Introduction by Zack Semke

“The cushions don’t blow away in the storm. The house stays comfortable for a week without power. The mortgage doesn’t get underwater because your energy bills doubled. All of it is the same thing.” — the Selling Passive House in a Time of Insecurity Lab.

That idea—security in the broadest sense—is a strong current in this collection, born of a moment when grid failures, extreme heat, and volatile energy costs are on everyone’s mind. But a second current runs just as deep here: the conviction that what we each learn on individual projects should become knowledge the whole movement can use. These five Insight Briefs come out of the Spring 2026 session of Reimagine Labs, the small, practitioner-led “think and do tanks” inside the Reimagine Buildings Collective where members organize themselves around the most urgent questions in their work.

You’ll find passive survivability pushed beyond the envelope to backup power, dehumidification, and redundancy; buildings designed for disassembly and reuse; a practitioner’s map to the crowded landscape of bio-based and healthy-materials tools; the blueprint for an open, searchable database of retrofit case studies; and clear-eyed guidance on talking with clients about comfort, cost, and security.

That second current is one you can join today: several of these briefs are invitations as much as findings, with surveys to take and databases to seed.

I hope you enjoy reading—and that something here strengthens your work.