The Passive House approach to design and construction empowers us to build better, creating durable, resilient buildings that slash energy use and carbon emissions. Most importantly, Passive House buildings provide healthy, comfortable and quiet interior environments full of clean, filtered fresh air.

How do designers and builders achieve all of this? Is it crazy hard? Does it require a physics degree? Does it mean using a bunch of wackadoodle construction techniques?

No, it does not.

For all you designers, you’ll have a package of design principles and ready-made digital tools at your fingertips to help you design buildings to keep people healthy and happy. For all you builders, Passive House is more an evolution in practice than a revolution. It’s about better materials, attention to detail and care in how assemblies go together, guided by building science. It’s the kind of pride in craft that probably got you into construction in the first place.

The five classic Passive House principles are:

Continuous insulation: wrapping buildings and a thermal barrier that keeps them warm in the winter, and cool in the summer.

No thermal bridges: careful detailing to avoid any building elements that allow heat or cool to bypass that thermal barrier.

Airtight construction: creating an airtight layer that acts like a windbreaker, stopping air from penetrating to the inside.

High-performance windows and doors that are airtight, thermally broken, insulating, and that manage solar gain.

Fresh air ventilation with heat recovery, creating havens of clean air and energy efficiency.

Passive House applies to all building types and can fit any architectural style. So don’t be fooled by the “house” in the name Passive House: In the original German, Passivhaus, the word “haus” connotes building more generally.

A Passive House can be an apartment block, a school, a museum, a firehouse, a retail store, a hospital, a cafe, a high-rise office tower, the building standard for an entire district of a city and pretty much any building type you can imagine.

In North America, Passive House buildings and Passive House professionals can be certified based on the standards of one of two distinct and independent institutions: the Passive House Institute, based in Darmstadt, Germany, and Phius, based in Chicago, IL. The two groups’ standards do differ in important ways. But both are firmly grounded in building science. Both employ those Passive House principles I just shared. And both focus on three key performance metrics:

Very low thermal energy demand: using very little energy for heating or cooling.

Very low total energy demand: so not just heating and cooling, but also plug loads, lighting and appliances.

Superior air tightness measured by a blower door test to ensure building durability, verify construction quality, and confirm energy performance.

When you put it all together, you get a great, healthy building. But you also take a big step toward making your building a part of the climate solution rather than the climate problem, because when you combine Passive House performance with materials that have low upfront carbon emissions or that even sequester carbon, and then you electrify everything, and you get that electricity from clean energy, that is the pathway to zero carbon building.

You can view this article at www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlrgE7PEtv0.

Zack Semke is the director of Passive House Accelerator.