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? …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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. …
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 …
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 …
