Leah Krauss
United Press International

 –  At the 18th annual International Contemporary Furniture Fair opening this weekend in New York, visitors will see cutting-edge chairs, beautiful beds and a solar-powered sofa.

The sofa, part of the New York Institute of Technology’s (NYIT’s) exhibit, “Furniture for a Solar Home”, is lined along the back with photovoltaic panels that, in turn, power two nearby lamps and a fan system beneath the cushions.

This way, you can “feel a cool breeze while expending only milliamps of energy, instead of turning on a two-ton air conditioner”, Robert Allen, the NYIT professor who supervised the sofa’s design, told UPI in a telephone interview. “There’s nothing earth-shattering about the concept,” Allen continued. “Airplanes have been doing it for 30 years.”

NYIT students originally designed the couch, along with a house and a house full of other furniture, for the US Department of Energy’s 2012 Solar Decathlon, Allen said. Teams from all over the world competed to build the most energy-efficient solar-powered house. The team was one of 18 finalists in the competition.

“The six high-tech furniture pieces [that will be on display in New York] challenge many assumptions of current sustainable design thinking by advancing a new model that suggests interior furnishings become principal participants in the overall energy and material strategy – both for solar and non-solar homes,” NYIT said in a statement.

One of the ways to achieve this is to create “micro-environments”, such as the sofa-fan-lamp system, within the house, Allen said.

This way, users consume only the energy they need, without wasting extra. It “diminish[es] the [energy] load on the house”, Allen explained.

“The little things add up,” Allen said. He cited the example of new Cadillacs, which feature personal air conditioning for each seat instead of one large air conditioning unit for the whole car.

“From an energy standpoint, it makes a lot of sense,” he said.

The sofa’s photovoltaic panels are amorphous, Allen said, meaning that they can convert diffused light into electricity. Most solar panels need direct sunlight to work. “All day the sofa is charging its bank of batteries, and at night it can power the fans and the light fixtures,” Allen said.

Another example of a micro-environment within the home is what Allen called the “Plug and Play” area, which features a series of screens that can be positioned around the chair to create privacy or to block the sun. The area also has its own fan system, Allen said.

The second concept on which the interior design students relied was consolidation – building furniture capable of multifunction use, Allen said. In their house, the dining room chairs double as living room chairs, and when not in use at all, they can be collapsed under the dining table to form a “decorative drum”, Allen said.

Beyond all that, the house saved on energy by being smallest in the Solar Decathlon competition, Allen said.

The two-storey building was “barely 530 square feet”, [50 square meters] Allen said, but the feedback he received was that it felt the most spacious.

The house, which NYIT students designed and built in cooperation with students from the US Merchant Marine Academy, used hydrogen as a storage medium.

“It was very expensive, and very controversial,” Allen said. “The Department of Homeland Security didn’t want tanks of hydrogen on the National Mall,” where the competition was held, he said.

With that detail worked out, however, the students had a fuel cell that, powered by the solar panels on the house, converted water to hydrogen throughout the course of the day, Allen said.

At night, the fuel cell converted the hydrogen to electricity, and the process’s only by-product was water, he said.

Designing the furniture and the house has been a two-and-a-half-year project, Allen said.

“Initially I wasn’t terribly excited about it,” he said. He gave the project some thought and agreed to sign on, on one condition: “I didn’t just want to take sustainable materials and make regular furniture,” he said, adding, “I wanted the furniture to be something different.”