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Julie Du Brow, USGBC-CA
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Winners of Global Design Challenge “Shaping the Future of Water Use at Home” Announced by USGBC California, Full Report Released

Global Winners Design Future Irresistible Water-Saving Approaches LOS ANGELES (May 29, 2026) California uses more water at home than almost anywhere else in the country, and most of it moves through fixtures, appliances, and landscapes designed decades ago. Drought has shifted from emergency to baseline, codes have tightened and fixtures have improved. But the way most homes use water at the household residential scale has barely shifted in the last 25 years, despite improved tools. Committed to bridging this gap, USGBC California (USGBC-CA) is proud to announce the winners of its first global design competition, “Shaping the Future of Water Use at Home”. Receiving the top level prize are Red Dot Studio in the Professional division, and Flow in the Student division.


(L to R): Geneva Gondak, EBMUD; Mark Myers, Project Architect; Ben Stapleton, USGBC-CA; Karen Curtiss, Principal, Red Dot Studio and Red Dot Ranch; Colin Mangham, USGBC-CA; Kyle Pickett, USGBC-CA. (Credit: Ling Luo for USGBC-CA)
 
This worldwide ideas competition empowered architects, engineers, designers, and students to create water-efficient homes that inspire change, and to consider global water sustainability challenges and supporting the U.N. Sustainable Development Goal 6: access to water and sanitation for all. The future of water vision that emerged across submissions coalesced around three goals:lower-water choice for consumers must be the easier one, the more pleasant one, the more beautiful one;solve for hot water and you solve the largest energy load in the home, thus solving for both water and carbon; anddesigns should work in the existing building stock – retrofit is the priority for the majority of California homes.
 [Full Report for Architectural Design Challenge: Shaping the Future of Water Use at Home] 
“Water scarcity is no longer a future challenge for California — it is a design challenge for today,” said Ben Stapleton, CEO of USGBC California. “What inspired us most about this competition was seeing teams from around the world rethink the home not just as a place that consumes water, but as a system that can conserve, reuse, generate, and steward it more intelligently. The strongest submissions proved that lower-water living does not have to feel restrictive — it can be healthier, more resilient, more beautiful, and ultimately more desirable. That is the future we hope to help accelerate across California and beyond.”
 
The challenge launched in December 2025 with a deliberate framing borrowed from the 50L Home Coalition. The 50L Home Los Angeles Pilot, implemented by USGBC California, aspired to reduce the average California household’s use of roughly 300 liters per person per day to 50 liters. The Pilot retrofitted 31 homes and resulted in dropping average use to 87 liters per person per day, half the Los Angeles average, including a drop by 23 percent in hot water use. Residents reported their lives got better, not worse.
 
The Future of Water challenge was built on this experience, asking the question: how would a home be designed if water scarcity had been the constraint from day one? The challenge noted that the solutions had to be implementable within one to three years, and they had to work in retrofits and new builds. Submittors were encouraged to think holistically and incorporate strategies that addressed indoor and outdoor water use Ultimately, they had to feel irresistible.


Bio-Regional Shelter, exterior (Illustration by Henry Gao, Courtesy of Red Dot Studio)
 
The winning Professional submission by Red Dot Studio, San Francisco-based, is called “Bio-Regional Shelter”. In short, it is a fog-rich coastal shelter – deployable as a home, an ADU, or post-disaster housing – that pulls water from air, treats waste on site, and works at the scale of a watershed. With many residents lacking clean water and reliable sanitation, the design is a rapidly deployable shelter that runs without depleted groundwater and without centralized infrastructure. The water strategy pairs MOF-based atmospheric harvesting (AirJoule A250) with regenerative energy, fixed-film biological treatment, and a closed-loop graywater system. A solar sail cloth roof feeds a SANCO2 heat pump and a LumenCache battery. Verdant straw SIP panels and mass timber framing keep embodied carbon low. A CLEANR filter catches microplastics from the laundry before they ever reach the soil. The submission addresses both Urban and Rural Water Strategies. The design targets 55 to 103 liters per person per day — within the UN Human Right to Water benchmark of 50 to 100 liters. This was a collaboration, with the design and architecture by Red Dot Studio, and Red Dot Ranch leading water systems research.“With over 1,000 at risk or failing water systems in CA, water insecurity is closer to home than we think,” said Karen Curtiss, Principal at the Studio and Ranch. “Our water infrastructure is aging and we need approaches that rethink water conveyance and work at the watershed level. We need to help water find its way home. We appreciate USGBC California holding the Future of Water at Home contest and look forward to learning from the results.”
 
The winning Student submission by Flow, titled “CoFlow” starts at the neighborhood and scales down, instead of starting at the fixture and scaling up. The team – comprised of students from Delft, Netherlands – treats domestic water as communal infrastructure operating across four braided scales. At the unit, all wet rooms cluster around a tight back-to-back layout to shorten pipe runs and reduce hot-water energy loss. At the household pair, two adjacent homes share a wet spine: a compact wet core (seen at left, Courtesy of Flow) handling rainwater storage, greywater routing, hot water heating, and filtration, fronted by a perforated wall that makes the water flow visible from the street, with a cascading edible garden irrigated by treated greywater. At the four-house cluster, an underground tank with UV treatment buffers seasonal demand and serves toilet flushing, laundry, and irrigation. At the district, stormwater diverts through bioswales and park retention basins or slow infiltration. Smart monitoring across all four scales turns private consumption into a community signal. The team’s design targets 17.5 gallons per person per day — roughly 66 liters, down 84 percent from the Los Angeles baseline of 112 gallons.
 

Representing the Flow team, Yoonji Kim said, “With CoFLOW, we set out to make water visible again. Rather than accepting infrastructure as something hidden and managed elsewhere, we embedded these principles, reduce, reuse, recharge within the spaces people actually inhabit. What emerged was not just a water strategy, but a new kind of civic relationship between people and the environment they share.” (Full team in Awards List below.)
 
The awards also recognize Excellence and Merit awards in the Professional division, two Emerging Innovators in the Student division, and four Jury Commendation Honors. Prizes totaling $50,000 are awarded across both Professional and Student divisions, including $15,000 for each of the top two winners. The challenge drew 112 participants – 65 professionals and 47 students – across six states and nine countries.
 
The Awards List: Highlights are noted for each awardee; full project narratives are accessible in the report, Architectural Design Challenge: Shaping the Future of Water Use at Home:
 
ProfessionalWinner:  Red Dot Studio, Bio-Regional Shelter (see above). (California)
 Excellence: Allan Lee Haskell, architect (California), The Hydro-Circular Home. Treat the home as a circular water economy. Embed Saya-Life leak intelligence at the supply line, mandate greywater-ready stub-outs at the slab, and run a color-coded Alternative Water Source line for non-potable reuse. Merit: Dan Edleson, architect (California), Invisible Abundance: Made of Air. Make water rather than just save it. Outdoor and indoor atmospheric water generators paired with HVAC condensate recovery, prefabricated as a single MEP (Mechanical, Electrical, and Plumbing) core for replication.StudentWinner: Flow (Loïc Chabus, Chuah Hao Feng, Yoonji Kim, Laura Schoonen, and Yat Hay Isabel Tsoi), CoFlow (see above). (The Netherlands)Emerging Innovator: Andrew Menna & Lori Yang, Red Light. A showerhead LED that uses color as a behavioral cue. Yellow at three minutes before the user hits a 15-minute target at 1.5 GPM, red at the threshold. No manual required. Modeled at 1.367 trillion gallons saved annually if scaled across U.S. adults. (California)Emerging Innovator: Juan Gilberto Bugarin Castillo, Water Battery. Shared like a thermostat vs. an app that is private and can be ignored, a wall-mounted device shows the household’s daily water budget as a draining tank, the way a phone shows battery. Targets a path to 87 liters per person / day, similar to the 50L Home LA Pilot. (Portugal)Jury Commendation Honors:Hafsa Burt, CA architect, Water as Sacred. (California)Benito Olamendi, CA landscape designer, Suburban Permaculture Retrofit. (California)Rohan G. Sutherland and team (Danilo Nesmiyan, Ely Sanchez, Andrew Leung, Frances Enriquez), Casa Atlas. (California)Gianlodovico de Mojana di Cologna, architect, Italy, The CORE Method. (Italy) 
The Awards were presented on May 28, 2026, at USGBC California’s 25th Annual California Green Building Conference, held on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley.

The next international ideas competition was also announced: Beyond the Box: Reimagining the Future of Data Centers. Organized by USGBC California and supported by regional and national partners and funders, it invites architects, engineers, landscape architects, and interdisciplinary teams to reimagine the data center as an active, responsible part of the communities it occupies. The traditional answer has been a sealed box with a fence around it; this challenge asks what comes next. Please visit this link for the launch and more information.

For further Future of Water Challenge or USGBC California information, please contact Julie Du Brow at julie@usgbc-ca.org or Ben Stapleton at ben@usgbc-ca.org. 
###About USGBC California (USGBC-CA)
USGBC California is a 501(c)3 non-profit and member-based organization whose vision is to transform California’s built environment into a more sustainable, resilient, and equitable region for all. USGBC California, an independent chapter of the U.S. Green Building Council, comprises green building communities across the state. We lead by inspiring leaders throughout our communities to take action on climate change, public health, and environmental justice while educating, developing, and empowering a diverse talent pipeline through our training, mentorship, and direct-to-community programs. We connect by merging interdisciplinary perspectives and collaborations to create positive systemic change. We advocate through promoting innovative, impactful policy solutions addressing the most urgent environmental and social challenges of our time. (www.usgbc-ca.org)

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