By Jay Fox
The summer break in the Accelerator’s live programming is upon us, but the Reimagine Buildings Collective is going strong with Reimagine Summer! Our cohorts will continue to meet and our monthly PHPP Tips + Tricks series is set for July and August, but we’ll also be introducing some new (and fun) features.
At the heart of Reimagine Summer is our Summer Sessions, which will basically be summer school for building science nerds. The idea is to give a leading expert on a specific topic—such as domestic hot water systems or bio-based materials—the opportunity to explore three challenges and three opportunities in different areas of practice before opening the session up to a discussion with the audience about their own challenges. It’ll be like Plato’s Symposium—just with less wine and more talk of thermal bridging.
These 1.5-hour Summer Sessions will take place every Tuesday starting in July. Our first speaker will be the one and only Tomas O’Leary of MosArt Architects, one of Ireland’s leading firms for large-scale Passive House buildings. O’Leary has played a significant role in bringing Passive House to Ireland and North America, as he delivered the first certified Passive House in the English-speaking world. He is a fountain of knowledge.
Other luminaries we’ll be featuring include:
July 14 - Christine Williamson
July 21 - John Semmelhack
July 28 - Kristoff Irwin
August 4 – TBD
August 11 - Sally Godber
August 18 - Gary Klein
August 25 - Chris Magwood
In addition to the Summer Sessions we’ll also be launching Reimagine Summer Labs. As we recognize that some people will have more free time than others, there will be two tracks. The more intensive track will focus on heat pumps, bio-based materials, and bio-based materials and panelization. Principal and Founder of Positive Energy Kristof Irwin will be collaborating with the heat pump group, while Jacob Deva Racusin, co-owner of New Frameworks Natural Building and phenomenal saxophonist, will collaborate with both the bio-based materials and bio-based materials and panelization labs. The less intensive labs will continue researching topics from Spring Labs, including passive survivability and phased retrofits.
Finally, we’ll also be introducing a Collective Reading Group that will meet up to analyze and dive deep into relatively short items that run the gamut of topics covered in the Collective: refrigerants, microgrids, modular housing…there’s no set agenda!
Here’s to a constructive summer!