Passive House Design Is Creating a Pathway to Highly Efficient Buildings

As architects and designers, we are always pushing the bounds of current innovation to build a more sustainable tomorrow. However, one of the most promising architectural solutions for combating climate change was developed decades ago.  

A rising trend throughout the industry, Passive House design—a standard first pioneered by Dr. Wolfgang Feist in 1980s Germany—lays the groundwork for creating highly energy-efficient buildings through five basic principles: thermal insulation; highly efficient windows; ventilation with heat recovery; air tightness; and thermal bridge free design. Today, the concept has developed into one of the most rigorous construction standards in the world, offering a pathway to significantly cut down greenhouse gas emissions and achieve net zero, or even net positive, at a much wider scale.  

Differing from other well-regarded, sustainable building approaches like LEED, Passive House is a performance-based standard that directly addresses the problem of energy use. It creates testable performance levels of a structure’s exterior walls, and therefore very quantifiable and verifiable energy levels.  

Typically, when these principles are holistically applied, Passive Houses use 40 to 60% less energy than conventional buildings, leading to major cost reductions, and in some scenarios, can even cut down energy use by up to 90%. While achieving this is no easy feat, the focus throughout the planning and construction process relies heavily on creating the envelope of the building and applying superinsulation and airtight construction throughout.  

[Related: Gensler Reimagines the Next Generation of Science Buildings Using Mass Timber]

Going Beyond Efficiency 

Beyond its energy efficiency benefits, Passive House projects also pay great attention to creating thermally comfortable spaces that maintain significantly better indoor air quality (IAQ). In the wake of recent studies revealing that indoor air can be even more polluted than the air outside, ensuring healthy IAQ levels is becoming increasingly important to consider throughout the planning process.

Further, Passive House projects prove to be more resilient during power outages and will considerably cut operational costs due to their lowered energy use. From a commercial standpoint, these are huge benefits that call for a wider implementation of Passive House design in this sector. 

Passive House design can be applied to any building typology. It’s important to break the misconception that these principles are exclusive to residential projects. Whether it be skyscrapers, institutional buildings or smaller-scale, single-family homes, there are no limits to Passive House applications. We, as architects, have tremendous opportunities to increase the prevalence of Passive House strategies across commercial and institutional markets.  

There is a greater upfront cost with these projects, which, on average, ranges from 3 to 5%, but it’s important to re-emphasize that the operational costs throughout the life of the building will be much lower due to the building’s significantly reduced energy use, making it a more cost-effective option in the long run. And, as energy codes and environmental pledges are becoming more and more strict, it is beneficial for commercial property owners to develop more sustainable buildings in the near future. 

For example, in New York City, nearly 70% of total carbon emissions stem from buildings. With city leadership recently announcing a goal to reduce 40% of greenhouse gas emissions from buildings by 2030, implementing Passive House principles into new construction and retrofits has been identified as a key way to accomplish this. For this reason, projects built to Passive House standards—whether new buildings or retrofits—will prove to be an increasingly valuable pursuit across all sectors, especially as hefty carbon taxes and rigorous environmental pledges become more widespread at a local, state and national level.