Solar Decathlon Build-out Gathers Pace By Chris Stimpson Solar Nation Executive Campaigner The sun rose this morning on a new development in progress in downtown Washington — about as downtown as you can get, in fact. On the National Mall, stretching from the Washington Monument east to the Smithsonian ‘Castle’, twenty small houses were in different stages of construction. They had started their journey to the capital from points as far away as Darmstadt, Germany and as close as the state of Virginia, to compete in the 2009 Solar Decathlon