Overview: Affordable housing gets better as Passive House design and delivery get better.
Presentation 1: Sticking to Passive House: Higher Performing Better Buildings Every Time
The struggle to maintain PH as an objective is not usually due to a lack of technical knowledge but from process breakdowns, unclear priorities, misaligned assumptions across disciplines, constructability challenges, and incremental cost-driven decisions that erode performance. We need practical, repeatable strategies for treating Passive House as a durable framework guiding decisions from kickoff through closeout.
Learning Objectives:
- Identify early project decisions that strongly influence whether Passive House is maintained through construction.
- Organize high-level Passive House targets into clear enclosure and detailing priorities.
- Compare up-front costs of high-performance Passive House to long-term risk and savings.
- Apply repeatable, practice-based framework for maintaining team alignment around project performance goals.
Presentation 2: Sutphin Boulevard, Breaking Ground, and Permanent Housing
Description: 97-10 Sutphin Boulevard, a 173-unit, permanently affordable housing building for seniors and individuals exiting homelessness with an integrated health center in Queens, NY, delivers rigorous, high-performance architecture, within the constraints of affordable housing pro formas. Look at the lessons of energy modeling, envelope detailing, mechanical coordination with healthcare, construction challenges, and a frank accounting of cost and value. Find out what Passive House delivery actually demands — and what it can return.
Learning Objectives:
- Describe the specific design, technical, and contractual strategies used to achieve Passive House performance in a large-scale affordable senior housing project with complex programming, including an integrated Federally Qualified Health Center.
- Identify the health, comfort, and energy cost benefits of the Passive House standard for low-income senior residents — including people exiting homelessness — and apply this framing to advocacy, design briefs, and developer conversations in their own practice.
- Explore the key coordination challenges in delivering Passive House within an affordable housing pro forma and team structure, and apply the lessons from this project to anticipate and mitigate similar challenges in future projects.
- Analyze the relationship between architectural design ambition and building envelope performance strategy using Sutphin Boulevard as a case study for how these goals can be pursued as complementary rather than competing objectives.
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.
