About Team DURA

Team DURA was one of the only Solar Decathlon teams made up entirely of undergraduate students.

The project began when a group of students, intrigued by studying previous Solar Decathlon competitions, approached Professor Alexander Aptekar and proposed forming an interdisciplinary club to compete. What followed was a collaboration among faculty and students across many different departments at New York City College of Technology.

DURA was originally designed to satisfy a specific site in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Over the course of development, the design had to respond to multiple overlapping code requirements — New York City building code, California code (for the competition site), and Brooklyn Navy Yard code — while also functioning not strictly as a livable house, but as a display space: a fully organized model home built for public exhibition.

After the competition, following some friction between the team and New York City College of Technology, the DURA house was eventually rebuilt in Berthoud, Colorado, in 2018, as a Habitat for Humanity project — giving the house a second life as an actual home. Read the full story on the Where the Project Ended Up page.