Tag: Simple

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The international Passivhaus Standard is most often associated with cooler climates. People assume it works best in climates like that of Germany and Northern Europe where the standard originates from.

But physics works wherever you are.

And people the world over want to live in comfortable, energy efficient homes.

So what about Australia?

We most often associate Australia with the beach and warm climates. With Sun, Sand and Surf.

And yet, Passivhaus is rapidly taking off in Australia. From a standing start of zero certified Passivhaus buildings only a year or so ago, there are now six at the time of writing.

Superpod delivered one of these certified Passivhaus homes. In this blog post, I interview the Superpod founder, Fiona McKenzie.

We talk about Superpod homes, Passivhaus Prefabrication and why Passivhaus is relevant in Australia despite what you might think.

australia: sun sand surf and passivhaus

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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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The mainstream approach to sustainable design is business-as-usual architecture with some easy bolt-on “sustainable features.” Easy solutions like this are what got us into the current mess: buildings contributing 40% of our CO2 emissions as we enter the anthropocene. (Have you read my manifesto?) Designing to the passivhaus standard means accepting more constraints and this requires more effort; it’s not an easy solution. A rigorous process must be followed. However, the passivhaus standard is actually very simple with clear performance benchmarks that must be met. And the results are simple: no complex offsetting or complex carbon calculating is necessary.

Passivhaus buildings simply reduce energy consumption and CO2 emissions, by design.

002 Passivhaus-Simple Continue reading →