GUY FOWLER
COLUMN
Passive house 30 years on:
qualified success or brilliant failure? As the stringent fabric-first, low energy standard enters its fourth decade, Guy Fowler asks what sort of impact it has made on the world, and where it should go from here.
M
y question is whether passive house has been, or can become, the success it promised all those years ago. My personal view is what follows. It has been influenced, mitigated and corrected by conversations with four of the leading lights in building physics and architecture. • Rob McLeod is professor of sustainable building engineering at Graz University of Technology in Austria. He co-authored the ‘Passivhaus Designer’s Manual: A technical guide to low and zero energy buildings.’ • Toby Cambray is co-founder of Greengauge, the building physics and engineering consultancy specialising in sustainable, low energy design. He is also a columnist for Passive House Plus. • Richard Hawkes is a passive house architect and is perhaps best known as the designer of the Crossway passive house. He
24 | passivehouseplus.co.uk | issue 39
specialises in projects designed under Paragraph 80, which allows for architecturally exceptional dwellings in locations where planning would otherwise be difficult to achieve. • Nicholas Browne is my favourite architect. It’s a safe bet that Nicholas would be fairly immune to the Teutonic seductions of physics and leans more towards Philip Johnson’s stance on architecture: “The job of the architect today is to create beautiful buildings. That’s all.” I work for a small and quite specialist ‘modern methods of construction’ (MMC) company that recently made its passive house certified details freely downloadable — superstructure, substructure and basement. And when I say I, I mean we the team, which includes my co-pilot Neil Bricknell. The intention in making these details available is to give confidence to architects and, to a lesser
degree, their clients, in making the decision to build to the passive house standard. And to drum up some business along the way. One obvious metric of success is numbers. How many passive house certified builds are there? Around Frankfurt, publicly funded buildings require passive house certification (as is the case in around forty other districts across Europe). But most of the developed world has failed to build many passive developments as a proportion of new builds. The UK apparently needs a couple of hundred thousand new homes a year, although it doesn’t usually manage this number, and precious few are passive. My particular interest is in building palaces, or at least a Castle Drogo or two, with well shod clients who want a thing of beauty that might eventually get listed building status, hopefully well after they’ve sold up or shuffled off their mortal coil. You would expect passive house to be an easy sell to these