Overview: Technical and performance outcomes continue to develop, while challenging us to transcend and transform the world we act in.
Presentation 1: Latest Developments from the Passive House Institute
Description: The Passive House Institute has led the evolution of building industry technical performance standards worldwide for over 30 years, from cold-climate origins to hot-humid projects. The physics-based standards provide an open framework for design. The science, our strongest foundation, is not a checklist — it’s a way of thinking; a platform for creating an architecture of provocative cultural meaning. Hear highlights and latest developments in ongoing Passive House research and how design can accept the challenge to realize work animated by freedom and joy.
Learning Objectives:
- Outline key moments in the development of Passive House methodology and standards.
- Describe how the tools of Passive House like the PHPP have formed the basis for an open framework of design exploration.
- Outline how practitioners can understand Passive House standards as the basis for an open framework for building design.
Presentation 2: Who Decides What Counts?: Life, Value, and Passive House
Description: Passive House has long been defended through financial metrics like ROI and payback, but its power actually lies in something far more radical: by placing consistent limits on energy use, it frees architectural design to imagine and create buildings organized around human life rather than financial value. Project examples show that when energy becomes a settled social constraint, design regains its generative freedom—so architects, clients, and communities can redefine value in their own terms and actively remake the world through the buildings they choose to build.
Learning Objectives:
- Describe the potential for social change in Passive House projects.
- Explain the possible changes in prioritization of value when energy need is no longer significant.
- Illustrate how fixed energy limits shift opportunity upstream into design, reducing long-term operational risk, complexity, and renegotiation for occupants and owners.
- Outline how one can move beyond proven performance to allow for more freedom in design.
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.
