Design and Construction Process

Building electrification using air-source heat pumps (ASHPs) is costly and requires a significant amount of space. Ice heating has the potential to reduce the capacity of ASHPs needed for full electrification by 50%, while also allowing for grid interactive peak shifting for added energy resilience and time-of-use carbon savings in order to meet decarbonization policies and local stretch codes. This thermal storage solution can dramatically reduce first costs, carbon emissions, and space required for full electrification of new construction and existing buildings.

This session will explore the use of systems thinking to accelerate decarbonization in homes and organizations. Through a case study of a single family property being redeveloped as a Passive House infill project, we will illustrate how the design and construction process can leverage the developer’s needs and available incentives. This session is appropriate for the emerging professional in building science as well as the experienced practitioner who wants to level up their impact.

An existing house represents an enormous amount of “up front” carbon that has already been committed. The more we can re-use it, the less carbon we are releasing per unit of housing. But when is enough enough? This session is about finding the sweet spot between existing and desired, and how to balance expense vs savings.

Learn about the "Fab Four" top embodied carbon materials and how we can reduce their environmental impact. The Federal Government is focused on this topic through a pilot procurement process to shift the market, as is NYS through EO #22. Let’s learn about how we can address steel, asphalt, concrete, and glass to radically and significantly reduce embodied carbon in our buildings and horizontal design!

As part of a whole-building design approach, building enclosure is a key lever in reducing operational carbon emissions. With early phase detailing, precise thermal modeling can be performed to set achievable envelope performance criteria and define critical design components. This leads to more rigorous conversations with construction partners and more certain cost outcomes. We will explore recent thermal studies of panelized enclosure solutions for large scale high rise buildings that meet Passive House performance criteria.

Join us for an enlightening panel session that delves into the pivotal role geothermal can play in commercial and network scale building decarbonization, energy consumption reduction, and climate resiliency in our communities. We will guide you through key considerations and strategies for site identification and project evaluation to enable successful ground source heat pump implementation in your projects.

This session will present a case study of the 544,000 sf Harvard Science and Engineering Complex, one of the most sustainable and resilient buildings ever constructed. The project employed a highly integrated design process to satisfy the aggressive performance goals set by Harvard. These included resiliency measures to address climate change, in particular sea level rise, and the highest possible energy efficiency, while providing a healthy environment for occupants, extensive water use reduction, and recycling.

What does it take to meet the Passive House standard in countries with extreme climates? Can Passive House be adapted to specific cultural demands that seem at odds with Passive House principles? What can we learn from vernacular architecture? The session takes a deeper dive into the investigation of how the Passive House approach can be deployed globally, its opportunities and challenges.

This session will showcase the implementation of a high-performance façade assembly on an existing high rise concrete multi-family housing building complex, and the resulting measured data of operational energy and water consumption. In addition to addressing climate resilience, we will discuss how the project addresses community resilience by allowing the tenants to remain in their homes through construction and improving the quality of their spaces through design.

While electrification of domestic hot water is picking up steam, outdated sizing guidelines result in oversized, expensive, and inefficient systems, especially in affordable multifamily housing. New Ecology’s data, from over 20 affordable multifamily housing sites, reveals differences between the measured loads and traditional sizing guidelines, presenting opportunities for higher system efficiency, reduced operating costs, and lower first costs as these buildings move to electrify their domestic hot water.

When used early in the design process, energy modeling is a powerful tool for decision making, not only for sizing equipment but also for shaping buildings and selecting materials. Iterative energy modeling results in reductions in construction costs, embodied carbon, and energy use. With current climate and energy goals, energy modeling must be a tool available to all design and building professionals. Learn to create energy models of your own today!

In light of the catastrophic flooding which occurred throughout the Northeast region in 2023, we must challenge ourselves to confront the increased likelihood of extreme weather events and diminished water resilience that our projects now face. Resilience can only be achieved if we embrace the reality of new weather patterns and adjust both design and funding strategies accordingly.

This session will discuss the advantages and challenges of using CO2 Heat Pumps for decarbonizing and efficiently electrifying commercial Domestic Hot Water systems. The session will outline and discuss the Mitsubishi Electric Heat2O DHW solution along with other CO2 DHW systems and their applications. The functionality, operation, scalability, and relevant design challenges related to these types of solutions will be explained. This session will discuss the use and benefit of CO2 as a refrigerant and its impact on environmentally sustainable buildings.

To achieve mass adoption of offsite construction, the building process as we know it has to be reevaluated from multiple perspectives. This is especially true when combined with the goals of scaling up low-carbon and high-performance objectives. The session will explore how the three primarily residential companies have built their businesses around offsite manufacturing principles and have developed strategies to “unsilo” the industry.

The impact of building materials on human and environmental health has received increased attention, and hundreds of design firms have pledged to support healthier materials. Ensuring healthier material selections requires complex decisions and collaborations. Acknowledging this challenge, how can the industry adopt meaningful material health goals across all projects? How can we build on the work others are doing?

As the energy and carbon landscape evolves, the design and construction of hospitals must change to meet new challenges. New techniques, perspectives and methodologies must be applied to drive innovation and achieve outstanding results. From the dual perspective of a CPHC and experienced HVAC design engineer, we will provide an overview of Passive House principles in the context of hospital design and construction. We will review three case studies: one occupied, one in construction, and one in design.

With the coming updates to building energy codes, there is an anticipation of growth in the volume of Passive House buildings. It is important to have a fully scalable approach to successfully guide teams from scope development through certification. This session will give a “behind the scenes” look into the process and demonstrate how to best handle the expansion of Passive House projects with a look at the perspective of the project manager, the energy modeler and the PHIUS verifier.

Methods for electrification of DHW in multifamily buildings all pose challenges. This session will provide an overview of existing technologies and a brief history of how we arrived at central air-source heat pump technology as the least problematic solution today. We will use recent design-phase case studies to illustrate cost, estimated energy use, mechanical space requirements, system and equipment peculiarities, metering strategies, maintenance requirements, what we’d like to learn from systems as they’re installed, and why the alternatives for electrification of DHW are even worse!

Passive House buildings go hand-in-hand with on-site generation and electrification, but what happens when you have code-required emergency power backup? The Kenzi tackled the wicked problem of designing, pricing, and permitting the first all-electric building above four floors in the City of Boston. We will dive into the nitty gritty of design, funding, and procurement, reveal our strategy for Boston Fire Department concerns, and discuss what code language we leaned on to pull it all together.

Retrofitting buildings to reduce operating emissions is a key climate strategy. Viable, affordable, and scalable strategies must be implemented. However, we must avoid a surge of embodied carbon emissions from the manufacturing of building materials. This presentation showcases research and case studies evaluating the embodied carbon investment of varying retrofit assembly strategies and construction methodologies in cold climates with the expected operational carbon savings. We will hold an introductory how-to workshop on low embodied carbon approaches that exist today.

This session offers a case study of a curtainwall building in which the project team collaborated on an iterative energy modeling and design process to achieve aggressive energy reduction goals. Our panel will share insight on the process that led to significant energy and carbon reductions, predictive versus post occupancy usage data, and how this building will adapt to BERDO 2.0 and future energy and resilience considerations – a challenge facing recently constructed buildings that will need to decarbonize in the near future in Boston.

On October 22, 2022 we held the inaugural Touch A Trade event in Kent, CT. The goal of this event was to introduce pre-teen and teenage children to various trades via hands-on experiences. This first event attracted nearly 500 participants, exceeding projected attendance and demonstrating the value of similar future events. This session will focus on our planning process, outcomes, and feedback from presenters and visitors alike, and appraise the value of the Touch a Trade event as a viable workforce development strategy to be scaled in other communities.

With rising determination to fight the climate crisis worldwide, practitioners are finding the Passive House standard a potent solution for the building sector. As passive and other sustainable building standards are proliferating worldwide, those standards meet a host of different location-specific challenges. This diverse panel of women architects and certified Passive House consultants are seeking to understand the adaptation of the Passive House standard globally.

Typical university dormitory projects are capital intensive and take several years to complete. This project turned this practice on its head. Using modular construction, on-site precast foundations, an integrated design-build team and low-embodied-carbon materials in a holistic approach, Colby College housed students as quickly as possible while ensuring the highest standards of beauty, accessibility, energy consumption, and healthy materials. Design started in September 2021, and students moved in in August 2022.

Windows are a key part of the building enclosure, but they are also the costliest, most fragile, and worst thermally performing component. We will present on windows from our viewpoint as building enclosure consultants and forensic failure specialists. We will explore energy and comfort impacts of glazing and glazing ratios, and then move on to water control detailing and the window-to-wall interface. Covered topics will include sill pan and rough opening flashings, “innie” vs.