To achieve mass adoption of offsite construction, the building process as we know it has to be reevaluated from multiple perspectives. This is especially true when combined with the goals of scaling up low-carbon and high-performance objectives. The session will explore how the three primarily residential companies have built their businesses around offsite manufacturing principles and have developed strategies to “unsilo” the industry.

As the energy and carbon landscape evolves, the design and construction of hospitals must change to meet new challenges. New techniques, perspectives and methodologies must be applied to drive innovation and achieve outstanding results. From the dual perspective of a CPHC and experienced HVAC design engineer, we will provide an overview of Passive House principles in the context of hospital design and construction. We will review three case studies: one occupied, one in construction, and one in design.

Methods for electrification of DHW in multifamily buildings all pose challenges. This session will provide an overview of existing technologies and a brief history of how we arrived at central air-source heat pump technology as the least problematic solution today. We will use recent design-phase case studies to illustrate cost, estimated energy use, mechanical space requirements, system and equipment peculiarities, metering strategies, maintenance requirements, what we’d like to learn from systems as they’re installed, and why the alternatives for electrification of DHW are even worse!

Passive House buildings go hand-in-hand with on-site generation and electrification, but what happens when you have code-required emergency power backup? The Kenzi tackled the wicked problem of designing, pricing, and permitting the first all-electric building above four floors in the City of Boston. We will dive into the nitty gritty of design, funding, and procurement, reveal our strategy for Boston Fire Department concerns, and discuss what code language we leaned on to pull it all together.

This session offers a case study of a curtainwall building in which the project team collaborated on an iterative energy modeling and design process to achieve aggressive energy reduction goals. Our panel will share insight on the process that led to significant energy and carbon reductions, predictive versus post occupancy usage data, and how this building will adapt to BERDO 2.0 and future energy and resilience considerations – a challenge facing recently constructed buildings that will need to decarbonize in the near future in Boston.

Think you know effective heat pump sizing and design? Significant market growth of cold-climate air-source heat pumps has resulted in new insights and lessons learned. Come explore new tools and best practices to enable improved design, sizing, and selection of ASHPs in this session with NEEP and Abode, and stay on the leading edge!

Many classroom environments are unhealthy and uncomfortable, creating poor learning environments with high absenteeism. Older, unventilated classrooms can be economically decarbonized with improved air quality and comfort. This session will present the conversion of a junior high school classroom, featuring a "rolling" room-by-room installation process using a community's local HVAC installation labor with one day of classroom downtime.

Join principals of New Frameworks and Builders for Climate Action for a critical look at our practices that have endeavored to embed justice and belonging alongside the highest goals for building health, efficiency, and carbon storage in projects - for the purpose of workshopping how our industry can scale carbon storage and justice, rapidly, to address climate justice.

With rising determination to fight the climate crisis worldwide, practitioners are finding the Passive House standard a potent solution for the building sector. As passive and other sustainable building standards are proliferating worldwide, those standards meet a host of different location-specific challenges. This diverse panel of women architects and certified Passive House consultants are seeking to understand the adaptation of the Passive House standard globally.

Typical university dormitory projects are capital intensive and take several years to complete. This project turned this practice on its head. Using modular construction, on-site precast foundations, an integrated design-build team and low-embodied-carbon materials in a holistic approach, Colby College housed students as quickly as possible while ensuring the highest standards of beauty, accessibility, energy consumption, and healthy materials. Design started in September 2021, and students moved in in August 2022.