This House Consumes Less Net Energy Than Your Little Urban Studio

Three mornings a week, Bill Healy or Hunter Fanney lead tours for their government colleagues of the newest and most curious project on the campus of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland, a place where federal researchers tinker with wild ideas like refrigerants that could combat global warming and sensors that could measure human brain activity. This latest $2.5 million experiment went up slowly over the course of 18 months on a grassy lawn just inside the campus’ main entrance and across the street from its childcare center. So lots of people have been waiting to get a peek inside.

Set anywhere else – in fact, even just outside of NIST’s security gates in suburban Washington, D.C. – this laboratory would look entirely unremarkable. It is, by all appearances, a typical suburban American home. It has three upstairs bedrooms, 2,700 square feet of living space, another 1,500 square feet of unfinished basement, a detached two-car garage and the kind of yawning driveway you could spend an entire weekend shoveling in wintertime.