2002 Innovative Technology in Housing Awards

by Illustration: Stephen Rountree Steven Winter Associates is developing a way to capture and deliver sunlight to dark, windowless rooms. Illustration: Stephen Rountree

DEFYING THE LAWS OF PHYSICS AWARD

You are the sunshine of my windowless basement.

Americans spend $40 billion a year lighting homes and businesses, most of it when there's plenty of light outside just going to waste. Enter Steven Winter Associates, which is developing a way to capture and deliver sunlight to dark, windowless rooms. The technology, called passive fiber-optic daylighting, relies on four high-powered Fresnel lenses to direct sunlight onto a secondary lens called a beam former. This lens concentrates the light, then sends it through 1/2-inch plastic fiber-optic cables to its final destination, where it's delivered via a standard light fixture.

The company has been field testing a prototype since last March. It hopes to commercialize the technology, at $400 per fixture, sometime next year.

'LIKE DUH' AWARD

Finally, curved framing for curved walls.

Curved walls can be dramatic, but the traditional way of framing them
-cutting straight boards into tiny pieces, jerry-rigging a curve, and slapping drywall or another bendable wallboard on top-is akin to building a basketball out of Legos. The result: Not only does the wall take forever to build, it often has visible flat spots and humps.

But with Flex-C Trac framing, curved walls are easy. Instead of using wood, builders bend two U-shaped pieces of sheet metal-one for the floor, the other for the ceiling-to match the desired curve. These pieces hold the wooden studs in place at any angle.

SECOND CHANCES AWARD

First comes the house, then the foundation.

Anchorpanel proves again that there's strength in numbers. The foundation system, which can be retrofitted on existing homes to protect from floods and earthquakes, consists of dozens of 3-feet-wide steel panels that attach around the perimeter of the house. Then they're cast in concrete and hidden with stone or another decorative covering.

PEACE OF MIND AWARD

Air filtration for the better-safe-than-sorry set.

Do you need a filter that removes 99.97 percent of all airborne particles? Probably not. That said . . . feeling lucky?

GuardianPlus ($599 to $1,399, depending on features) is the most complete air system you can buy. Not only does it regulate heating, cooling, and humidity, it also removes asthma- and allergy-causing pollutants-such as dust mites, mold spores, and smoke-along with so-called volatile organic compounds, potentially harmful gases coming from carpets, paint, and furniture. It even filters
out carbon monoxide and radon.