Energiesprong Alabama: Deep Energy Retrofit Strategies for Alabama’s Public Housing

The elective seminar course Energiesprong Alabama engaged undergraduate architecture students with officials from public housing authorities to research opportunities for deep energy retrofit of Alabama housing projects that are threatened with demolition. While the prevailing approach in most US schools of architecture is to teach students to design for new construction, this course instead emphasized research, analysis, and design methodologies focused on retrofit of existing buildings. The retrofit approach introduced in the course is based on the Dutch Energiesprong paradigm, under which thousands of units of social housing have been renovated since 2010. Students analyzed case study retrofit projects from Europe and the US to extract principles which might be applied in their local context. Students then researched the scope of public housing authorities in Alabama and selected groups of buildings in need of retrofit to avoid demolition. In the final project of the seminar, students developed design proposals for deep energy retrofits of specific Alabama housing projects, using computational energy modeling and photovoltaic simulation software to demonstrate that their retrofits could approach net zero energy and achieve a payback that would justify the retrofit expense.