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 …
Affordable Passivhaus ‘Plexes Everywhere
What if “public housing” meant a house-sized building with four to six apartments in a single-family zone, built by and for long-term older residents of the street, subsidized in part by land leases on the ground under their former homes? …
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 …
How Long Will It Take to Build Your New House?
A prospective client recently asked how long it would take to get a new house built. It’s a good question, and often asked, so I thought I’d turn my answer into a blog post. Short answer? Typically, going from first …
King County’s Climate Action Plan and Passive House
On November 2nd, King County rolled out an exciting update to their Strategic Climate Action Plan. It is indeed bold! So much to love about it! Among a wide range of excellent goals for transportation, operation and maintenance, there’s a whole section …
Seattle Climate Action Plan and Nick Licata’s Resolution 31400
Neither the City of Seattle Climate Action Plan to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050, nor Nick Licata’s Resolution 31400, establishing a Green Building Advisory Board for the City of Seattle, make any mention of Passive House. Passive House (Passivhaus) is the approach to designing ultra-low-energy …
How Seattle Thwarts Innovative Building
Seattle prides itself on its forward green thinking. However, it lags terribly behind on forward green doing. Why is that? There may be other factors endemic to the banking system in the US and the financing of projects, but here are …
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 …
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. …
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 …