Ribbon Cutting Ceremony

There was a great turnout for the ribbon cutting ceremony and open house tours. The ceremony celebrated the last 2.5 years of hard work by students and faculty as well as the wonderful support from the local Norris community and other project contributors.


Opening remarks were made by Scott Poole, the new Dean of the College of Architecture & Design at UT Knoxville. The other speakers included:

Jimmy G. Cheek, Chancellor, UT Knoxville
Samuel Mortimer, Bachelor of Architecture '10
Loy Johnson, Council Member, City of Norris
Kevin Clayton, CEO, Clayton Homes


The distinguished speakers were joined by other project supporters for the formal ribbon cutting.


Although this event was a well deserved "job well done" for everyone involved, it also marks the beginning of the year-long residency, demonstration, and extensive energy monitoring program. As a Master of Architecture student at UT and one of the Graduate Research Assistants this year, I will be helping to monitor and interpret the collected data to see how well the home's systems are functioning. I am excited to be part of this phase of the process and I am looking forward to sharing what we learn with you. Keep checking in for weekly updates on the New Norris House.

Summer Landscape Mini-Term Recap

What a summer! Even though it was a HOT, muddy, dirty process the time spent building the New Norris House landscape is one that I will always remember fondly. I even miss the manual labor, but maybe that's because I'm in an air conditioned room right now...

During the landscape mini-term we accomplished so much. We finished building and installed plants on the terraced bioretention beds.

We excavated for, and built, the raised vegetable beds and installed the 200 gallon irrigation cistern.


We successfully installed the stormwater overflow from the irrigation cistern to the bioretention beds and installed the pipe that brings the house's greywater into the greywater bioretention bed. We also built a gravel plinth for forest-side seating, installed over 200 linear feet of aluminum bed edging, dug beds for the perennial plantings, worked with a local contractor to finish the site grading, installed a stepping stone path connecting the sidewalk to the existing walking trails behind our property, weeded, watered and installed erosion control measures.


Some of us even got a lesson in how to operate landscape machinery!


So far, the plants are doing fantastic. The bioretention beds are lush and the perennial beds are off to a great start. We have plans for native shrub and tree planting in the fall, but for now it is so nice to be able to see what started as just an idea on paper growing and thriving in reality. Thank you to everyone who helped make the mini-term such a huge success!

LEED for Homes

Over the course of the past 3 months I have been working to complete our LEED for Homes submission to the USGBC (United States Green Building Council) in hopes of achieving a Platinum certification. We are well over the Platinum threshold and are currently projecting that we will exceed it by 27 points. Once certified, we will be the 6th (maybe 7th) LEED for Homes Platinum project in the state of Tennessee. Furthermore, we will be the first LEED platinum project in the University of Tennessee's building stock.

While the documentation itself is more or less complete, we have been working on a large publication to accompany our submission. We hope that our efforts can serve as a case study for others and the book will be available for purchase/ download in the coming months! Below you will find some draft spreads of the 264 page document. Enjoy!

The cover of the book.

The fist section deals with the story and background of the New Norris House. This includes history, design objectives and strategies, and process work.

The second section is the home's user manual. It contains specific information about the operation of the home's systems (rainwater, solar hot-water, HVAC, etc), care and maintenance schedules (floor, siding, landscape, etc) as well as information about lifestyle choices (recycling, composting, purchasing greenpower, etc).

The third and final section is a detailed description of every LEED point acquired by the project. In the credit shown above, information is given about removed exotic species and efforts to re-mediate the site.

This credit details efforts made to avoid the use of tropical wood (in our case, lauan).

The above credit details efforts made to control contaminants during the construction phase.