Two graduates of Kansas State University's landscape architecture program are the received a top award in the annual American Society of Landscape Architects' National Student Design Competition for work they completed while at K-State.
Celine Andersen and Mark Ruzicka received the Residential Design Award of Excellence for "Prairie Roots: Site Design for Solar Decathlon Project Solar House."
The project statement called for the students to design the site for K-State's entry in the 2007 Solar Decathlon using sustainable site elements to symbolically represent Kansas. The success of the design relied on a dichotomy of elements that satisfied the decathlon site on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., and the Kansas landscape.
Andersen and Ruzicka described their project as a concept to integrate the solar house to the site by celebrating the Kansas landscape. The design took six sustainable elements and integrated them with the site and house: "green" roof, native plants, gray-water harvesting, rainwater harvesting, kitchen garden and sustainable agriculture. The design used recycled and reclaimed materials, native plants and best management practices as an expression of sustainable ideals.
Each element was given appropriate position on the site: merging circulation, outdoor rooms and sustainable elements with the visual identity of the house and its systems. A prairie band acted as the major site element, swiping through the site and home using the "green" roof and native plantings as a strong visual element. The experience of circulating through the site and into the home was based on the principles of path, portal and place as described in the book of the same name by Edward T. White. The outdoor rooms are defined by the linear paths, compressive portals and space-forming planes that create a transition from the hectic decathlon streets to the solar home.
As a temporary site installation built by students, the design focused on transportability and construction feasibility as defining constraints. Though focused on the design of the National Mall site, Andersen and Ruzicka also worked within the bounds of placing the house in a native Kansas landscape.