6 Comments

Great post, and love the simple summary. Looks like the building is also constructed of some great natural materials? Do you look at embodied carbon as well when designing?

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Thank you Steven. The buildings I design are mostly made of CLT, mass timber structure and natural fiber insulations, minimising synthetic materials wherever possible.

I could say it is a low-carbon design, but to be frank, I never actually looked the embodied carbon numbers because I know they consume a fractional amount of energy and mostly made of natural materials so I am happy with that. And I've seen huge variations in carbon assessments and it looks like to me that many entities are using it as accounting trickery.

I am very independent minded, practical and don't like to derive solutions from theory and policies, my work is guided by experience and practical design. I purposefully avoid the current buzzword concepts as they are constantly changing - like net-zero carbon etc.

Also it is reads like a fallacy for me. The aim of sustainability is obviously to consum the least amount of man-made energy if we have natural energy (sunlight) available, but I am also for maximising pro-human potential and since we, humans are carbon based life-forms, it sounds contradictory to me saying that 'I want to eliminate or lower embodied carbon in my life'.

This sounds better 'I maximise naturally available abundant energy for my health and wellbeing' while minimising the generation of harmful by-products (but I understand that in advanced civilisation it cannot be zero).

Carbon is not the (only) harmful by-product of our current technological processes.

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Great articles ! I am enjoying these.

Did you achieve the aesthetic balance you desired after "softening" the passivhaus ? That is, a more aesthetic design approach ?

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It is still in progress! To be totally fair I am still searching/developing my aesthetics but it certainly does help. A whole cycle from first draft to finished building usually takes 2/3 years so it is like steering an admiral ship on the sea :) But it does help the design process very much to not constantly think about passivhaus parameters.

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Thank you for this! I’m really enjoying your posts and am learning so much!

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I am glad to hear that you do!

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