Designers and builders of mid-rise residential, affordable housing, schools and high rise Passive House buildings will take to the stage at NAPHN15 in Vancouver, BC.

PRESS RELEASE

Demonstrating that designing and building to the Passive House standard can drastically reduce the energy demand of all building types, not just residential homes, organizers of the North American Passive House Network conference 2015 have confirmed designers and builders of large Passive House buildings to speak at the event in Vancouver, October 1-2.

Sonia Zouari, Project Architect for the 42 unit Salus Clementine project — Ontario’s largest Passive House project and the first social housing project in Canada targeting Passive House Certification — will talk about the challenges of a light steel structure, optimization of thermal bridging, strategy to build-in Passive House quality execution in the specifications and tender documents, and quality assurance.

Dieter Herz of Herz & Lang (Germany), winners of the Passive House Award for “Office and Special Use Building” will share strategies for breaking through market barriers and making Passive House the logical solution for large buildings such as supermarkets, courthouses and prisons.

Principal of Cornerstone Architecture, Scott Kennedy, will present on a six-level Passive House building containing 95 rental apartment units starting construction in Vancouver in September.

“It’s exciting to see more and bigger Passive House projects across North America. The 27-storey Cornell Tech dormitory in New York broke ground last month, and is set to be the tallest Passive House in the world. California, New York and Vancouver have committed to carbon neutral buildings by 2020 and recognize the crucial role Passive House will play to achieve these targets.” Bronwyn Barry, Co-President, North American Passive House Network

Conference attendees wanting to learn more about designing multi-family and large Passive House buildings can also join a pre-conference workshop on Wednesday September 30th hosted by Tomàs O’Leary (Passive House Academy) and Dieter Herz, and will have the opportunity to see large projects built and under construction on Passive House project tours in Vancouver and Whistler on October 3rd.

Addressing the issue of cost as a perceived barrier to Passive House construction, the conference program committee hope to dispel such myths with presentations on ‘The Business Case for Passive House’ and ‘Making Passive House Pay’. Andrew Pape-Salmon, Senior Energy Specialist at RDH will share the results of a collaborative research study with Synergy Sustainability Institute, and Mario Bodem of ING + ARCH (Germany) will share details of his experience designing a Passive House school in Bavaria that came $1M under budget.

The conference program has been designed to propel the Passive House movement forward in North America, and organizers believe the focus on big buildings and affordability will inspire and inform not only building industry professionals, but policy makers and government officials who can learn from municipalities already embracing Passive House.

Conference website: http://naphn15.canphi.ca

More information:
Passive House is an international building standard developed by the Passive House Institute (PHI), located in Darmstadt, Germany. Building to the Passive House Standard reduces a building’s operational energy demand to an optimized extent through passive measures and components such as insulation, airtightness, heat recovery, solar heat gains, solar shading and incidental internal heat gains. Passive House reliably delivers up to approximately a 90% reduction in heating and cooling demand and up to a 75% reduction in overall primary energy demand when compared to existing building stock. Passive House buildings affordably and predictably provide the most resilient, comfortable and healthy interior environments. See http://www.passivehouse.com

The North American Passive House Network (NAPHN) shares news, events, and other knowledge resources related to Passive House across North America. http://www.northamericanpassivehousenetwork.com

The Canadian Passive House Institute West (CanPHI West) is a registered not-for-profit providing Canadians with the knowledge, tools, networks and confidence to design and construct Passive House buildings. http://www.canphi.ca