Well, first of all, thank you, Sabir. Thank you, Mark, and Alfredo. Oh, I don't like to do this.
Okay, here we go. Every good story begins in Greece, Thanos, and so does this one.
Daedalus and Icarus were father and son, and Icarus decided that he wanted to fly over to Sicily.
His dad built him a series of wings that you've seen he represented in our history for a long period.
Unfortunately, he burned off his wings because he flew too close to the sun.
The Solar Decathlon Project was something that we undertook as a group at the College of Architecture,
international competition to build a solar-powered house, entirely solar-powered, 20 universities participated.
Those were the competitions that we had to actually begin to compete with,
which my colleague is going to speak to you a little bit about.
This could not have been built without an incredible amount of people here.
How many Solar Decathletes are here? Many. Come on.
Of course, I'm not going to admit to it tonight, but we basically had to bring together people from
ID, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, building construction, and of course the College of Architecture.
At the very beginning, our design process included a number of models in order for us to understand how and what we were going to build.
Here you can begin to see some of the wings and the solar skins.
The wings are both modeled in terms of small-scale models and large-scale models, and obviously in terms of digital models.
The wings was an idea about how to use a photovoltaic to actually construct the architectural principle of the house.
The skins had a lot to do with the ability to understand the relationship of solar, sun, and the sensitivities of that,
which goes back to this story of Icarus. Of course, Icarus did crash. His father knew that he was going to crash.
That was because you can get too close to the sun, and you don't want to get too close to the sun.
The students had to produce an incredible number of drawings to actually get this building built.
We did build the project, which I'll show you evidence of.
Before we actually started to get building, we had to make a whole series of prototypes in order for us to understand the wings,
and here they are in prototype mode, and to understand the various qualities of skin.
Light was an absolute generator for the whole project.
Without the idea of light being a design principle, we would have never been able to get so far.
Samples were built from very, very small-scale to very large-scale.
Of course, the time did come to actually start building, and that all freaked us out.
Here we were delivered a chassis. This house had to be transported to Washington.
Of course, we had to get it on wheels. We had to get the wheels off.
We actually had to build the chassis. This is what actually pulled 48,000 pounds of building, this little thing right here.
We had to insulate it. We had to actually get the structure built.
Every single one of these pieces was welded and actually built by the students.
It is an unbelievable tour de force to actually have erected the structure that they did,
bolt for bolt and screw for screw.
Once the structure was erected, there's Amelia. In the audience, Amelia, where are you?
There she is. Once the structure was erected, we actually had to begin to think about questions of envelope.
The envelope is two parts. One is a structurally insulated panel, which is a polystyrene material
that is highly insulative, but incredibly opaque and dark.
The other factor was this sensitive skin, which was a polycarbonate plastic that was in filled with aerogel.
A highly insulating material that we then came to use in the roof skin that you see here.
Here we have all of our Icarus, wonderful Icarus students, some of you are in the audience,
that basically hung off that roof for days on end to get these panels inserted,
which are again a plastic compound filled with aerogel.
This was the basic principle behind the sensitivity of Icarus.
Here we have an interior designed again and built with polycarbonate panels constructed at the AWPL,
which is the Advanced Wood Products Lab at the College of Architecture at Georgia Tech,
if I haven't made that very clear already.
The interiors were CNC machined and designed by Vishwadeep Dio and Lorraine Ong,
and built by a whole number of students, Amelia again included.
This project would never have been possible without a whole series of building systems related information and data,
which my colleague, Ruchi Chowdhury, will be showing you in a minute.
And whether it was hot water, whether it was the actual inverters, whether it was the ERV units,
or the heating and ventilating of the house, the systems were essential.
We get to Washington in October, I think it was the end of September, early October,
and we had to haul the house up there and actually get it kind of finalized.
Here you see the roof, we had never actually built the wings of the roof until we got to Washington.
We don't like to do things, you know, on short notice or anything like that.
We only had 5,000 square feet, we had really, really, really a small amount of space to actually build everything.
I show you some of the sort of final slides of the actual house when it was set up on the mall
with some of the ideas about the skins, again, reappearing in all of these images.
It's a pretty nice site to actually be out there on the mall in Washington, not a bad site.
I agree.
And so, both the exterior and the interior were finally seen by all of us for the first time.
We were actually building up until the opening day on Saturday.
We had never seen these interiors, which are actually spectacular.
And again, all of this was based on the idea of light and light as a generator.
Whether it was the interior of the bathroom or the bedroom,
the furniture was all donated by Herman Miller and partly the kitchen by Bulltop.
It was an absolutely spectacular sort of public event.
I don't know what the final figures are, but some people claim that we could have gone between 150 to 200,000 people on the mall.
Certainly, we had a good sort of tens of thousands coming through the house.
We had 20 schools there, and each school sort of got a representation.
Students were doing media tours all the time, and of course, even President Claude from Georgia Tech came by and see us.
Some of our competitors and friends, University of Texas at Austin, Colorado, the Winners, Darmstadt, our neighbors, Penn State,
everybody sort of did very well in each of their categories, and we'll see some scores in a minute.
But all of this really could have not been possible without the ability for many of these students to actually build skills
while they're actually having a good time and freaking out at the same time,
whether it's questions of welding or woodwork or actually literally building the steel
and making sure that it actually allows for the structure to actually operate,
but even something as sort of pedantic as trying to load huge amounts of 53-foot trailers to get your materials up there.
But at the same time, you can't build anything like this, which probably had about 100 people in terms of just student work
and maybe dozens of faculty members without actually building teams.
You build the building, but you also have to build the team,
because otherwise we could have not have had the stamina to actually complete this.
I invite all of you to come and take a look at the house.
It is on campus in front of the College of Architecture.
There it is in the process of being reconfigured, and also to visit our site at solargatech.edu.
So thank you very much.
Thank you.
