Thursday, June 4th
Building Tour #1: 11:00 – Noon
Expo Lunch: 11:30 – 1:00
1:00 – 2:00 PM | June 4th
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Remarks by PHN, PHI, and event partner Swegon, with a keynote presentation on the development of Hotel Marcel by its owner, architect & developer, Bruce Becker.
- Bruce Becker, Becker + Becker & Hotel Marcel
- Vanya Chan, Passive House Institute
- Mike Woolsey, Swegon
- Katelyn Meehan, Wells Fargo
- Darren Macri, Wythe Windows
- Ken Levenson, The Passive House Network
Remarks by PHN, PHI, and event partner Swegon, with presentation on the development of Hotel Marcel by its owner, architect & developer, Bruce Becker.
Expo Break: 2:00 – 2:30
2:30 – 3:45 PM | June 4th
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A retrofit at New York University in Greenwich Village and multifamily new builds in Dublin demonstrate the performance-defining new expectations and value.
Moderator: TBD
Passive House Performance: 1,500 Sensors in Dublin Social Housing
The ability of Passive House to avoid a ‘Performance Gap’ – when the results fall short of expectations, as is often the case in conventional green building – is well known, but project data is typically not publicly available. Here, we make the evidence public by examining a social housing project in Dublin, Ireland, where thousands of PHI-certified units are underway. Go on the journey of project delivery, data collection, and how we can be certain to close the gap every time.
- Tomás O’Leary, Mosart
Decarbonization at Rubin Hall – The Design, Construction, and Results of a Large Urban EnerPHit Retrofit
Built 100 years ago as a hotel, newly renovated to the EnerPHit standard, the 17-story Rubin Hall in New York City now houses 700 first-year NYU students. Goals included student comfort and wellness, as well as significant energy reductions and compliance with NYC’s carbon-emission regulations, Local Law 97. Get the resulting data and learn how the project team delivered the project, from construction details to systems commissioning, from the architect and the owner.
- Cecil Scheib, New York University
- Michael Syracuse, fxcollaborative
A retrofit at New York University in Greenwich Village and multifamily new builds in Dublin demonstrate the performance-defining new expectations and value of Passive House.
Yellow Room
Learn about Hotel Marcel’s all-electric mechanical systems by Swegon & Mitsubishi, and how their integration continues to evolve in commercial Passive House buildings.
Moderator: Dylan Martello, Steven Winter Associates
Ventilation Systems at Hotel Marcel and Beyond
More information coming soon.
- Matthew McGovern, Tower Enterprises
- Faiz Malek, Swegon
High Capacity Air to Water, Heating & Cooling
High-Capacity Air-to-Water Heat Pumps provide an all-electric, highly efficient solution for domestic hot water and space heating/cooling. Hotel Marcel is one of the first adopters of Mitsubishi’s Heat20 DHW system. How’re they operating and what’s next? The presentation will review the system’s design and hotel feedback on how it operates and performs for them. Finally, we will look at upcoming products that fit in that same space.
- Zachary Koch, Mitsubishi
Learn about Hotel Marcel’s all-electric mechanical systems by Swegon & Mitsubishi, and how their integration continues to evolve in commercial Passive House buildings.
Blue Room
Families and teams intentionally prioritize Passive House resilience after losing everything in the 2025 Los Angeles Fires.
Moderator: Anne Barrett, Yale University
From Ashes to Airtight: Passive House as Post-Fire Resilience Strategy
To end the cycle of rebuilding after wildfires, Passive House can serve not as an idealistic upgrade, but as a practical risk-management and resilience framework, and a financially and logistically viable path under real-world rebuild conditions, through close collaboration between architect and builder. The benefits begin with the building and extend to owners, insurers, lenders, and communities.
- Meredith McDaniel, MAAM Architects
- Darin Dusan, Joubert Homes
Factory-Built Airtightness: Delivering a 0.32 ACH Fire Rebuild in Four Months
A case study on working with fire disaster communities, this Altadena, California, rebuild serves as an example of the challenges and opportunities in responding to and preventing future disasters. Skilled labor shortages and rising costs can put high-performance goals at risk. Leveraging prefabricated enclosure components in Passive House design demonstrates a path to future resilience.
- Edie Dillman, B. Public Prefab
- Jonah Stanford, B. Public Prefab
Families and teams intentionally prioritize Passive House resilience after losing everything in the 2025 Los Angeles Fires.
Green Room
From Massachusetts & the United Kingdom, from the C-Suite to the trades, realizing the full power of Passive House means training, learning, and sharing.
Moderator: Dori Lam, PassivhausMAINE
How Construction-Phase Excellence Unlocks the Full Value of Passive House
While the technical case for Passive House is well established for more complex building typologies – schools, universities, healthcare, and civic infrastructure – performance gaps during construction and handover undermine confidence among clients, funders, insurers, and policymakers. Drawing on a research initiative led by the Passivhaus Trust, the shared findings identify the critical levers for delivering Passive House across procurement and programming, leadership and site culture, to commissioning and handover. This presentation offers practical, experience-based guidance for teams seeking to de-risk delivery, support finance and insurance confidence, and translate policy ambition into real-world outcomes.
- Sarah Lewis, Passivhaus Trust
Massive Learnings from Massachusetts: Practical Takeaways from 40+ Passive House Practitioners
As Massachusetts now mandates Passive House certification for multifamily projects in Specialized Code communities, scaling cost-effective delivery is paramount. This presentation highlights a professional knowledge gap in Passive House (from engineers and architects to drywallers and HVAC teams) and addresses it by identifying systemic best practices for ventilation, airtightness, and team coordination. Based on interviews with more than 40 Passive House professionals, it’s a powerful opportunity to learn from collective experience and produce a roadmap for industry-wide success.
- Beth Campbell, Passive House Massachusetts
- Alexander Gard-Murray, Passive House Massachusetts
From Massachusetts & the United Kingdom, from the C-Suite to the trades, realizing the full power of Passive House means training, learning, and sharing.
Expo Break 3:45 – 4:15
4:15 – 5:30 PM | June 4th
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Passive House strategies raise the bar for serving diverse populations from Spanish Seniors in Catalonia to families on the Upper West Side.
Moderator: Esther Van Eeden
Certified Senior Care Housing Comes to Catalonia
As our population ages, more people are particularly susceptible to the growing risks of overheating driven by global warming. In addition, elderly care homes are among the most energy‑intensive building types, operating 24/7/365 with high internal gains from industrial kitchens, laundries, medical services, and high occupancy density. Located in Catalonia, Spain, Mirador de Gràcia demonstrates that Passive House can be successfully applied to large, complex healthcare‑residential buildings in warm climates, providing superior comfort and air quality for a vulnerable population while dramatically reducing operational costs and carbon emissions.
- Oliver Style, Praxis
Demystifying Passive House Design
Charlotte of the Upper West Side is Manhattan’s first residential condominium in a landmark district to earn PHI certification, setting a new standard for sustainable urban living. Join the architects as they demonstrate that Passive House principles can not only enhance performance but also integrate with the refined formal aspirations of this high-end real estate development project.
- Todd Poisson, BKSK Architects
- Will Russell, BKSK Architects
Passive House strategies raise the bar for serving diverse populations from Spanish Seniors in Catalonia to families on the Upper West Side.
Yellow Room
Generate value, wealth, and security with Passive House as an integral component of your business plan. Understand how comfort, health, and energy efficiency can drive net operating income, return on investment, provide access to more favorable financing, and create a higher value asset.
Moderator: Stuart Decrew, Yale University
- David Komet, Urban Earth
- Bruce Becker, Becker + Becker
- Mike Doty, Nuveen Green Capital
Generate value, wealth, and security with Passive House as an integral component of your business plan. Understand how comfort, health, and energy efficiency can drive net operating income, return on investment, provide access to more favorable financing, and create a higher value asset.
Blue Room
Integrated heat pump water heaters in multifamily get figured out, while innovative combined mechanical systems are piloted in Canada.
Moderator: Narasimha Rao, Yale University
Heat Pump Water Heaters in Apartments: Challenges and Solutions
Putting HPWHs inside apartments can be tricky. They make some noise, they blow cold air, and there’s practically no data on how they actually perform in real buildings. This session explores real HPWH installations (some good, some bad, some horrible) in multifamily buildings, along with data on water heater interactions with space conditioning systems. Attendees will gain practical insight into successfully integrating HPWHs in multifamily buildings.
- Robb Aldrich, Steven Winter Associates
New HVAC Solution for Passive House Multifamily Buildings
Passive House should reduce project mechanical costs, but because current systems are not designed for the very low building loads, achieving this is difficult. Find out about a new approach, developed for new and existing affordable and market-rate multifamily buildings, that combines all-electric heating, ventilation, air conditioning, and domestic hot water into a single integrated system, and how it works.
- Andrew Peel, Peel Passive House
Integrated heat pump water heaters in multifamily get figured out, while innovative combined mechanical systems are piloted in Canada.
Green Room
Materiality of adobe in California and mass timber in New York, new-build and retrofit, and the elasticity of Passive House approaches.
Moderator: Andrew Ruff, GOA Architecture
Mass Timber Renovation in NYC: The Data 1 Year Later
An urban infill retrofit, addition, and conversion on a tightly bounded lot was then designed to utilize nail-laminated (mass) timber (NLT) and a foam-free assembly, achieving Passive House Plus certification, including a 7.9kW rooftop solar system. See the methods, the results, and lessons learned.
- Floris Keverling Buisman, 475 High Performance Building Supply
Adobe or not to be: Rebuilding with Vernacular Materials in a Modern World
Rebuilding after the Eaton fire in Altadena, the team and client decided to pursue Passive House, not just in the Pueblo style, but also utilizing adobe building methods, bringing together a new hybrid of high-performance optimization with natural materials, rooted in the region’s history – and offering lessons for others to move this approach forward.
- Mike Horgan, Cairn Collaborative
- Caroline Dunn, Cairn Collaborative
Materiality of adobe in California and mass timber in New York, new-build and retrofit, and the elasticity of Passive House approaches.
5:30 – 6:30 | Expo Reception Happy Hour
6:30 – 7:30 | Member, Mentorship & Fellowship Meetups in the Lobby
Friday, June 5th
8:00 – 9:00 AM | Expo Continental Breakfast
9:00 – 10:15 AM | June 5th
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A two-part look at the architecture and engineering of a 217-unit affordable housing project as it pushes toward net zero.
Moderator: Lois Arena, Steven Winter Associates
Going the Last Mile: Bridging Passive House to Net Zero in Dense Urban Environments
The Jennings Hall Expansion not only sought to add 217 all-electric units of senior affordable housing wrapped in a 14-story Passive House enclosure in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, but also to push toward net-zero goals, all while constrained by a dense urban site and a nearby subway tunnel. Critical to crushing overall energy use was tackling domestic hot water, ventilation, heating, and cooling with integrated solar, hydronic, and ERV systems.
- Crystal Ng, Curtis + Ginsberg Architects
- Mark Ginsberg, Curtis + Ginsberg Architects
Hydronic Energy Balance For the Win
In addition to the many architectural and façade elements intended to reduce energy consumption, the HVAC and Domestic Hot Water Systems were designed to use water-source heat pumps coupled with a ground-source geo-exchange (geothermal) system that leverages multiple zones and diverse uses to further dramatically reduce energy use and carbon emissions. The approach offers a way to minimize the negative impacts of VRF refrigerants and realize the energy savings that ultra-low-energy Passive House buildings are designed to achieve.
- Elias Dagher, Pennoni
A two-part look at the architecture and engineering of a 217-unit affordable housing project as it pushes toward net zero.
Yellow Room
Certified ventilation system options and capabilities from Systemair and Zehnder, from single-family to complex commercial buildings.
Moderator: Andrew Peel, Peel Passive House
Indoor Air Quality for Passive Houses
An overview of Systemair’s Passive House Certified offerings and how to utilize them on Passive House projects.
- Eric Richards, Systemair
- Szabi Fekete, Zehnder America
Certified ventilation system options and capabilities from Systemair and Zehnder, from single-family to complex commercial buildings.
Blue Room
Grassroots grit, municipal vision, and industry leaders respond to crises of destruction and affordability with creativity and Passive House, in Colorado and California.
Moderator: Eddy Voltaire, Design Construction & Sustainability Inc.
Municipal Partnerships, Workforce Training, and Attainable Housing Scale Passive House in Colorado
A pilot program to bridge the gap between municipal climate commitments and real-world housing delivery was developed in partnership with the City of Fort Collins, uniting a multidisciplinary team around a single question: Can Passive House be built affordably, repeatedly, and in direct service of community need? Currently underway, the partnership demonstrates that the gap between policy ambition and on-the-ground action can be closed.
- Karen Ramsey, Building Wellness, LLC
Resilience Rising from the Ashes: How a Diverse, Grass-Roots Community in Altadena is Rebuilding Passive Homes after the Los Angeles Fires
How does a community of homeowners displaced by wildfire, with no building or architecture experience, navigate the Passive House landscape as they work to rebuild? How do we collaborate when everyone has unique Passive House designs and strategies? Despite differences, find out how the group gained valuable insights and lessons along the way.
- Leo Cheng, ResilientHAUS
- Jaime Rodriguez Jr., ResilientHAUS
Grassroots grit, municipal vision, and industry leaders respond to crises of destruction and affordability with creativity and Passive House, in Colorado and California.
Green Room
Operationalize the PHPP and drive building commissioning to meet the mark in new construction and retrofits.
Moderator: Marine Sanchez, RDH Building Science
Operationalizing PHPP as a Day-One Digital Twin for Equitable Performance
Despite the rigor of Passive House certification, a “performance gap” can emerge due to errors in system installation and commissioning. Yet we can identify these problems and resolve them in real time at the start, bridging the gap between predicted design and actual operation, by transforming the PHPP into a dynamic diagnostic tool. A shadow operational-ready commissioning PHPP can use actual meteorological year data, real-time metered data, and utility bills, while mapping electrical and PER sheets. It allows property managers to troubleshoot issues before they become systemic and provides a feedback loop for designers to refine future models.
- Matthew Bowers, Auros Group
Operationalize the PHPP and drive building commissioning to meet the mark in new construction and retrofits.
Expo Break 10:15 – 10:45
10:45 – Noon | June 5th
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As the Passive House revolution proceeds in Massachusetts, how are the outcomes being felt in the building and utility industries?
Moderator: To be announced.
Passive House is Shaping the Housing Stock in Massachusetts
Massachusetts is a leader in Passive House code requirements, and a study of housing production and permitting in communities that have adopted Passive House codes found that production remains robust after code adoption. There need not be a trade-off between Passive House code requirements and housing affordability. Instead, Passive House can be part of a comprehensive state affordability strategy, one that encourages housing development while also bringing down energy costs for owners, occupants, and all ratepayers.
- Alexander Gard-Murry, Passive House Massachusetts
Mass Adoption of Passive House Can Deliver Grid-Level Savings
Passive House is undersold. The scope of the value proposition typically presented – the value to the building, though valid and worthwhile, misses a much larger value proposition. That is, if we “zoom out” and examine, at a utility scale, how Passive House radically reduces both heating and cooling peaks, we would see that Passive House helps us avoid expensive electric grid upgrades that would otherwise be required. We need to shine a bright spotlight on this value and demonstrate that mass adoption of Passive House unlocks grid (and by extension ratepayer) savings.
- Paul Ormond, Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources
As the Passive House revolution proceeds in Massachusetts, how are the outcomes being felt in the building and utility industries?
Yellow Room
High-quality Passive House components and material selection can be an affordable, sustainable catalyst for stronger project delivery for both operational and embodied carbon benefits.
Moderator: Gabrielle Brainard, SOM
The Biogenic Blueprint: Leveraging High-Tech DfMA to Deliver Low-Carbon, Foam-Free Passive House
High-performance prefabrication does not require high-carbon materials. By utilizing DfMA, we can “profit” from the health and carbon-sequestering benefits of biogenic materials while maintaining the schedule and cost predictability of offsite construction. This provides a scalable path for the industry to move beyond operational efficiency toward total carbon neutrality.
- Steve Hessler, New Energy Works
Passive House & Embodied Carbon
Let’s gain a better understanding of the life-cycle carbon impact of Passive House design strategies by examining large-scale building examples. Let’s compare the embodied and operational carbon impacts by intentionally addressing key design and construction variables, and explore how the results may inform future action to deliver greater Passive House carbon emissions reductions.
- Louis Koehl, Handel
High-quality Passive House components and material selection can be an affordable, sustainable catalyst for stronger project delivery for both operational and embodied carbon benefits.
Blue Room
The flexibility of Passive House retrofits with PHI’s EnerPHit program is pushed to the limit.
Moderator: Roxanne Ryce-Paul, NYC School Construction Authority
Decarbonizing Public School Districts Through a Phased EnerPHit Approach: A Case Study in London
Deep retrofit strategies can be delivered across public school districts using a phased approach aligned with real-world funding constraints. A case study featuring three schools in a London school district shows how the Passive House Planning Package (PHPP) can be used not just as a modeling tool but as a decision-making framework to guide phased work toward EnerPHit-level performance, enabling deeper decarbonization. It shows how engagement—with schools, estates teams, and students—ensured that technical outcomes translate into meaningful, lasting impact.
- Nidhi Shah, RACE-Studio
Rural Workforce Housing on a Shoestring
This project is an opportunity to explore and understand the potential cost-effective envelope interventions that advance toward Passive House EnerPHit performance for the adaptive reuse of metal buildings as affordable workforce housing, and, in so doing, to leverage the substantial upfront carbon investment the metal building represents.
- Buck Moorhead, Buck Moorhead Architect
The flexibility of Passive House retrofits with PHI’s EnerPHit program is pushed to the limit.
Green Room
Discover how Passive House can support our children through a school in Washington State & a healing lodge for indigenous youth in British Columbia.
Moderator: Sarah Smiley Smith, Yale University
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 achieve the objective of providing a healthy indoor environment that supports healing, and making the project financially sustainable with low operating costs.
- Andrew Peel, Peel Passive House
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.
- Mike Fowler, Mithun
Discover how Passive House can support our children through a school in Washington State & a healing lodge for indigenous youth in British Columbia.
Noon – 1:00 PM | Expo Lunch Break & Building Tour #2
1:00 – 2:15 PM | June 5th
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Compare energy standards, models, and results. How difficult is it? What can we do to accelerate the recognition and acceptance of Passive House performance?
Moderator: Bronwyn Barry, Passive House BB
A Modeling Crosswalk: Recognizing Passive House Performance within California Title 24 and Beyond
Passive House design performance can be translated into state energy code compliance software while preserving credit for high-performance envelope and ventilation strategies. By examining a case study comparing PHPP, WUFI Passive, and CBECC results across residential prototypes and climate zones in California, differences among modeling tools that cause Passive House measures to lose visibility in compliance outputs are identified. The results provide a repeatable framework for improving consistency, documentation, and recognition of Passive House performance within compliance pathways for energy codes in California and other jurisdictions.
- Keith Saechao, Frontier Energy
PHN Energy Study – Phase II
See the results of a PHN-commissioned study by RDH that set out to compare widely-used building standards (IECC, ASHRAE 90.1, LEED) against Passive House for multifamily buildings across climate zones 1-7. The study can provide policymakers and market actors with greater clarity on where Passive House sits relative to code minimum and other performance-based pathways. Study outcomes will help inform incentives and compliance pathways by better recognizing Passive House outcomes within familiar code frameworks.
- Marine Sanchez, RDH
Compare energy standards, models, and results. How difficult is it? What can we do to accelerate the recognition and acceptance of Passive House performance?
Yellow Room
Affordable housing improves as Passive House design and delivery improve, with examples in Jamaica, Queens, and across the region.
Moderator: Carlos Cardoso, Beyer Blinder Belle
Sutphin Boulevard, Breaking Ground, and Permanent Housing
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.
- Brandon Pietras, Bernheimer Architecture
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.
- Adam Watson, L&M
- Cheryl Saldanha, SGH
Affordable housing improves as Passive House design and delivery improve, with examples in Jamaica, Queens, and across the region.
Blue Room
A renovated Greek island getaway and a Connecticut home work within the constraints of place and provide invigorating, inspiring destinations for living.
Moderator: Bria Josephs, b.a. forma
Retrofitting on a Greek Island: The Inspiration, Construction Challenges, and Delight of it
Approaching a retrofit of an old home on a Greek island with constrained access meant rethinking one’s Passive House experience and asking: How do you design and build a Passive House in a place with no local expertise or material availability? How do we adapt? Discover the journey and the resulting data.
- George Kontaroudis, Ikc
No Excuses: Making High-End Homes Passive House
High-end residential construction can readily support innovation and meet the highest standards of energy performance, durability, and climate responsibility, yet it remains one of the least optimized sectors in terms of performance. This home demonstrates that when clients invest in bespoke design, we can make rigorous energy modeling, airtightness, embodied-carbon reduction, and long-term resilience fundamental expectations rather than exceptions.
- Stas Zakrzewski, ZH Architects
A renovated Greek island getaway and a Connecticut home work within the constraints of place and provide invigorating, inspiring destinations for living.
Green Room
While luxury and affordable housing have found their groove, let’s track down the “missing middle” and the business case for it.
Moderator: Nicholas Jones, Eversource
Filling the Missing Middle: Architect-Led Development for Attainable Passive House
Passive House works. The harder problem is making it attainable for middle-income buyers in the communities that need it most. This session follows pHdesign’s live attempt — a PHI low-energy home near Ellenville, NY, where the architects became equity partners and took on the developer role to test what it actually costs, and what it takes, to deliver high-performance middle-income housing.
- Hilary Padget, pHdesign
- Anthony Harrington, pHdesign
Why Passive House Architect-Developers are Embracing Prefab and the “Missing Middle.”
As developers often lack more ambitious energy-efficient building strategies, it is the architect-developer who is emerging as a new catalyst for urban densification, Passive House quality, and good design. And where labor shortages and site experience are limited, they are leveraging prefabricated panels. Small multifamily developments in Washington and British Columbia demonstrate this emerging paradigm’s ability to serve the “missing middle.”
- Craig Toohey, Collective Carpentry
While luxury and affordable housing have found their groove, let’s track down the “missing middle” and the business case for it.
2:15 – 2:45 | Expo Break
2:45 – 4:00 PM | June 5th
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Technical and performance outcomes continue to develop, while challenging us to transcend and transform the world we act in.
- Jessica Grove-Smith, PHI
- Vanya Chan, PHI
- Timothy Lock, OPAL
Technical and performance outcomes continue to develop, while challenging us to transcend and transform the world we act in.
4:00 – 5:00 | Expo Reception Happy Hour & Building Tour #3
