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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The Chainsaw Retrofit

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 …

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