Category: #LovePH

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Perhaps you’ve heard the oft-cited African proverb: “It takes a village to raise a child.” Passivhaus is similar; it takes a whole team to successfully deliver a passivhaus project. The Passivhaus Standard requires an integrated approach to design so everyone on the team needs to be involved and to play their part.

Structural engineers need to design structure integrated with, not compromising, the thermal envelope. Building services engineers need to design the building as a whole system not as discrete items of equipment added to a building. Architects need to be aware of building services and structure and how they integrate as elements of the architecture. The passivhaus designer needs to be aware of the building shape, form, structure, services, physics and more. And the list goes on; the team of professionals working closely together on an individual passivhaus project can be quite extensive.

And looking beyond individual projects, passivhaus professionals share many common interests and goals. They want to deliver buildings that live up to their promises. They want to help tackle climate change. And more often than not, they want to work together and help each other succeed. Whether it is on specific projects, at conferences, or on social media, passivhaus professionals are very active in honestly sharing mistakes, lessons learnt, best practice and latest developments. There is a very strong global passivhaus community.

Community is a reason to Love Passivhaus!

021 Love Passivhaus Community
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Architecture is often described as the combination of art and science. The role of art in architecture is understandably subjective and open to debate. However, what about the role of science in architecture?

Clearly buildings do obey the laws of science, as they must. And specifically, the structure and services of a building are calculated and designed using physics. Understandably, it is most often these areas of science that get expressed in architecture. We can see this, for example, in the structural expressionism of Santiago Calatrava or in the romanticised high-tech style of Richard Rogers.

Aside from structure and building services, however, does science inform architecture in any other ways? Perhaps not as often as it should! As I wrote about previously, design is central to passivhaus. And science is central to passivhaus design – at the macro level of form and orientation, and at the micro level of airtightness and thermal bridging.

Science is a reason to Love Passivhaus!

020 Love Passivhaus Science
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What is the fundamental purpose of a building?

Buildings serve several needs of society – primarily as shelter from weather, security, living space, privacy, to store belongings, and to comfortably live and work. A building as a shelter represents a physical division of the human habitat (a place of comfort and safety) and the outside (a place that at times may be harsh and harmful).
– Wikipedia

As you can see, comfort is fundamental to the purpose of a building. So why do we find it so hard to ensure our buildings are actually comfortable? Why does our ‘world-class’ architecture still fail to provide comfortable buildings to live, work, learn and play in? (Besides using far too much energy and emitting far too much CO2!)

The Passivhaus Standard is known as the world’s foremost building energy efficiency standard. And it is that, but it is also a comfort standard. After all, what is the point of a building being energy efficient (or low carbon for that matter) if it compromises the functionality and comfort of the people who use the building? Passivhaus buildings provide exemplary comfort for the occupants by maintaining a healthy comfortable temperature, by being quiet, by having fresh air and by being draught-free.

Comfort is a reason to Love Passivhaus!

019 Love Passivhaus Comfort
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integrity
/ɪnˈtɛɡrɪti/
noun
1. the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles.
2.the state of being whole and undivided.

Breaking promises damages your integrity. Do you make promises about the performance of buildings you design or construct? And do your buildings keep those promises?

Let me share a short story with you.

On a commission where I was the project architect, we reassured our clients that their new building would be super energy efficient, among other things. And yet, once the building had been handed over, I found myself in an embarrassing situation.

In a meeting with the clients, they put me on the spot and asked me why the energy bills were so high. No matter how many times I explained that the new building was much larger than their old building and had a lot more energy consuming equipment in it, there was no way out: in the clients’ mind we had not delivered on the promise of a super energy efficient building.

In fact, the new building was very energy efficient. However, we had never quantified what we meant by a “super energy efficient” new building. Therefore, the clients’ interpretation of this was lower energy bills and all they had to compare were the energy bills from their old building.

Needless to say, this project wasn’t a certified passivhaus building. Had it been, we could have given the clients an accurate prediction of what the (radically low) energy consumption would be. They would have had a good estimate of the expected energy bills. And the building would have performed as predicted. Our promise would have been kept.

Integrity is a reason to Love Passivhaus!

018 Love Passivhaus Integrity
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Architectural design is typically carried out with little or no environmental consideration integral to the process. Once the design has reached a certain stage environmental considerations – whether material toxicity, water conservation, carbon emissions or energy conservation or something else – are then assessed. At this point decisions are made to revise and iterate the design for better environmental outcomes or to add ‘environmental features’. We know the results of this disjointed design process and we know this has to change if buildings are going to be better for people and the planet!

Unfortunately many environmental standards reinforce this process in two ways. Firstly by being separate from the design process, often as an assessment procedure. Secondly by requiring ‘environmental features’ be added in order to score points or increase the rating of the design.

The Passivhaus Standard is different. Unlike most environmental standards for architecture, design is central to the Passivhaus Standard. And the Passivhaus Standard is central to the design process.

Design is a reason to Love Passivhaus!

017 Love Passivhaus Design
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