LENNY ANTONELLI
COLUMN
Final say: Reflections on leaving Passive House Plus After fourteen years working on Passive House Plus and its predecessor, our departing deputy editor Lenny Antonelli muses on how our understanding of sustainable building has changed over the years – and on what may come next.
O
ne of my earliest assignments for Construct Ireland magazine, the predecessor to Passive House Plus, was to visit two certified passive houses in rural County Carlow. This was back in 2008, when the magazine’s understanding of what ‘sustainable building’ meant was still evolving. The two houses had little aesthetic merit, but they were only the second and third certified passive houses in Ireland. Back then the German standard seemed strange and exotic, and while the houses were plain looking, they also felt like the future. Four years later the magazine felt confident that yes, this was the future, and we rebranded as Passive House Plus and launched a UK edition. At the time, there was plenty of debate in eco-building circles over the merits of passive house — about whether it was too onerous, too architecturally stifling, too airtight and too reliant on mechanical ventilation. But in hindsight it certainly feels like passive house won the day. Super-insulation, airtightness, the elimina-
work of those who push for better building standards each day. But it does make me wonder what the next vanguard will be. In a recent issue of this magazine, Peter Rickaby argued that retrofit should not just be about energy and carbon, but that it must also create beautiful places to live. And I wonder if we need to make more space on the cutting edge of sustainable building not just for left-brained concepts like building physics and heat loss, but right-brained ones like beauty, community, and equality. Obviously, these are not new design concepts, but it sometimes feels that the mathsbased world of passive house and the woollier realm of architectural ‘placemaking’ exist in different galaxies. It’s heartening to see projects like the passive house schemes in York that are profiled in this issue, which is also my last as deputy editor of the magazine. The York schemes aim to dramatically cut energy and carbon, but also to foster community, and create beautiful places to live. Last year, my fiancée and I moved from
New ownership models like cohousing can help us move beyond the false dichotomy of massive debt or insecure tenure, but they need support. tion of thermal bridging, and mechanical ventilation are increasingly accepted as integral to good building, even when it’s not a passive house being built. The regulations inch closer to embracing these concepts too, albeit faster in Ireland than the UK. Developers might argue that passive house is too difficult or expensive, but it’s rare to hear anyone say that it isn’t better. Over the last few years, the leading edge of green building has turned its attention to measuring embodied carbon, a much more subjective task than measuring heat loss or airtightness. But embodied carbon is now, thankfully, creeping its way towards the regulatory agenda too. Of course, all of this is happening far too slowly given the dangerous warming of the planet, and I don’t mean to make this progress sound inevitable: it is only down to the hard
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Galway City to Cloughjordan Ecovillage, an intentional community adjacent to a small town in the Irish midlands. The houses in the ecovillage, which are all of natural materials, were built between 2008 and 2013. Heat is provided by wood-chip district heating, walking and cycling is prioritised over cars, food is grown on the community farm and allotments, and there is ample space for nature in the woodlands, orchards and grassland. But more than that, it has been a revelation to live in a place where social encounters and gatherings and neighbourliness are designed into the fabric of the community. And where people have literally built their own homes, often with little previous experience. It is also obvious to me that a community with its own farm and heating network, and its pool of skills and resources, will be more resilient as climate breakdown begins to dis-
rupt our lives more and more. It’s measurably better for the planet too: a 2015 study found that a resident of Cloughjordan Ecovillage has an ecological footprint of 2.03 global hectares, far lower than the Irish average of 5.3 (but still above the 1.6 that the Global Footprint Network says is available to everyone). There’s also something powerful in a community taking charge of providing for its own housing needs. Earlier in the summer, the Cloughjordan Cohousing group hosted an event called ‘Housing Ourselves’, which heard from different Irish groups trying to get community-led housing projects off the ground, such as Nimble Spaces in Kilkenny and Common Ground in Wicklow. It was inspiring to hear from those seeking to sidestep the failure of the state and take the provision of affordable housing into their own hands. But it was also frustrating to see how these groups have sometimes struggled within a system geared more towards developers than communities. I attended not just as a journalist, but also as someone who, at 36, does not own his own home and now wishes to put down roots in a community without taking on an absurd level of debt. Affordability is an overlooked aspect of sustainability: it is hard to live sustainably and modestly, to choose the bicycle over the car, to buy directly from local farmers, and to share skills and resources, when we are wracked with debt and overworked. New ownership models like cohousing can help us to move beyond the false dichotomy of massive debt (a mortgage) or insecure tenure (renting), but they need support (see Self Organised Architecture’s roadmap for community-led housing in Ireland at www.soa.ie). Over my years with the magazine, editor Jeff Colley and I often joked about the irony of writing about beautiful, architect-designed passive houses while having little prospect of living in one, with our journalists’ salaries. That prospect seems further away than ever given Ireland’s housing crisis, but I am hopeful that the failure of our top-down housing model can spur the growth of a more equitable one that blossoms from the bottom up. A fully referenced version of this article is online at www.passivehouseplus.ie