DC-based Residential Architect (and Custom Home magazine) just featured an interview with Sam about the new Passive House Alliance, its mission, and its relationship with USGBC.
Two weeks ago we announced Sam Hagerman’s recent selection as the first president of the Passive House Alliance. The new organization will play a key role in the larger green building movement, ensuring that more and more of our nation’s buildings are built to the super-efficient Passive House standard (which cuts energy use by about 85%). The story quickly garnered attention from local press.
Now the attention is going national, with this interview of Sam published by residentialarchitect.com (and in Custom Home magazine). In the interview, Sam highlights the performance-based (rather than prescriptive) approach of Passive House, the theme of simplicity over complexity, and the fundamental goal of getting more Passive House built in the Northwest and across the U.S.
He also touches on an emerging concept in the green building community: that Passive House and LEED are not competing green building standards but rather complementary ones. The Passive House standard has a laser-light focus on ongoing energy use but doesn’t address the embodied energy of the materials that go into a building. LEED is the reverse: sharp focus on embodied energy, but fuzzy vision when it comes to operational energy use. Combined, the two standards make a formidable pair. In Sam’s words:
“PHIUS and PHA are moving toward forming a partnership with the USGBC to address some of the blind spots that exist in the Passive House model. The leadership at PHIUS is reaching out to the USGBC during Greenbuild 2010 to discuss this. I think they could use us as much as we could use them. Because they need to really emphasize the performance metric, and we really need to get a green building component built into our model, in terms of the sustainability of the materials used. Then we’ll have a perfect mousetrap.”
– Zack (Connect with me at +ZacharySemke)
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