Rob Hosken: Protecting Passive Building Performance

Last week, we were joined by Rob Hosken, an architect and the principal at Building Performance Architecture. In addition to working on buildings that have achieved Passive House certification, Rob has also worked on two of the world’s first Living Building Challenge certified buildings. Rob drew on his decades of experience supporting high-performance buildings in Western Pennsylvania and beyond to talk about the importance of quality assurance and control (QA/QC), which are absolutely integral to any kind of construction, but are especially when striving for high-performance building certifications.

Much of Rob's presentation focused on a 52-unit apartment building that achieved a 977 CFM50 whole building leakage directly after the air barrier was installed and 0.017 CFM50 per square feet of envelope, which is 72% below the maximum amount leakage allowed by PHIUS.

Pretty amazing, right?

If you want to know how Rob managed to hit such an amazing blower door number and hear about more projects that he and his team have worked on over the years (including the first Passive House certified library in North America), check out the video above and remember the three magic words:

• Teamwork

• Experience

• Vigilance

Additionally, Rob provided two nuggets of wisdom by which his team abides that anyone who works in a collaborative environment should keep in mind:

• “For everything wrong that we see, we make a recommendation on how to fix it.”

• “The earlier you start, the better results you’ll get in the end.”