Four years ago, Mark Younger, Pratt '03, had a dream to construct an environmentally sustainable house at Duke.
That dream became a reality Friday with the opening of the Home Depot Smart Home.
Located off Campus Drive behind the Freeman Center for Jewish Life, the $2.5-million Smart Home boasts sustainable living and futuristic technology. Ten students-six males and four females-will begin living at the Smart Home next semester.
At the ribbon-cutting ceremony, President Richard Brodhead and Kristina Johnson, former dean of the Pratt School of Engineering, spoke about the strong leadership and innovation necessary to create such a place.
"When I first saw the idea for what was then called the Smart House, I thought 'I'm no fool, this is a very cool idea," Brodhead said. "At other schools, students would have heard 'This is a wonderful idea. P.S. Don't count on it.' But not at Duke."
One of the major missions of the Smart Home is to focus on energy efficiency and sustainable living, said Smart Home President Tim Gu, a junior.
"I think one of the best parts is how we utilize and recycle rainwater," he said. "Water rolls off the 'green roof' that has plants growing on it and falls into canisters in the basement where we can filter and reuse it to wash our clothes and water our lawn."
The Smart Home also has floors constructed of renewable cork, generates 30 percent of its energy from solar panels and faces south to rely strongly on the sun's light, Gu added.
In addition to using their skills to better the environment, the Smart Home engineers are working on research that will put the house on the cutting edge of technology. It's common for students to ask the walls to deliver the weather forecast, and name tags allow a computer to track inhabits inside the house.
"Eventually, we want to integrate all the devices in the house so you can walk into a room and the temperature, music and lighting automatically adjust to your preferences," said senior Vidhan Srivastava, one of the students moving into the Smart Home next semester.
For entertainment, students living in the Smart Home can cook in the full kitchen or watch one of the three televisions in the media room.
"The media room has multiple TVs and wireless headphones so if someone wants to watch the World Series and someone else wants to watch 'Gossip Girl' at the same time, that can happen," said senior Jeff Schwane, vice president of the Smart Home.
Perhaps the most striking feature of the Smart Home, however, is the integration of the students and their individual projects into the house, Gu said. Students in both the Trinity College of Arts and Sciences and Pratt have contributed and made the opening possible, he added.
"When I was given a tour by the students who designed the Smart Home, I was blown away," Brodhead said, adding that he and his family now refer to his house as a "dumb house." "This place is so beautiful-but that's not the point. It's so ingenious."
At the opening, administrators highlighted the Smart Home as something unique and special to Duke.
"It shows a lot about what a university thinks of its students when it gives them a piece of land to exercise their imaginations on," Brodhead said. "This is truly what Duke is all about."
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