Passive House Gains Ground in Multifamily Housing – GreenBuildingAdvisor

Green Building News

This year’s winners in Phius’ Passive Projects Design Competition reveal the standard’s evolution and developers’ appetite for high-performance building.

Building rating systems all have this in common: They are the products of systems thinking. The methodologies and philosophies that inform each one (e.g., LEED, WELL, Living Building Challenge, et al.) vary, of course, but they’re all aggregates of synthesized and codified benchmarks. The Passive House standard, however, benefits from this moving refrain: Passive House was not invented; it was discovered, which is a paraphrased nod to this informative history of the practice.

As the thinking goes, design and engineering solutions should be contextual and climate-responsive, and they should employ sensible, low-impact building materials that leverage specific natural elements, like sunlight, and keep others at bay, like wind and rain, while maintaining a basic level of interior comfort. Humanity has been doing this for centuries; it was only in the 1990s that two professors from Sweden and Germany filtered these time-honored practices through a modern lens and codified a prescriptive, high-performance building standard called Passivhaus.

The standard has come a long way in 30 years. That is partly due to more advanced energy-modeling software, energy-saving appliances, better glazing, better renewables, better HVAC equipment, and so forth. But arguably the biggest contributor to Passive House’s growth has been greater adoption of its principles in buildings that are not houses. The latest batch of winning projects from the Passive Projects Design Competition, sponsored by Phius, are proof enough that the standard has evolved “from an idea to an ecosystem,” according to the organization’s press release, “with designers and developers applying high-performance strategies to increasingly large and complex buildings.”

A growing cast of categories

The competition, now in its 11th year (not counting 2024, when the program took a brief hiatus), has always boasted “a healthy mix of different building categories,” says Katrin Klingenberg, co-executive director of Phius. Single-family homes…