed as an exemplar of Ecologically Sustainable Design. The home is an essay in design synthesis: intended to integrate existing principles with state of the art environmental technologies and a comprehensive methodology for evaluating the performance of these technologies. The aim of this paper is to present selected results of the data gained from this evaluation to give feedback on the performance of the solar technologies used in the building. The paper argues that the project can form a Trojan horse for future practice concerning sustainability. The outcomes inform the debate on the design for wider use of solar design principles in building design in urban areas and how this confronts present approaches to provide some form of Energy Code compliance legislation