From: http://www.therecord.com/news-story/3412515-north-house-gives-region-glimpse-of-the-future/
By Jeff Hicks; June 07, 2013
CAMBRIDGE — Harrison Auch stared wide-eyed at the bed suspended from the ceiling.
Then, he unleashed a big, goofy baby grin.
Even a seven-month old, named after the late Beatle George Harrison, could tell this North House place was really something.
“He likes the ceiling,” said his mom, Kim, as Harrison chewed on her hoodie’s pull cords.
Well, there is a lot to like about this 800-square-foot, solar-powered bungalow — a sparkling glass cube surrounded by a 3,000-square foot wooden deck — located on the long-ago site of a piggery on the Blair Road edge of Cambridge.
The home heats its own water and stores heat from the sun in the floors so the nights don’t get too chilly. It’s got a miniature weather station on the roof that automatically opens and closes the North House window shutters.
Here comes the sun. There go the venetians.
“Dancing blinds,” said Patti Leather, spokesperson for the Rare Charitable Research Reserve, which enthusiastically gave North House its North Dumfries location.
Andrew Marston, Baby Harrison’s uncle, was one of the University of Waterloo architecture students who helped build it all.
Really, this is place is baby Harrison’s future. That’s why he was one of the guests of honour at Thursday’s official opening of the solar-powered green-housing prototype.
As a child, he can come here to learn about nature and the environment and clean energy.
As a student, he can even work here to improve upon North House as students from the Cambridge-based school of architecture plan to do research and design upgrades ad infinitum.
This is the happy landing place for North House, on a chunk of rare’s 900 acres along the Grand River where 12,000 cars pass by every day.
For a while, it looked like North House would remain disassembled in vast warehouse of crates like the Lost Ark of the Covenant.
It was originally designed by a team of architecture and engineering students from Waterloo, Simon Fraser University and Ryerson University. They entered the project in the 2009 U.S. Department of Energy’s solar decathlon and had to move it to the National Mall in Washington, D.C. for the event.
It won an award. It didn’t leak, like other entrants.
But it needed a new home after the competition. Eventually, rare stepped forward just as the University of Michigan might have considered brining it to Ann Arbor.
“We’re so happy it’s staying here,” said Maun Demchenko, one of the original Waterloo students who took the home to Washington, D.C. “We wanted it to stay in the community.”
Between participating universities, donors and benefactors, about $2-million has been pumped into the project, including $400,000 to bring it to rare.
Now, it’s stands proudly in the sun. Cue the dancing blinds.
“My heart is about to explode right now,” said Lauren Barhydt, the project co-ordinator for Waterloo. “The fact it’s actually come back to life is completely flooring.”