Passive House for New Orleans

Congratulations to the team at Sustainable.to for winning the challenge with their design Low Cost/Low Energy House for New Orleans the full press release can be seen on ArchDaily: http://www.archdaily.com/134521/passive-house-for-new-orleans-competition-winner/

According to Architecture 2030 and the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the building sector consumes two-thirds (77%) of all electricity produced in the U.S. and is responsible for producing nearly half (46.9%) of U.S. CO2 emissions in 2009. By comparison, transportation accounted for 33.5% of CO2 emissions and industry just 19.6%. Globally, these numbers are even worse. However with this enormous problem, comes enormous potential. As the Obama Administration recently outlined in the Better Building Initiative, building energy efficiency is the most cost effective way to reduce our energy consumption and dependence upon fossil fuels.

The technologies necessary to achieve significant energy reductions in buildings are cheap and readily available: no exotic mechanical systems or costly renewable energy sources are needed. These technologies have already been successfully applied to achieve dramatic reductions in tens of thousands of buildings across Europe and North America using the Passive House Standard, the world’s most rigorous building energy standard. By combining an airtight, thermal-bridge free and super-insulated building enclosure, with passive internal and solar gains with balanced energy recovery ventilation, buildings built to the Passive House Standard have shown measured reductions in space heating and cooling energy consumption up to 90% compared to standard energy code requirements.

This challenge, coinciding with the 2011 AIA National Convention, seeks to address this issue directly by engaging the design community in developing a series of affordable, low-energy, single-family homes for the communities in New Orleans that are still recovering from the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina. The homes that are rebuilt in these communities will need to be sustainable in the broadest sense of the term: affordable to build and purchase, long-lasting, with minimal impact on the local environment, and affordable to heat and cool throughout the life of the building. Adhering our Challenge Objectives to the Passive House Standard will insure that all of these goals are met.

One of the first Passive House projects completed in the US, the Fairview House in Urbana, Illinois, was sold to a resident displaced by Hurricane Katrina. It’s time to give New Orleans residents a Passive House of their own to come home to.

Context

• Lower Ninth Ward, New Orleans, LA
• Typical lot in the Lower Ninth Ward. Please see the provided site model

Objectives

• Design a low-cost, extremely low-energy home for New Orleans
• Homes should meet post-Katrina building codes, guidelines and best practices
• Homes should be shotgun typology and strive to create cohesive neighborhoods
• Program - 1000 sf treated floor area, to include (2) Bedrooms, (1) Full Bath, (1) Half Bath or 1250 sf treated floor area, to include (3) Bedrooms, (2) Full Baths
• First floor elevation - +5’ above grade
• Lot size - 40’x104’
• Setback – 20’ front yard with 6’ front porch, 20’ rear yard, 3-5’ side yard
• Orientation – Typically long-axis along East/West, but consideration should be given to a North/South orientation as well
• Design should strive to achieve Passive House Standard:
  • Airtight building shell ≤ 0.6 ACH @ 50 pascal pressure (simple, well-detailed construction)
  • Annual heating and cooling requirement ≤ 15 kWh/m2/year (4.75 kBtu/sf/yr)
  • Primary Energy ≤ 120 kWh/m2/year (38.1 kBtu/sf/yr)
• Designs should demonstrate that affordable and sustainable homes can also be beautiful

Provided Materials

• Key Passive House metrics spreadsheet
• PHPP Climate Data for New Orleans
• Building site with setbacks. Orientation may be changed (.dwg, .3dw, .rvt)

Precedent & Sources

• Saft Residence
• Duplex House for Make It Right / GRAFT
• Brad Pitt’s Make It Right presents duplex homes for NOLA 
• Hotlinks, duplex house for Make It Right / Atelier Hitoshi Abe
• Alligator / buildingstudio

Submission

• Post design model and documentation (3d and/or 2d)
• Post Key Passive House metrics spreadsheet
• Post images
• Post diagrams explaining approach (optional)
• Post video explaining approach (optional)

Prizes

• The winner of this HP-sponsored challenge will take home an HP Designjet T2300 PostScript eMFP, the world’s first web-connected printer with scan, print and copy functionality. A nearly $10,000 value, the HP Designjet T2300 eMFP helps simplify the printing process while letting teams print on the go and share files more easily than ever before. 
• The winner of this challenge will be featured on DesignReform on the first day of the AIA National Convention in New Orleans, May 12th

Judges

• Alejandra Lillo - Alejandra Lillo graduated with her first professional degree from the Universidad Mendoza Facultad de Arquitectura y Urbanismo, receiving her Architecture License in Mendoza in 2000. Her architectural career began as a designer at Corbett Cibinel Architects in Winnipeg Canada in 2001, where she focused upon healthcare and educational design. In 2003 she pursued her second professional degree, a Masters in Architecture, at UCLA's AUD, graduating in 2004. She joined the Los Angeles office of Graft as a lead designer and project manager in 2004. In 2007 she was promoted to the position of Managing Partner and CEO of Graft Inc. In February 2011 Alejandra co-founded Undisclosable with Bryan Flaig.
• David Basulto - David is the cofounder of Archdaily, the world’s largest and most trafficked architecture website in the world.  David graduated from Universidad Catolica’s architecutre program and decided to start an architecture blog with one of his friends.  After a few years of hard work, David and team turned Archdaily into the world’s most important architecture website.
• Corey Saft - Corey Saft is an assistant professor in the School of Architecture and Design at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He is the second year co-coordinator and teaches graduate seminars in architectural theory and contemporary modes of architectural production and fabrication. He has also taught Site and Material and Methods classes. He received his M.Arch in 1999 from the University of Oregon where he first studied the
  advanced passive techniques.
• Trey Trahan - Victor F. “Trey” Trahan, III, FAIA is President and Principal-in-Charge of Trahan Architects, APAC, and has been recognized and published both nationally and internationally for innovative design and creative use of materials.  An accomplished designer, Mr. Trahan received the 2005 Architecture Review Emerging Architecture Award in London, one of three firms in the world to receive this recognition and the only U.S. firm honored. In 2007, Trahan Architects was one of only five U.S. firms on Wallpaper Magazine’s list of the world’s 101 best emerging design firms. Mr. Trahan was elected to the AIA College of Fellows in 2006 at the age of 45.
• Katrin Klingenberg - Katrin Klingenberg is executive director and lead designer at e-co lab, a nonprofit community housing development organization. She and Passive House builder Mike Kernagis cofounded the Passive House Institute United States (PHIUS) to disseminate information about, and promote the construction of, Passive Houses in this country. She has designed and built several Passive Houses in the U.S. and consulted on numerous other Passive House projects throughout the U.S. and Canada. Recently Klingenberg worked with Dr. Wolfgang Feist, founder of the Passivhaus Institute in Darmstadt, Germany, to translate the energy-modeling software program, Passive House Planning Package (PHPP), into the English language.
• DesignByMany Community - The top 10 entries based on user votes will be seen by the judges. User votes will be counted for a week after the submission deadline.

Deadline

• Submission: Sunday May 1st at 11:59 PM EDT (GMT -4)
• User Voting: Sunday May 8th at 11:59 PM EDT (GMT -4)