What I learned about Passive House @ Yestermorrow

outside the box 5

What I learned about Passive House @ Yestermorrow

by mkdesignbuild, November, 11 2010

Yestermorrow gives me to make such a very tall porch

Just home from the Yestermorrow Passive Haus weekend workshop and am pleased to report I didn’t implode! While they were dissecting not just any excell spread sheet calculators, German ones! I sat quietly near by and worked on the design for the 3 unit row house I am inspired to create incorporating some of the passive haus ideals, and soothed myself knowing that others find this fascinating so I don’t have to know it, just them.

What was brilliant about this weekend was the understanding that there is no yellow brick road. We’ve all got to do our own homework and come up with the best ideal for each particular designbuild. Even leed platnum isn’t immune cause it’s so easy to loose sight of the sustainability through the points. Does that work? I’m trying to make the analogy of loosing sight of the forest (read: regenerative sustainable design) through the trees… by being so focused on hitting the points.

Let me move into a world I’m more familiar with, feng shui. For me this is like gravity, a natural law that only a fool would defy and my work is all about tapping into.

This might explain it better.

I used to live in 325 sq ft, including the bathroom. You can read all about it in this article called Living Big in a Small World I loved it and actually this lovely new condo I’m in, all 950 sq ft of it feels cavernous. (I miss my small space and will downsize soon, just not sure what calls me yet.)

I was told by someone who “studied” this ancient art that storing things under one’s bed blocks the chi and is bad feng shui. Whereas I thrived in 320 sq ft space because I used the prime real estate under the bed for storage and this is what allowed the chi to flow freely.

What I realized this weekend is that we can be good little biscuit girls and boys and go for the points and the plaques and totally miss the opportunity to design and build something really great. In keeping with Yestermorrow’s visionary approach to learning and creating our world, the educator presenting wasn’t, what’s that word for someone who is indoctrinated… suffice to say we milked a few sacred cows.

It may have even been suggested that some of our hero’s here in Canada got co-opeted or seduced by the whole lead thing and stopped creating really innovative, even regenerative designs, being lost in the trees to be labour the analogy.

Passive House certification has some flaws, nitch richtig, as we say in German, though I can’t spell in my father’s tongue either. A serious one that borders on the oxymoron genus is that it’s exponentially easier to get the points if you build large. Yestermorrow had a vision for building a 400 sq ft passive house and it can’t happen cause the walls would be thicker than the 400 sq ft space to achieve the R- values needed to meet passive house standards. Another challenge is that Yestermorrow is in Vermont and they would have to meet the same standards as a passiv house in Florida.

A truly brilliant system ( read, one that mimics nature) would be adaptive not prescriptive and give points back for using so little resources and making the space work creatively (like by mining all that storage space under the bed for example.)

If we’re gonna build a better world, I can’t abdicate and let someone else do my thinking for me, I mean I can, the real reason I went to this workshop is to make more friends with folks who get excited by R values. I can call on them to help me think this stuff through, cause it’s tricky but we have to keep in mind there isn’t a one size that fits all. It’s important to see things like Passive House as a great tool with great tools within it that can elevate our built environment if we temper it with our own brilliance that is born of nature which models a kind of regenerative adaptive design that is humbling. If I can be in that space of humility I am half way there.

The educator this weekend who knows his way around even a German spread sheet pretty darn good, said the only reason he was sitting at the front of the class not with us is cause he’s made more mistakes. A kindred spirit who understands that while ignorance may not be bliss, acknowledgement of it is the most brilliant spring board I’ve ever come across.

It haunted me this weekend that I know just enough to be dangerous and that standards like passive house or leed need to be utilized just like the table saw we had on site today while creating this gorgeous porch. (I need to work into this story so it won’t look like I am just putting the photos up to show off.) It’s so cool, and it’s Yestermorrow that gives me the courage to build something so very tall. I’m pretty sure it’s the tallest one on the street, wait till it’s done, it’s gonna be very shiny! I better call and order the steel so I will have a photo to post for you soon.

mkdesignbuild

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