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? Those homes vacated by the older residents would now be …
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 of strategies devoted to reducing carbon emissions through green building, …
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 residential, commercial and institutional buildings that reduces energy used in …
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 community of like-minded adventurers on the edges of low energy …
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. Building Green picked up the story, as did Grist. But…are …
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 long been a hero of mine. In ninth grade I …
The Passivhaus approach can be implemented when retrofitting existing buildings as well as when building new ones. Heating energy use in an existing building can be reduced to 10% of what it was prior to renovation. There are (of course) a number of challenges. In western Washington, achieving Passivhaus in an existing building …
