As we ring in 2022, the Passive House Accelerator magazine once again brings encouraging stories of project teams, policymakers, and manufacturers delivering climate-friendly building solutions. Passive House techniques—in concert with building electrification, clean energy, and low embodied carbon materials—chart a clear pathway toward climate action for the building sector. We hope the practical guidance found in these pages will inspire imitations galore. And, while we are always excited to document the increasing adoption of Passive House approaches, in this issue we are particularly thrilled to have an article by José Sosa Rueda covering the growth of Passive House in Latin America.
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Articles in this Issue
12/13/21
Putman Family YWCA Housing Opens Doors in Ontario
Putman Family YWCA in Hamilton, Ontario opened its doors this fall to its first affordable housing development designed for women and their children.
12/6/21
Boosting Passive House Availability
Passive House has long been attainable for the affluent and interested. In recent years, Passive House has increasingly become the target for new affordable housing developments, especially in certain states and provinces.
11/29/21
Bird’s Wing Passiv House + Duplex
Located on the west side of Vancouver, BC, Bird’s Wing Passivhaus+ marries Passive House thermal efficiency with spatial efficiency and a minimalist design.
11/15/21
Making Workforce Diversity a Cornerstone of the Clean Energy Economy
The anxiety-inducing Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report released in mid-2021 reaffirmed what many working in the high-performance building industry already knew: buildings will play a key role in mitigating carbon emissions.
11/8/21
Collective Carpentry Expanding Its Climate Impacts
Collective Carpentry is poised to transform opportunity into climate action. In June of this year the panel prefabrication company found out that it had been successful in its application for a grant—its first ever—from the CleanBC Building Innovation Fund and secured $580,000.
11/1/21
Appealing for a Retrofit Mission
“There’s no physical barrier to retrofitting all buildings, but we need audacious thinking and a willingness to try,”
10/25/21
Integrating Mitigation and Adaptation
The release of the IPCC’s most recent report makes patently clear how critical it is to design buildings to minimize carbon emissions impact, if there had been any question.
10/19/21
Keep Cool and Carry On: Passive House Cooling Experiences in Warm Climates
With rising global temperatures and increasingly frequent summer heatwaves, keeping cool in Passive House buildings has become a hot topic.
10/6/21
Passive Resilience Amid the Portland Heat Wave
In late June, unbearably hot weather descended on British Columbia, Oregon, and Washington. As many people quickly realized, there were few places to go to escape the heat, because most buildings were not designed to withstand these unprecedented temperatures.
1/11/22
Passive House in Latin America and Caribe
Comments from a Latin American Passive House designer
1/17/22
A Tale of Two Alabama Homes
For many rural towns—especially those that are staring down the barrel of obsolescence due to limited job opportunities, declining populations, and substandard housing stocks—large portions of the built environment are at a crisis stage.
1/17/22
A Delicate Balance: Weighing Embodied vs. Operational Carbon
While the carbon impact of a building’s entire life cycle is critical, emissions averted by 2030 have an even more significant beneficial impact on our climate than those averted later.
1/18/22
Extra Care for Exeter’s Elderly
Edwards Court in Exeter, England is the first and thus far only specialized housing for elderly people—or extra care scheme, as it’s known there—in the United Kingdom to be built to Passive House standards.
1/18/22
Passive Mobile Office
The [bundle] team designed and built the office-on-a-trailer in 2019. It was built nearby on the land of the Lummi Nation, who donated a trailer and the use of a warehouse as a construction site in exchange for workforce training on sustainable construction methods.
1/18/22
Kingsland Commons to Give New Life to Greenpoint Hospital
The redevelopment of the hospital campus will revitalize a corner of North Brooklyn and bring affordable housing to the borough.
1/18/22
Harvey West Studios
Santa Cruz, a coastal city in California known for its beautiful beaches and mild climate, also has a well-earned reputation for its limited and expensive housing options.