The Passive House battle rages on

I was one of over 170 attendees at the annual passive house regional meeting in Olympia, Washington on March 18th. Martin Holladay of the widely respected green building advisor really kicked the conversation off in a provocative keynote address questioning the appropriateness of the popular European performance standard for the North American market.

Read more here in a reconstruction of the presentation at the GBA website. And here is Michael Eliason of the Brute Force Collaborative Blog in his rebuttal. Treehugger chimed in as have many in the passive house community.

And now Graham Wright makes some great contributions on the Passive House Northwest website.

Still waiting for Wolfgang Feist himself to chime in.

Prefab Redux - another look at green prefab

From the Seattle Business Magazine April issue, "Prefab Redux"

Great to revisit the topic now that the hype has withered away. Such a shame that there is still so little discussion about how the majority of high-performance homes constructed to the strict passivhaus / passive house and Swiss Minergie performance standards are prefab. Then again, the Swiss, Germans, and Austrians are years ahead in integrating applied buildings science into the design-fabricate-construct process for high-performance building and even that is not generally recognized within the North American building community so of course there is little awareness about how they achieve and scale the process.