Reimagine Buildings News

Hello, and welcome to episode four of Reimagine Buildings News, the podcast of the Reimagined Buildings Collective. I'm Zack Semke, member of the Climate Reality Leadership Corps, director of Passive House Accelerator, and host of the Reimagine Buildings Collective, and thank you for being here. By the way, if you are a building professional who's stepping up to tackle climate change, the Reimagine Buildings Collective is the place to be. It's where we gather online to connect and learn from each other so we can make the biggest impact possible. If you're not already a member, please head over to reimaginebuildings.com to join.

Speaking of joining the collective, I wanted to celebrate this week's newest members. A big welcome to Erin Woods, Maria Lomanto, and Sarah Bayer, our newest expert in residence. Welcome to the collective. Okay. This past week was a great one on the collective.

We were joined on Tuesday for an ask me anything session by my dear friend and former colleague from our Hammer in Hand days, Dan Whitmore. He's a nationally renowned passive building educator and builder. And on Friday, Sarah Bayer, the director of sustainability at Magnuson Architecture and Planning, joined us for Ask Me Anything Friday. As I wrote in the collective, if Marvel were to launch a movie franchise of superheroes of Passive House, Sarah would star in her own feature film. She's quite the rock star.

Replays of both of these events are live now in the Reimagine Buildings Collective, so head on over to check them out either in the Mighty Networks app or in your web browser at collective.reimaginebuildings.com. But in the meantime, I've gathered clips here for your listening pleasure to share insights from Dan and Sarah, and we even get a nice clip from Ed May as well. So let's start with Dan. In his first clip here, Dan responds to a question about how one can pivot to doing passive housework exclusively.

I've focused and specialized in passive house since I I went to the class. I drank the Kool Aid in 02/2009, and I've just loved it. I started my first project in 2010 and it's just what I wanted to do. It really honestly reinvigorated my whole professional trajectory. And I was like, this is it.

And it's all I've wanted to do since then. The, the passive house crowd in my mind is the one that's like, okay, this is the path through the, through the seas, the high seas or the passageway, you know? So how to get there and concentrate on that. I've really emphasized it. I focused on it.

I've done this. I've done my best to learn. I've done my best to put my work out there. The hardest part honestly wasn't finding clients. It was finding a team that wanted to get there.

And so I've been good at finding clients. I've decided at this late stage that I just want to be my own client. The building behind me, I'm, I actually am, enjoyed and, privileged to be a very small owner in it. So I was able to come in and say, no. We're gonna do this.

We're gonna have this very small cost premium, but we're gonna own it long term, and the value is gonna come out in in the mix.

So how does one take the first step, though? How do you get there? Both Dan and Ed respond here.

It's it's first starts with what inspires you. Unquestion. Because you need to be inspiring to your to the your clients and everybody else around. So my business model has to center around what I, that's why I've shifted to the developing stuff is because I, I lost my inspiration for, for doing custom. Yeah.

High end custom stuff.

I totally agree with Dan. I think you have to start from your own strengths and your own capabilities. If you're an architect and you love architecture, then you're gonna do it in a way where you're folding it in to your typical practice. If you're on the outside and you wanna do it as a dedicated consultant, that's, like, a whole different business model. If you wanna work on single family, that's a whole different business model than multifamily.

So a lot of it depends on your own proclivities, and then a lot of it depends on your resources, your, like, resource base. Like, I totally I think Dan is exactly right. If you can do this as a developer, like, that's awesome because that's the person making the decisions. My own circumstances, we have no I have no money. We have no, like, capital.

We have nothing. So we did everything bootstrapped, and that just meant working as an outside consultant for other people on often a fee for surface basis. We tried to move towards fixed fee wherever possible as a way of sort of incentivizing efficiency, but it's not like we had any capital that we could use to do our own development. That would be awesome, but many of us don't have that. Most of us don't have that.

And so it depends a lot on your own resources there. But I think I would at heart, I would still come back to I think I said this in the last thing we were talking about, right, and this is what Monty Paulson always said. Passive House is not an end to itself. Passive House is supposed to be a tool to help you achieve other things. So you don't build passive houses for the purpose of building passive houses.

You build passive house because it's a really awesome way in order to deliver these other things that you want. Energy efficiency and comfort and durability and health and all that other stuff. So you don't sell Passive House, you sell the other stuff and then Passive House is just a tool that you use. You don't sell a hammer, you don't sell I own a hammer and I'm gonna use a hammer on your project. You sell the goal the end goal, and then you use passive house if it's useful, and then you put it down if it's not useful.

And it's only you only pick it up if it's a useful tool to deliver those actual end goals that are actually meaningful to people.

Okay. So start from where you are, and remember the passive house is a means to an end, not the end itself. In this last clip from Dan, he shares more about what launched things for him in passive house, starting with his own labor.

In terms of construction, one of my biggest resources is my labor. Labor being one of the biggest pieces of any construction project, being able to lean on my own capacity to work too many hours in the week, doing a project that is a passion. Launching my career in passive, I leaned on that heavily and I was excited to work fifty, sixty hours a week. That's not a healthy thing long term, but for launching my career, that was a very, it was something that I could lean on. So, having come, having been a carpenter at that point for twenty years, twenty plus years, I could do a lot of the work.

I can corral my friends. And so it was a passion project. It was also right at the end of the, housing crisis, the financial, there was a big recession. And so, I was able to lean on a lot of my friends who were a little short on work. It's an aggregation of opportunities that were presenting themselves right then.

And with that, I did one of the first past few houses. I still own it. Finding your peace and what you can lever and then go and then diving in with passion. And with that, people were coming to me. And I did.

I I was a CPHC at night. I was the carpenter during the day. I was the builder sourcing all the parts and pieces and the trades. I did end up doing too many things that are now that's not true. At the time I needed to do them.

I installed installed my own ventilation system. I installed installed all the air barrier applications, all those parts and pieces, outsourced the the siding and the and the drywall, insulation, those sorts of things. But, but it definitely created a, oh, this guy knows what he's doing because he can turn the dials on the energy models to figure out what needs to be done. It also was a huge lever because then I'm out on-site going or purchasing the, purchasing the products and going, wow, that's too expensive. And be able to turn over here and do the energy model and tweak it just enough and say like, I can do that trade off and I can, value engineer.

And then having done all of those parts and pieces in one, a lot of people were coming to me and then I could outsource for the parts that I didn't wanna do. So I could I still do some energy modeling to today to to date, but it's all it's pretty selective. Instead, I turn to other folks to do that. I I now have, teams I can turn to for to do good insulation, teams I can turn to for good ventilation systems. I still do most of the air sealing myself because I like it.

And I think that it had become I I haven't come across anybody who can do as good a job as I can as quickly as I can. And, partly, that's from the passion. And so now people, you know, luckily, there's a big enough piece in in my market where people a lot of people doing it, but I still get regular calls from them, from my colleagues, from potential clients because of that passion, because and also because I did so many of the pieces. But it was also as a the right size project for me to take on economically and and time wise.

Great insights there from Dan and a super valuable view into how we brought the pieces together, added in a big dose of long hours powered by his passion and mission, and became a first mover and leader. Let's pivot now to a few highlights from Sarah Byers' Ask Me Anything session. In this first clip, Sarah fields a question from Mary about window frame materials and fire resistance.

So a few years ago when everybody started using u p v c windows, there's a little bit of a a step back. Well, does that meet the fire requirements? It's just never great to have melting plastic. I would love, like, a an aluminum solution, because that's fully recyclable even though it takes high energy to recycle. I think we can just get better at that.

That's something that we can probably keep improving upon, but the fact that plastic is has a toxic life cycle, I don't think we can ever really get away from that. But how do we get really well performing aluminum windows or even wood and aluminum or I'm not sure. Plastic. There are some just there's some very durable plastics that don't warp, and they figured that out. But just to share openly, like, the dismay of seeing all the toxicity released from the fires, I just it just breaks your heart.

And it didn't if it happened, like, fifty years ago, they you know, maybe the things wouldn't have burned so quickly because the flash point of all these materials that we have now in our buildings is so much faster, and it just ignites. You know? And natural materials just don't have those same drawbacks. They perform better in the fire. So I'm I think, hopefully, people are starting to realize some of those things and demanding better.

It's a great point and a reminder of the multiple potential benefits of using natural materials in our projects. Next, I asked Sarah about the geothermal system that she presented about as part of our recent reimagined buildings electrification conference and whether what she learned about that system had changed her approach to practice.

Yeah. Wow. I think its upfront cost is still higher than it probably will stay higher than the PTHPs or the PTACs or the unitized package terminal heat pumps that is also really accelerating in their development right now. We used to have one manufacturer, and now we have at least three in the city that can do it. So I see the upfront construction cost of geothermal or ground source being a barrier.

But right now, it's seen as a really as a much less, you know, lower global warming potential, leakage risk. So I'm saying, like, the people who are thinking big picture picture about our society and trying to make it better, which is our government. Right? We need people to think very picture and steer us in a good direction. They're seeing they're incentivizing ground source and geothermal.

So it's got good incentives right now. Our utility companies see it as a really good system because it's more efficient because it doesn't rely on the heat from the air, which is variable. And then it so its peak demands on the grid are a lot lower. So as we change our grid over, it has so many benefits. And it's resilient.

It's long lasting. And then all the other things for the architecture are great too. There's no penetrations in the facade. Each unit can be heating or cooling. Water's a pretty good medium to distribute heat with, so that's efficient too.

Yeah. I see VRF going away, but I think geothermal's gonna have a big competitor with unitized systems.

Finally, Sarah reflects here about her role as director of sustainability at MAP and what reaching for regenerative architecture means for her?

Regeneration, I think, means bringing life back, fixing the the damage that we've done to our ecosystems. Primarily, I think that's the end goal, but you see it as and it's happening in a at the re the term regeneration, I think, is is happening in sustainability space more and more. Like, Paul Hawkins' last book is regeneration. It's just being part of sustainable is just keeping the status quo, which we know doesn't work. So I've seen a sort of broadening of the lens of what we care about.

And in our work that we have to do energy efficiency as a foundation, how does that play into all the other things that we need to do for regeneration? And I I don't think anyone's actually really defined what regenerative architecture is. Some people talk about it being, like, a circular economy, just definitely one piece of it. But is it also how you deal with your local ecosystem? How is it that all your materials deal deal with their ecosystems?

How does it affect the human thriving so that, you know, we don't, human thriving is critical in its own right. It has its own value, but it's also connected to you know, when humans are not thriving, we usually this environment suffers first. So, yeah, I think my job has just been trying to really broaden our lens of what of all the things that we're doing with our actions and just trying to find them and then find where the lowest hanging fruit is to address them. That's been my goal. So, you know, red list free materials.

There's a lot of alternatives now in the red list free environment. So Living Futures worst chemicals list. I think that is something that should be more attainable for projects now. So if you're doing architecture and so we're gonna start another study on trying to make one of our buildings red list free. So living future, what they do and just the bigger holistic view that they have is great place to get inspiration from.

So that's a few things. But I also, for me, just personally, embody carbon because it just that science needs to be addressed and move forward really quickly. The fact that you can use carbon storing materials in your building is so powerful and also addresses the passive house concern. Well, you need more insulation, so, you know, it's not a bad thing. But what if that re those carbon storing materials came from regenerative agriculture?

So it's like, how does your profession affect all of the other professions out there? Think about so why should an architect care about soil science or agriculture? Yes. We can because we are changing the demand for things based on what we're specifying. So and it all it's all connected.

I guess systems thinking is another way to think about what we're all doing. So just some thoughts there.

Right. Just some thoughts there. Sarah's point about systems thinking is so important. We can't let ourselves fall into silos or fall for silver bullets here. Efficiency, upfront carbon, ecosystem health, grid transitions, all of it is intertwined.

And when we can recognize that, we're better empowered to take part in those systems in ways that can approach regeneration. So easy peasy. A big thank you to both Dan and Sarah for helping us out last week and sharing their wisdom with us. I hope you really enjoyed the clips here and getting a taste of the insights that they were sharing. Of course, you can catch the full replays, in the collective at any time.

This coming week on the collective, we're joined on Tuesday by another dear friend and former colleague of both Dan's and mine, the one and only Skyler Swinford. Then on Thursday, we conduct a live session for lesson four of the next level secrets from the pros course. This one, a roundtable conversation with Ed May, Lois Arena, and Maureen Sanchez hosted by Michael Ingwe. And on Friday, the Accelerator's very own Mary James will be joined by Steve Quarles for an ask me anything dedicated to fire resilience and fire hardening. With that, thank you for listening.

That wraps up episode four. As always, please don't hesitate to DM me with anything Reimagine Buildings Collective related, what you'd like to see on the platform, any ideas you'd like to share. We've built all of this for you, so feedback is super, super valuable to us. Also, if you're enjoying your experience on the collective, please invite your friends and colleagues to join us. We'd love to have them be part of it all.

Thank you, and have a great week. Be well.