How Passive Design Eliminated the Need for Heating and Cooling – GreenBuildingAdvisor

Green Building Blog

In Ecuador’s highlands, a courtyard plan, volcanic stone, and operable glass walls provide privacy, passive cooling, and year-round comfort

Arrayanes House was designed around a simple premise: in Puembo’s mild, high-altitude climate, the building itself should do as much of the work of maintaining comfort as possible. The 5,000-square-foot house uses thermal mass, cross-ventilation, solar control, and a courtyard plan to maintain comfort without conventional heating or cooling.

The site helped shape that strategy. The house occupies an elevated corner lot in a suburban valley outside Quito, with streets on two sides and a golf course along another edge. The owner, a doctor and avid golfer, wanted privacy without giving up panoramic views of the surrounding landscape and native Arrayanes trees. He also wanted the house to serve as a gathering place for his extended family, including four children and ten grandchildren, who visit regularly on weekends.

“Our biggest challenge was creating a sense of privacy in a gated community that prohibits fences,” says Nandar Godoy-Dinneen, senior associate at PJCArchitecture, who grew up in Quito and trained as an architect in Ecuador. “We introduced a horizontal stone wall as the main façade, which shields the home from view while maintaining an open feel.”

PJCArchitecture, working through its Ecuador-based design-build arm Make Estudio Division, used the steep site to reinforce that move. The stone wall sits toward the high side of the lot, while the house opens inward to a protected courtyard at the lower grade. That arrangement creates privacy, but it also supports the building’s passive strategy by concentrating large operable openings around a sheltered outdoor space.

“The strategic placement of the house in relation to the lot’s grading helped maintain a smaller scale,” Godoy-Dinneen says, “almost giving the impression that the house is emerging organically from the terrain.”

Sustainability was a priority from the outset, but…