Some 20 collegiate entries will be vying for attention at the Decathlon, judging for which will take place at the National Mall in Washington.

The entry from nearby University of Maryland’s School of Architecture is called ‘Leaf House’. Team leader and third-year student John Kucia joined the Leaf House project about a year ago in a design class. Since then 250 students, faculty members and mentors from the commercial building trades have worked on the house’s many solar-powered systems. Among those systems is the radiant flooring, which Kucia says is cheap and efficient. “We have a special panel that converts sunlight into a fluid. We pump the fluid around the floor and it heats the house,” he told the Voice of America (VOA) in an interview.

The array of solar panels, installed on the roof, will supply enough energy to heat and cool the house, power its lights, and run its smart house computer system. “It will be examining all the mechanical and electrical components as well as windows and doors, the interior and exterior environment regulating the systems of the house.” In other words, lights can be dimmed or air-conditioning turned off remotely over the internet.

Cooling system
Mechanical engineering student Tyler Sines expects the cooling system (which he helped design) will give the team a competitive advantage. He explains that it uses the liquid form of a material commonly found in the tiny packets enclosed with new shoes to keep the footwear moisture-tree. “It’s the first time,” he says, “a desiccant - as it is called - has been applied to a home cooling system to suck humidity out of the air.”

A home owner can actually view the cascading desiccant from a showcase built into the wall. Sines says the waterfall-like feature serves both an aesthetic and a practical purpose. Team leader John Kucia explains how one portion of a south-facing wall will help conserve water and reduce erosion of the soil surrounding the house. “We are putting a bunch of planters up on the wall, and when it is fully grown you’re going to have a solid wall of nothing but greenery. The gutter systems of our roof will be watering this vertical plant system.”

The student team that designed and built Leaf House works well together, says architecture graduate student Brittany Williams. “We really want to change the way the profession works and allow architects and engineers to work together constantly,”she adds. “It actually makes a more beautiful home, as well as one that is more efficient.”

Williams believes that what she has learned preparing for the Solar Decathlon will make her more employable. Faculty advisor Julie Gabrielli adds that the students have gained skills that will help them tackle 21 st century problems.

Maryland University’s Leaf House will be transported by truck in mid-October from its College Park (Maryland) campus to the National Mall in Washington, the venue for the Solar Decathlon.

Where does ‘Ground Zero’ stand?
The sixteen acres of land in New York city that is known as ‘Ground Zero’ draws hundreds of thousands of visitors each year, and interest in what will eventually be built there reaches a peak on the anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001.

According to Voice of America’s Kane Farabaugh, there appears to be little progress at the site six years after the horrendous attacks, but developers continue to be optimistic that the Ground Zero redevelopment plan will be completed by 2012. At street level, it is hard to see the construction effort at Ground Zero, says Farabaugh. But looking down at the site from above, the scale of the work becomes clearer. Each day, hundreds of construction workers are literally laying the foundation of Lower Manhattan’s future.

Six years after the terrorist attacks that changed New York city forever, delays and debates have contributed to a perceived lack of progress at the site. The chairman of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, Avi Schick, admits that a lack of communication is partly to blame. “For too long in the past, all the various stakeholders sat in their own rooms in their own offices and planned their own projects.” As New York Governor Eliot Spitzer’s representative on the redevelopment, Schick assured the assembled media persons at an unveiling of further development plans that those problems were in the past. Schick said at the presentation - “As the Governor has said, there will be no more false promises and no more false starts.”

Indeed, as he spoke on the 10th floor of World Trade Center Seven, the only tower actually rebuilt since September 11, 2001, work in the large hole below continued.With the first steel beams of the ‘Freedom Tower’ now in place, Larry Silverstein, the developer with the rights to rebuild at Ground Zero, promises to break ground on more towers in the next six months. “The buildings will reach street level a year after the start of construction, and at that point steel will rise, and towers three and four will top out in 2010.”

However, despite all the optimistic talk, there have been setbacks in recent weeks, says Kane Farabaugh of VOA. Just across the street from Ground Zero stands the former Deutsche Bank building, which was heavily damaged by the September 11 attacks. Now under demolition one floor at a time, it became in August a death trap for two New York City firefighters. Since then the demolition work has come to a standstill. All the parties involved have their sights set on a 2012 completion date. Lifelike animations show how New York City would look if the current plans reach completion - a series of towers that gradually spiral down to the permanent memorial to all those who perished that fateful September morning.

Now called the National September 11th Memorial and Museum, the centrepiece of the plan calls for two square voids surrounded by falling water, aptly called ‘Reflecting Absence’.