Design and Construction Process

This session will discuss the process of transforming an old masonry building in Newton MA into a PHIUS-certified net-zero office space and educational center for high-performance design and construction. The construction process will be discussed and Passive House features of the building will be described as will challenges and lessons learned from the process.

This is a tale of two companies on a quest to account for the embodied carbon impacts of energy retrofits, and to incorporate these impacts into the project planning process. How do we decide when embodied emissions are worth longer-term emission reductions? What are the pros and cons of choosing lower embodied carbon materials compared to higher emission ones?

The Passive House concept continues to scale up in North America, in both number and size of projects. Passive House buildings benefit from airtight construction, as minimizing winter infiltration directly lowers energy consumed when heating the building. Airtight construction also hinders airborne moisture from escaping through the building skin, thus requiring new thinking about the requirements of the ventilation system.

Transforming existing buildings is especially challenging with public-owned affordable housing buildings that rely on public funding and grants and must continue to house residents during major renovations. This session will share the successes of the Cambridge Housing Authority (CHA), which in 2014 vowed to reduce energy intensity by 20% in a decade.  CHA met that goal in only four years, and continues to improve their portfolio. Speakers will discuss incentives, strategies, priorities and certifications integrated into the design and planning process.

This small New Hampshire town was faced with a host of issues with its 35,000 sf school. Key areas included IAQ problems, lack of temperature control, obsolete HVAC equipment, and high energy bills. A small group of volunteers proposed a radical solution: take one classroom as a prototype, disconnect it from the central plant, super-insulate it, and install a cold climate heat pump and an ERV.

Builders and developers, whether public or private, can learn from the success of Columbia County NY Habitat for Humanity, which uses Passive House methods to provide high-quality, healthy, and affordable housing. Key lessons include strategic site planning, envelope assemblies and details friendly to unskilled labor, and keeping to budget while coping with design changes, building code variations, fluctuating costs and availability of materials, and evolving Passive House standards.

States across the region are setting ambitious heat pump targets to support their climate goals. But what will it look like to retrofit millions of homes with heat pumps as the primary heat source? This session explores efforts in Massachusetts to answer that question with applicable lessons for the entire region. In 2019, Mass Save launched a first-in-the-nation incentive for integrated controls that automatically transition between heat pumps and traditional heating systems.

As architects, designers, builders, and community advocates, we value the adaptive reuse of buildings, but lack data to verify our design choices. We often operate on intuition to choose what to reuse and what to upgrade, attempting to balance life cycle impacts of new construction materials while lowering operational energy use. Over the last decade, Boston firms Bruner/Cott and Goody Clancy have evolved their practices in high-performance and transformative reuse to think more deeply about the embodied and operational impacts of reuse projects.

There’s been a surge in interest in Passive House multi-family new construction in the Northeast. So what kind of differences are we really talking about from conventional projects? Can we educate our design and engineering teams to get there? Hear from two of Massachusetts’ first Passive House affordable projects: Beacon Community’s 55-unit Old Colony and POAH’s 135-Unit Mattapan Station. Find out changes in design and construction both projects had to make. Learn about incremental costs and savings.

Maine Passive House (MPH) has used two different strategies in retrofitting existing homes. One strategy involves adding insulation to the outside of the building; the other strategy is to add insulation to the inside of the building. Most projects involve a mix of the two strategies. Along with added insulation and eliminating thermal bridging, MPH increases air tightness, installs high performing windows and doors, and adds mechanical ventilation systems in their projects.