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Event Description
Event Description
From the TSA Website: Throughout the world, people are working to become more self-sustaining when it comes to landscaping and architectural design. Sometimes the purpose is to live off the grid, other times it is to create a smaller carbon footprint; yet other times it is to meet a need in locations where there is no access to power, water, or other basics. There are many options for sustainability throughout the world, but sometimes a location limits or enables those options. participants research a sustainable architectural design for a home in a country of the team’s choosing other than the team's resident country. Teams will create a display and a model. The model can be of the home the team designs or of a specific aspect of their design.
For the 2023-2024 season, our students chose inner Mongolia, China for their project. Below is a portion of their portfolio and project. This team placed first in our state competition.
Design Challenge and Explanation of Style and Solution
Design Challenge and Explanation of Style and Solution
Our team will be building a traditional Mongolian home. Traditional Mongolian yurts are usually built with wood rafters as a base, a wooden floor, and a felt covering, are in a cylinder shape, and have a cone-like roof. In our team’s design, we chose to build a wood base. Unlike traditional Mongolian homes, we will be adding various windows, rooms, and 3 doors leading outside in our design. We will also be making a glass roof/second floor.
Wildfires are quite common in Inner Mongolia, especially in grassland areas, and wood and felt are fire hazards, that way adding multiple windows and doors allows alternative escape routes during a fire.
Our agricultural system will be a small farm and a greenhouse in our glass roof. A big challenge in Inner Mongolia was most homes have no power and our team’s solution for that is going to be using a windmill as our power source. Another challenge most people face in Inner Mongolia is cold weather, due to climate change and being so far from oceans the weather is very cold. Most homes are heated by stoves, but that can be inconvenient. Our Solution was a wind-powered fireplace heater.
Inner Mongolian winters are also extremely cold, with a very scarce amount of food. The greenhouse inside the roof of our home can grow fresh food, and we have made some food storage as well. Our team was very creative with the design, making many different changes to the traditional Mongolian home. One of the changes is that we created a stairwell at the front door, instead of a fully circular home. The reason for this is that we wanted the stairs to be easily accessible, and the hallway can also be used as extra storage space. P
We have quite a lot of power in our home, including ceiling fans, lamps, and sinks. This is all powered by a windmill, which stands near the yurt. In real life, the windmill collects kinetic energy from the wind, which causes the blades to turn. These blades begin to generate electricity, which is then transferred to the home using a wire. However, in our model, we have just created a model and a house.
The furniture in our home is also very unique, due to everything being homemade. We tried to incorporate Mongolian/Chinese architecture into everything, as well as the floor plan. We created couches, sinks, beds, closets, tables, etc.
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