Time For Your Free Custom Design - The FreeGreen Challenge

Posted July 30, 2008 04:50 by David

Tags: freegreen challenge, free custom design contest, the new american green home

Tomorrow (July 31st) we will be launching the Inaugural FreeGreen Challenge.  For those of you who have been following along you will also know this as the FreeGreen Custom Design Contest.  With the launch (and related press releases\articles) coming we wanted get the word out on the blog first.  That said, see below for how we think about this contest .

What Is the FreeGreen Challenge

The FreeGreen Challenge is a contest in which any FreeGreen user can enter a submission to win a Free Custom Home Design for thier specific project, lot, etc.  The only real limitations on entry's are that they must be for homes being built in the United States, and entrants must be planning to build thier home in the near future (for specific and full contest rules see the contest form).  The winner will be the user with the best, most practical, and most exciting green home ideas, which we will help them make into reality.

What Is So Great About The FreeGreen Challenge

You mean besides offering our users a $25,000 prize  ?  We believe that the FreeGreen Challenge represents the first opportunity for the American public to define the term "Green Home".  For years architects and designers have been prescriptively defining this idea.  What they have missed was that this is not a problem with prescriptive solution.  The market must tell us thier tolerance for cost\benefit around energy saving, what green products seem affordable and useful, what styles work best, etc.  Without this we will not have mass market acceptance, and without that we have nothing.

This competition is our attempt at starting this dialog with you.  We want all of you to tell us what you want to see, which systems are most interesting to you, what passive solar design technique look the best, etc.  It is this conversation which we believe will significantly progress the concept of the American Green Home all within a two month period (not too shabby).  And of course because this is FreeGreen all of your ideas will be incorporated into our future designs, and the winners final design will be posted (for free) for others to use.  In our minds the FreeGreen Challenge represents the first large scale attempt to have an "American Scale" design charrette on the topic of green homes.  We are excited to see what comes of this experiment, and to provide one of our users with a free custom design.

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