Building Envelope

Solid mass masonry buildings are a significant fraction of the existing building stock, and many contribute to the historic fabric of neighborhoods. However, with wall R-values of R-3 to R-5, they do not meet modern standards for energy efficiency and comfort.  Insulating these buildings successfully—without causing long-term damage—is a vital part of the ‘toolkit’ for meeting energy and climate goals.

What lessons can you learn from completed new construction passive and net zero affordable projects? How can we bring costs down with further experience and tools? Learn from a design build firm experienced in passive and net zero affordable projects.  Hear best practices, what works, and what hasn’t been working.

Throughout our experience in the K12 Practice Area, we have seen and measured how daylight can positively affect students’ performance and general wellbeing, but how can we keep good daylight levels under the pressure of a tight schedule and the aggressive performance goals of a Net Zero Energy project?

With so many ways to retrofit a building, how can owners identify the right scope of work? What about the right timing? Even the most well-intentioned building owner may leave carbon savings on the table, choose the wrong ECM or retrofit solution, or spend more than they should on a retrofit. Despite the urgency today to electrify and decarbonize as quickly as possible, we can and should stop, think, and plan to optimize retrofits and maximize savings, while investing in health, workforce, and equity.

Over the past two years, Massachusetts and its consultant team has studied cost-effective commercial building approaches aligned with climate goals. This session will present a building-level review of the analysis done to inform Massachusetts’s upcoming stretch energy code and municipal opt-in stretch code. We will focus on a) Thermal Energy Demand Intensity (TEDI), b) critical role of envelope, thermal bridges, and air infiltrations, c) implications to carbon emission and fossil fuel use, and d) cost optimization for different commercial building types.

The electric grid is changing rapidly - with more intermittent, renewable energy resources contributing to the power generation supply, more dispatchable baseload retiring, and more extreme weather events causing outages. Providing uninterruptible power supply is becoming increasingly more challenging. As building designers and operators, we have the opportunity to be part of the solution by optimizing the demand side of the equation. Passive building is a design methodology that utilizes passive principles to reduce loads on a peak and annual basis.

As buildings become part of the climate change solution, more building professionals and their customers want to know how they can reduce carbon emissions in home retrofits. The presenters conducted a research study to answer this question by assessing the net carbon impact of insulation and air sealing upgrades when accounting for both embodied carbon emissions of materials and operational carbon reductions associated with weatherization upgrades.

Ventilation-system design and occupant behavior both significantly impact indoor air quality and consequently the health of occupants in affordable multi-family housing, that is increasingly being sited adjacent to highways and busy roadways in cities.

Multifamily Passive House new construction can be built today for low incremental cost and dramatic energy reduction. Join us for a review of eight affordable passive house projects, demonstrating that Passive House buildings in the Northeast are regularly achieving 60% to 80% lower energy use per square foot than code-built. Learn what has been hardest, what has been surprisingly easy, and what teams would do differently next time from two affordable Passive House projects built in Massachusetts: SquirrelWood in Cambridge and Harbor Village in Gloucester.

Affordable housing is key to bringing equity to disadvantaged communities. In Boston, the Department of Neighborhood Development (DND) design guidelines are pushing affordable housing with strict requirements that are equal to Passive House performance standards.