Description

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

Presented by Adam Watson, L&M and Cheryl Saldanha, SGH

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.

Presentation 2:

Sutphin Boulevard, Breaking Ground, and Permanent Housing

Presented by Brandon Pietras, Bernheimer Architecture

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.

1.25 AIA & 1 PHI CEUs

Moderated by Carlos Cardoso, Beyer Blinder Belle

Learning Objectives:

1. Identify early project decisions that strongly influence whether Passive House is maintained through construction.  
2. Organize high-level Passive House targets into clear enclosure and detailing priorities.
3. 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.
4. 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.