Affordable housing scheme DELIVERS CERTIFIED PASSIVE RESULTS
Passive house has long been the preserve of early adopters and motivated self-builders. In the last few years however, we’re seeing increasing numbers of certificates awarded to commercial buildings and public housing projects. Last year, Hastoe Housing Association and Parsons + Whittley Architects won a UK Passivhaus Trust Award for their Wimbish Housing project, a development of fourteen affordable houses in Essex. This year, Hastoe and Parsons + Whittley followed up with another fourteen unit affordable passive house development in Ditchingham, Norfolk. Wimbish was a first-time adventure into passive house for both housing association and architects. Building on the experience gained here, the award-winning team set about shattering many of the preconceptions about passive house.
Using traditional building materials and skills, they’ve delivered affordable housing in a conservation area surrounded by listed buildings. “What we’re really about with passive house is this,” says architect Chris Parsons. “We try to take the concept and make it deliverable in the UK – make it buildable. We’re not at the forefront of developing the methodology. Our strength lies in taking that methodology and painting it onto the UK construction industry.” As any designer, Parsons included, will tell you, one of the keys to making any passive house project work is to build passive principles into it right from the beginning. Despite this, the Ditchingham development wasn’t actually intended to be passive. Moreover, the fact that it was located in a conservation area,
and adjoins listed buildings – a Tayler & Green development from the 1950s – meant that the design team faced a number of tricky obstacles before ever considering the low energy approach. As it turned out however, the non-passive constraints actually ended up nudging the architects towards passive. “We couldn’t do it as a long, straight terrace,” Parsons explains. “We didn’t have quite enough land. But that was fine because a curved terrace was a Tayler and Green idiom anyway. Then, in order to make sure that we didn’t destroy views of or from the listed properties, that meant that the terrace naturally ended up in one corner of the field with the front of the curve following the sun around. We all looked at it and went, ‘That’d be a great passive house scheme.’” Parsons pitched the idea to Hastoe, and fresh