Intersection Trees

Urbanists love trees. Let’s just get that out of the way at the outset. We love them for the same reasons everyone else does: the shade that cools us and the patterns leaf shadows make; their beauty, their bark and …

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MHA = Mandatory Green Building

Over the last almost four years Seattle has been engaged in a deep dive into housing affordability, starting with former-Mayor Ed Murray’s appointment of twenty-eight volunteers to the Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda (HALA) Committee in September 2014, charging them …

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Brussels’ Exemplary Buildings Program

Yesterday’s Passive House Northwest Annual Conference was fantastic, led off by a rousing keynote on Seattle’s greenest building to date, the Bullitt Center, by Denis Hayes. The theme for the conference was “Building Bridges.” That means reaching out to our …

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The Greenest Building: Retrofit or Passive House?

Yesterday, preservation rock-stars Preservation Green Lab released the results of a study on the energy impacts of retrofitting existing buildings versus building new ones. Their unsurprising–for an arm of the National Trust for Historic Preservation–conclusion: Retrofits are almost always greener than new buildings. …

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Passivhaus vs Bullitt Center

If the Bullitt Center Living Building had been designed to meet Passive House, it would have needed only two-thirds of the on-site-generated energy of the current design to reach net-zero—in other words, a much smaller photovoltaic array. Denis Hayes has …

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