Designs for Aleutian homes: winning entry won't be built.

• Author: Hollander, Zaz
• Position: ARCHITECTURE & ENGINEERING

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An international home-design contest aimed at stimulating affordable, energy-efficient building in the inhospitable climes of Atka Island drew an elegant winning entry from a young team of Spanish architects. But, in a difficult decision for the Aleutian Housing Authority, that body has abandoned plans to build the design that won the Living Aleutian Home Design Competition earlier this year.

Instead, the Authority plans to build a different home with a design not suggested by any contest participants--an octagon--and not on Atka but in the community of Sand Point.

The decision allows the Authority to meet its original contest goals without compromising the competition's stiff standards on cost and efficiency, says AHA's executive director, Dan Duame.

"I just can't let the idea of the competition dictate my result," Duame said at the end of July. "My original objectives were to find a highly performing building at the lowest possible cost that's replicable throughout the region. If the facts lead me to something else, that's where I need to go."

The Living Aleutian Home Design Competition--hosted by the Aleutian Housing Authority and the Portland, Ore. International Living Future Institute--challenged participants to design an energy-efficient yet affordable home on Atka, a windswept spot in the central Aleutian Islands deluged by 60 inches of precipitation a year--an inch for each person who lives there.

The Living Aleutian competition asked entrants to design rigorously efficient, cost-effective and easily replicated homes. The design needed to meet "netzero" standards for energy and water by creating as much of both as it consumed. And it couldn't cost more than $400,000, the average price for the modular units currently built on the island.

In May, to fanfare in the cold-climate housing community and in their home country, the competition announced the winner: a trio of young architects from the Taller Abierto studio in Madrid, Spain's sophisticated capital city of 3 million.

The winning project, "Finnesko 13," was a sloping three-bedroom, one bath home with a strip of windows and an aerodynamic design meant to channel the wind. The home was to be powered by wind turbines and geothermal heat rising from the volcanic ground.

The Madrid studio won the $35,000 first prize. And, in a fairly unusual opportunity for architects not accustomed to seeing designs become real, Taller Abierto also won the chance to turn their...