Overview: Discover how Passive House can support our children through projects in Washington State & British Columbia.
Presentation 1: Witset Indigenous Youth Healing Lodge
The Witset First Nation addressed the legacy of multigenerational trauma produced by the Canadian Residential School System’s atrocities by creating a Youth Healing Lodge for the children of residential school survivors and their families. The owners saw the Passive House Standard as critical—while emphasizing culturally significant materials, symbols, and function by incorporating community needs like a communal kitchen, dining areas, and a smudging room—to achieving the objective of providing a healthy indoor environment that supports healing, and making the project financially sustainable with low operating costs.
Learning Objectives:
- Identify how traditional Indigenous culture and Passive House goals align.
- Explore how to incorporate culturally significant features and functionality while not compromising on Passive House requirements.
- Describe how to work with an experienced Passive House construction manager to deliver remote projects.
- Illustrate the impact of Passive House on the healing journey.
Presentation 2: From Airtight to All-In: When Performance Enables Purpose
Passive House, at its best, is a foundational platform for holistic, transformative design. The award-winning Upper School project at The Bush School in Seattle, Washington, exemplifies this potential by connecting high performance with community, ecology, and human development. Attendees will gain practical guidance on fostering collaborative team environments and applying transferable systems thinking to projects of any scale.
Learning Objectives:
- Describe how Passive House performance can serve as a foundation—not an endpoint—for integrated systems design that connects buildings to community, ecological, human, and economic systems.
- Identify practical strategies and team practices that create the collaborative conditions needed to explore project potential through a systems-based design approach.
- Explore how systems-driven design decisions can generate outcomes beyond energy performance and savings, including equity, ecological health, resilience, and well-being.
- Apply transferable systems principles and tools from the case study to inform future Passive House projects at building, campus, and community scales.
CEUs:
Upon completion of all modules a Certificate of Attendance will be automatically issued for AIA & PHI credit. Please self report to both AIA & PHI using the codes provided.
