Members of Hugh Crawford's "Environmentalism and Ecocriticism" class in LCC built three playhouses last fall as part of a research project on literary nature writers. This semester one of those houses is on display in Clough Commons in anticipation of Bernd Heinrich's March 7th Karlovitz Lecture. The other two have gone solar.

A team of College of Architecture students working with Tristan al Hadad, Russell Gentry, and Joseph Goodman (from GTRI) are designing innovative mounts and connections for residential photovoltaic panel installation.

They recently mounted their first designs on the Thoreau and Beston houses still on display in front of the Architecture Building and are producing at peak 1 kilowatt. Now they just have to figure out what Thoreau would have done if he had electricity.

The solar panel research is sponsored by the Department of Energy.