Row houses are usually associated with parties and good food, not with environmentally-friendly features like solar panels, low-flow shower heads and a plug-in hybrid car station. The Green Dorm — which is nearing its fundraising goal and could be within two or three years of completion, according to students and faculty associated with the project — aims to change all that.

The Green Dorm received a $75,000 grant from the Environmental Protection Agency last May, and the School of Engineering and the Offices of Development plan to complete a $12 million fundraising campaign for the sustainable dorm sometime this summer or fall. Once fundraising is complete, it will take about one year to finalize the building design and another year for construction, according to officials.

The project’s organizers not only plan to incorporate the latest environmentally-friendly technologies into the Green Dorm, but also want to create a community in which residents will learn about sustainability through immersion.

“The goal is to develop a building and a place and a community that fosters that type of sustainable lifestyle for the mainstream,” said Civil and Environmental Engineering Lecturer Mike Lin, who is involved in the Green Dorm project.

While raising the money for the dorm’s construction is the first priority, Green Dorm officials also want to establish a University endowment for the sustainable building.

“The endowment would allow us to plug and play with new technologies and devices,” said Civil and Environmental Engineering Prof. Richard Luthy in an email to The Daily. “Many of the special features of building will evolve over time. This will maintain student and faculty involvement and help create an exciting and fun place to both live and study.”

Luthy said the University has showed its continued support of the Green Dorm project by including it as part of the Stanford Challenge, a $4.3 billion fundraising endeavor.

A number of research projects connected to disciplines ranging from sociology to computer science, product design to medicine will be incorporated into the Green Dorm project.

“It will be exciting to go into the next phase of the project, and really start to work with the design professionals and transfer all that stuff we’ve gathered in academia over to an actual project,” said Jen Tobias ‘08, a student researcher and course coordinator for Lin’s class on the Green Dorm.

Some of this research examines traditional environmental issues such as energy and water consumption, but an increasing number of projects are taking unconventional approaches to studying what it means to be sustainable.

According to Lin, one student is studying the sociology of sustainable communities. Green Dorm project leaders also hope to work with the Graduate School of Business to determine the economic, emotional and physiological effects of living in a sustainable building.

“The goal of the research is not just to design that plug in [a hybrid] solution, but to design solutions that invoke a mental and ultimately cultural shift among the residents that will live in the dorm,” Lin said.

In addition to the eclectic student research it has prompted, the Green Dorm project has also encouraged high levels of collaboration among students, faculty, administrators and contractors.

“The broad-based participation by students and faculty from a wide range of disciplines speaks to the power of its vision of sustainability,” said Laura Breyfogle, senior associate dean in the School of Engineering.

Ultimately, the Green Dorm project hopes to revolutionize the thinking behind sustainable architecture, and organizers hope the new residence will prove a model for future buildings.

“Hopefully we’re going to have instilled in the project the DNA for how you can go about thinking about the social and environmental crisis in a completely different way,” Lin said. “And with any hope, someday there will be no more social and environmental crisis, and the Green Dorm can just be a dorm, and eventually hopefully every dorm will be a green dorm.”