Boston, where the winters are cold and the summers are humid is a frankly unforgiving climate for passive design. But that hasn’t stopped design/build firm Placetailor from applying the same rigor to zoning, insulating, sealing and retrofitting this 1850s Boston home as is typical in Germany, where the original PassivHaus emerged.

Among the characteristics of this home that make it so energy efficient are concrete floors to provide thermal mass, extensive solar glazing on the south side, super-insulated 12″ panels comprising the exterior walls, heat recovery ventilators to re-use the heat that would otherwise be wasted in exhausting the interior air. To put it in simple terms though, the architects simply paid attention to reducing summer heat gains, reducing winter heat losses (through the lungs and skin) and designing to allow the sun into the building in the cold winter months to offset any energy needed to heat the home. All in all, the cost attributed to making these decisions while at the drawing board is greatly less than when trying to retrofit a conventional building, and the turn-around on the investment for higher-efficiency appliances/building materials is relatively quick. As such, the PassivHaus standard tends to result in a significant 90% reduction in energy use for heating and cooling the building.

Without fail, when designs are held to the rigorous standard of the PassivHaus Institute, the result is an incredibly efficient building. The only downside to such a building standard is that it imposes severe constraints on the architect because of the need for super-insulated wall construction, typically only accomplished by use of SIPs (structurally-insulated panels) or cross-laminated timber that tends to be more than 12″ thick. These are minor things though, when you consider the end result and compare it to the typical American home. Such building methods are typical in Europe though, and the materials to do so are more readily available and therefore cheaper, so this building type has become more of a standard than an exception.

Realities such as this one make me question exactly what values of Americans led to the preponderance of McMansions while all across Europe homes were becoming more efficient and livable and they continue to have a viable housing stock. In America there is no such thing as a starter house anymore. The majority of new development are either suburban single family home developments where each home is confusing, illogical, wasteful, expensive and unwelcoming or urban multi-family housing developments that disregard the need for community, limit the choices of the occupant and whose goal is maximum density for maximum profit; none of these can be considered starter homes. By starter homes, I am referring to something on par with those Sears-built homes of the early 1900s or those found in Levittown, NJ around the same time – homes that are affordable, expandable to fit the user’s needs (think of a young family with children), and create a sense of community which places an otherwise missing value on the preservation of these buildings. “Affordable” homes nowadays are either shitty and rundown, in bad neighborhoods, or just plain old non-existent.

That is why the PassivHaus actually offers a viable alternative that would satisfy a need present in our country for decades. The PassivHaus standard emphasizes compact footprints and efficient building systems, which have the potential to, when applied to larger developments, result in higher densities and cheaper housing stock. This is a bit of conjecture on my part, but nothing close can be said of our current modes of development so I feel appropriately confident in making these claims.