Pumpkin Ridge Passive House
Interview with Carissa Farkas, structural engineer extraordinaire
Interview with Carissa Farkas, structural engineer extraordinaire for Passive House projects in Portland and Seattle
Perhaps the most compelling thing about the Passive House approach to high performance building is that it takes off-the-shelf, existing building technologies and materials and applies them in smart new ways to achieve revolutionary building energy performance. 21st century building science makes it possible.
Passive House Foundation Design and Construction Optimized at Pumpkin Ridge
The beauty of the Passive House building energy standard is that it's totally performance-based. If you can reach Passive House's three metrics, you're golden:
1.airtightness of less than or equal to 0.6ACH at 50 pascals of pressure.
2.annual heat requirement less than or equal to 4.75 kBtu/sf/yr.
3.primary energy less than or equal to 38.1 kBtu/sf/yr)
The Best Designs are Simple
Whether it's a renaissance villa by Palladio, a NW Modern home by Belluschi, or an iPad by Apple, one maxim holds constant: the best designs are simple - the extraneous peeled away, the essential expressed.
Achieving this elegance in design isn't easy. But when a designer strips away complexity and clutter and delivers something simple and powerful, mountains can move.
The Ins & Outs of Passive House
The Pumpkin Ridge Passive House is a 3600 square foot project on the western outskirts of Portland, designed by Scott | Edwards Architecture and built by Hammer & Hand. Passive House (also known by the German Passivhaus) is the world’s most stringent building energy standard, so the home will enjoy revolutionary energy performance, with heating energy demand at just 10% that of a conventional home.