Some statistics: Cornell has, ahem, the number one architecture program in the United States. The United States each year produces six billion metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions — which is, per capita, almost 200 times more than poorer countries in the world. Buildings represent 39 percent of those emissions. Let’s round that up to 40 percent. While turning off the lights in Rockefeller overnight is important, the energy saved by doing so is chump change compared to what could be wrought by the education of a well-trained and knowledgeable generation of builders and designers.

Shock and disbelief were the only two feelings stronger than nausea when judges announced the results for architecture at the recent Solar Decathlon competition in Washington, D.C. After a two-year, Herculean effort, Cornell’s Solar Decathlon team (CUSD) had produced an innovative house of remarkable craftsmanship. Its peculiar form and materiality exerted an uncanny architectural magnetism, attracting the press and public and eliciting praise and pride from everyone involved.

Cornell’s ‘Silo House’ came in seventh out of the 20 teams competing in the 2009 Solar Decathlon, a U.S Energy Department sponsored competition in Washington D.C. that challenges university students to construct solar powered houses.

WASHINGTON, D.C. –– This weekend a team of Cornell students traveled to the capital to participate in the U.S. Department of Energy’s 2009 Solar Decathlon: a competition in which teams from 20 schools in North America and Europe compete to “design, build and operate the most attractive, effective, and energy-efficient solar-powered house,” according DOE’s Solar Decathlon website.

The usually open green lawn of the National Mall was transformed into a “Solar Village” of zero energy homes,” a collection of houses which utilize renewable resources such as sun and wind to produce as much energy as they consume.