By Kristi Hintz

The year was 1933, and President Franklin Roosevelt needed innovative solutions if the New Deal was to lift the nation out of the Great Depression. The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) was one of those innovative solutions.

TVA’s first major undertaking was the construction of Norris Dam. Created to invigorate the regional economy of the extremely rural Tennessee Valley, the Norris Dam Project also was the agency’s chance to prove itself.

The town of Norris, established as part of the Norris Dam Project, was an equally bold experiment. Norris was designed as a model community and was revolutionary given the times—constructed with environmental efficiency and sustainable principles in mind. The centerpiece of the community was the Norris House, an innovative, affordable home that featured new technologies, locally produced materials, and efficient vernacular design.

Sustainability for the 21st Century

Today, 75 years later, an interdisciplinary team from UT has designed and will soon construct a prototype of the New Norris House, a sustainable home for the 21st Century, and one that they hope will last well into the future.

“The original Norris House represented the sustainable home of the 1930s and survives as a symbol of innovation,” says Tim Ezzell, director of the Community Partnership Center, a division of UT’s Institute for a Secure and Sustainable Environment (ISSE). “Our team created a design for the next 75 years.”

Ezzell, a historian and planner, and Tricia Stuth, assistant professor in the School of Architecture, led the team of architecture and planning students on the project.

“Norris could be considered one of the nation’s first planned sustainable communities,” Stuth says. “The neighborhood featured innovative, affordable homes with new technologies and efficient designs.”

The original Norris was an experimental town that analyzed electric efficiency among numerous homes constructed of wood, steel, and cinder block. The community was the creation of cutting-edge science and technology in residential design, using design elements such as pre-cast flooring and advancements in ventilation, insulation, electric and thermal heating, plumbing, and lighting.

Design for the Environment

The New Norris House will be cutting-edge in sustainability and green design.

“Though revolutionary by 1930s standards, the Norris houses are increasingly dated and no longer represent the cutting edge of sustainable design. The spirit of the homes, however, seems especially relevant today in light of current environmental and energy constraints,” Stuth says.

In that same spirit, the New Norris House was designed as an affordable, efficient, and sustainable structure that incorporates today’s technologies and meets today’s needs. The design takes advantage of natural ventilation, winter sunlight, and summer shade. The house features a solar-powered hot-water heater, a high-efficiency heat pump, a system for collecting and storing rainwater, and an on-site system for treating gray water.

“In designing the home, we tried to keep our focus and gestures as simple and effective as possible,” says Samuel Mortimer, a fifth-year architecture student. “The home is designed in three phases to allow the occupants to expand the home as their needs change. The home can be built in 500-, 900-, or 1,400-square-foot phases.

“Another key idea we had throughout the project was identifying sustainability as more than environmental concerns, i.e., carbon emissions. We realized that for this home to be a successful sustainable project, it needed to be socially sustainable as well—adaptable to changing needs, affordable for a wider demographic, and desirable to live in. Anyone can design a sustainable house, but the real challenge is designing one that people want to live in and can afford to live in.”

Engaging the Community

Determining desirability and affordability was crucial to the project and in fact was the first step. Last fall, the students started the New Norris Project with a series of workshops and exploratory visits to Norris to get a feel for the community, its citizens, and their needs and wants.

“The community has been open to discussion throughout the entire design and engagement process,” Mortimer says. “To derive a concept, we attempted to boil down what the Norris paradigm was and subsequently to reinterpret it for the 21st century.”

What resulted is “a New Norris House that’s designed to be buildable in the current city of Norris and fits within the architectural, technological, intellectual, and environmental framework of the original Norris Project,” he adds.

That original design was developed loosely based on the English garden city movement of the 1890s. Winding roads followed the contour of the terrain, and houses did not always face the street. The plan accommodated shared garages that were utilized by the surrounding cluster of homes and connected by a network of walking paths. While the garages no longer exist, the walking paths that connected them, though rarely used, remain.

“One objective of the New Norris House project was to reactivate these paths,” Stuth says. “The new design integrates the home into the surrounding community via pedestrian paths linking homes to community service nodes that provide for shopping, recreation, public gatherings, and performances. Each node has a unique function serving the town as a whole.”

The New Norris Houses were also designed, where possible, to be constructed of locally produced green building materials and to comply with the standards of the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design for Neighborhood Development (LEED-ND).

Award-Winning Design

After months of research and planning, the team from UT entered their New Norris House design into the P3 Award Competition during the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) National Sustainable Design Expo held in Washington, D.C., in April. About 40 teams competed. The UT team won top honors. The EPA competition focused on benefiting people, promoting prosperity and protecting the planet (P3). The team will use its award, an EPA grant of $75,000, to construct a New Norris House prototype.

“The competition was great,” Mortimer says. “It was inspiring to check out all the projects from other schools and to get a glimpse of the up-and-coming innovations we can expect to see on the market in the coming years. And, of course, we were ecstatic after receiving our award—it made all the work worth it. And it’s making the next phase possible.”

Listen to a podcast about the UT’s winning design or read the transcript.

Currently, the group is working on securing a lot in Norris and hopes to begin construction on the design in spring 2010. Mortimer, Levi Hooten and Daniel Luster, all fifth-year architecture students, will continue in their roles as student team leaders. Mary French, a graduate student in civil engineering, along with her advisor, Zhongguo “John” Ma, is working with the group to develop a multidisciplinary team of engineers to collaborate on the project. The team also hopes to add a student in landscape architecture or plant sciences as well.

Stuth will act as principal investigator for Phase II, with Ezzell and Catherine Wilt, ISSE policy consultant, acting as supporting investigators. Collaborators on the project include TVA and the town of Norris. The group still is actively engaged in discussions with the community, especially as they move forward with the design-build phase of the project.

“Community input will be just as vital in the next stages of the project as it has been throughout,” Mortimer says. “I want the citizens of Norris and visitors to the town to be surprised at how a piece of modern, sustainable architecture can be respectfully and successfully integrated into this sensitive, historical fabric. Their input is key to that integration.”

Tags: Architecture • Environment • Sustainability • Tim Ezzell • Tricia Stuth