Highly eff icient ‘passive homes’ gain ground

BY JOANN LOVIGLIO Germany, Austria and Scandinavia. Fewer than 100 exist in the U.S. — but that’s changing, from chilly New England to toasty Arizona to muggy Baton Rouge, said Katrin Klingenberg, Passive House Institute US co-founder and executive director.

“People associate the passive house movement with Europe, but it comes out of the (American) oil embargo and energy crisis in the 1970s,” she said. “Then political change happened, (energy) prices came down … but in Europe that didn’t happen, so they had reason to continue the research.”

The shift was symbolized most clearly, perhaps, at the White House, when solar panels installed in 1979 during President Carter’s tenure were removed in 1986 under President Reagan’s administration. (The Obama administration promised in 2010 to put them back but hasn’t yet done so.)

Going passive isn’t solely the realm of new construction, either.

In McKeesport, outside Pittsburgh, a historic YMCA is being turned into a multiunit passive building to house people at risk for homelessness. In New York City last year, Julie Torres Moskovitz’s firm Fabrica 718 retrofitted a 110-year-old Brooklyn brownstone into the city’s first certified passive house.

“There’s a whole movement,” said Torres Moskovitz, author of the new “The Greenest Home” (Princeton Architectural Press, 2013) on super-in- sulated and passive house design. “It’s a hotbed in Brooklyn of doing these retrofits.”

McDonald’s firm, Onion Flats, first tackled a threehome, low-income housing development completed last fall — Pennsylvania’s first to be certified under guidelines set by the International Passive House Institute, based in Germany.

The stylish, 1,900square-foot Bellfield Homes in north Philadelphia have a heating and cooling system one-eighth the size of what similar traditionally built homes require, because they were built with an “airtight, super-insulated thermal envelope” that helps reduce energy use by 90 percent, McDonald said.