Party Walls

The number of multifamily residential projects targeting Passive House certification has been rising steadily over the past decade, bringing along many exciting challenges.

This has been especially prevalent in New York City, where increasingly stringent energy standards and a desire for innovation have made designing to Passive House standards an attractive goal.

As the number of Passive House projects passing through our offices in New York City; Washington, DC; Boston; and Norwalk, CT continues to grow, we have seen some important overlaps with one of our other consulting services: accessibility compliance.

In the United States, multifamily new construction projects consisting of four or more dwelling units are subject to the Fair Housing Act, as well as state, city, and local accessibility laws and codes. Projects targeting Passive House certification must comply fully with all applicable accessibility requirements.

In this blog post, we will focus on projects in NYC—although most newly constructed residential projects across the country will be subject to some variation of the criteria discussed below, for both Passive House and accessibility standards. (more…)

We like to say that a building is not sustainable if it does not sustain the health and wellbeing of all its occupants. This includes considering how the materials, technologies, and building systems affect indoor air quality, comfort, and the physical and mental health of those utilizing the space.

In our post-COVID world, it also includes how a building can protect its occupants from viruses and other airborne illnesses.

We’re sharing real-world examples of how SWA consultants have helped to mitigate potential negative impacts on occupant health in high-performance buildings. (more…)

On the very first episode of Buildings + Beyond, Passive House pioneer Lois Arena answered the most common questions asked about meeting the high-performance requirements of the Passive House standard. You loved the episode—it’s one of our most popular of all time—and we loved recording with Lois. So, 6 years later, we decided to record a highly anticipated follow-up episode.

Listen as host Robb Aldrich poses the same 10 questions from the original episode, and a few new ones, to Lois and Dylan Martello—who both work on first-of-their-kind, largescale Passive House projects at Steven Winter Associates. What answers have remained the same, and what has changed in the last 6 years?

Click here to listen to the original episode.

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The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) began revising its Indoor AirPlus (IAP) specification for homes and residential buildings in early 2020. Since the first drafts of version 2, several factors have shaped the new standard, including the public’s hyper-awareness of indoor air quality (IAQ) during and post COVID, input from strategic partners, and considerations from multiple public comments.

The goal to improve IAQ across new and existing housing while addressing affordability and expanding access to healthy housing among disadvantaged populations will not change.

But a lot will change for building designers, developers, owners, and property managers that earn the Indoor AirPlus label for their buildings.

For starters, the program will now be written as Indoor AirPlus (previously “airPLUS”), and there are two levels of certification: Certified and Gold. EPA anticipates that version 2 will be available for use in fall 2024, and version 1 will be sunset in January 2026. During this overlap period, partners may opt to use either version.

Below, we’ve summarized the changes to expect from Indoor AirPlus version 2. (more…)

In case you missed it, emergency legislation has extended the DC third-party data verification deadline to July 1, 2024.

In the past few months, SWA has helped Washington, DC, building owners complete mandatory third-party benchmarking data verification for 2023 calendar year data. With the deadline extended, now is a good time to talk about the recurring issues we’ve seen and the lessons we’ve learned.

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The International Energy Conservation Code (IECC) or “model code” establishes the minimum requirements for building energy efficiency. The code is updated every three years, and for 2024, a new consensus-driven development process brought together diverse stakeholders to determine those requirements.

However, the International Code Council’s Board of Directors recently voted to go against consensus and remove mandatory provisions relating to building decarbonization from the 2024 draft.

In this episode, host Robb Aldrich interviews Gayathri Vijayakumar, Principal Mechanical Engineer at Steven Winter Associates and a voting member of the 2024 IECC Residential Consensus Committee, to find out… what happened?

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When is it the right call to improve the energy efficiency of existing building systems, or upgrade and electrify them?

Though electrification is important to reduce carbon emissions, electrifying buildings is not straightforward. Factors like cost, existing infrastructure, compliance needs (and we’ll say it again: cost!) can keep building owners from going all-electric.

In this episode, Buildings + Beyond co-host Robb Aldrich catches up with Ryan Merkin, Vice President of Business Development at BlocPower (and a SWA alum). They discuss the eight areas Ryan considers when deciding to focus on efficiency vs. electrification:

• Building height
• Planned capital expenditures (CapEx)
• Current system condition and remaining useful life
• Heating energy source: oil and electrical resistance
• Existing systems: Individual/unitized vs. central
• Packaged terminal ACs (PTACs) and through-wall sleeve ACs
• Regulatory drivers (LL97, ESG, etc.) and incentives
• Metering: who pays what now; who would pay in the future

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Buildings are complicated. There’s a bigger learning curve than ever for the people who construct, operate, and manage high-performance buildings—and there’s more demand than ever for skilled workers across the sustainable building industry.

In this episode, Ellen Honigstock, Senior Director of Education at Urban Green Council, sits down with Kelly Westby, Managing Director of the Building Operations, Decarbonization, and Efficiency (BODE) team at Steven Winter Associates. They chat about what it takes to effectively educate the workforce to ensure occupant comfort, energy and carbon reductions, sustainability, and the overall performance of a building.

This is a crossover episode! Go to the Building Tomorrow: Conversations with Climate Solvers podcast feed to hear Ellen interview Kelly about all-things building commissioning.

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There’s more to a healthy meal than what’s on your plate. Cooking inside a home or apartment produces contaminants—those of primary concern are PM_2.5 and nitrogen dioxide (NO₂)—and without an exhaust strategy, these pollutants will remain inside and diminish indoor air quality.

In addition, one of the biggest news stories of 2023 was the Canadian wildfires. These events had many on the East Coast thinking about outdoor air quality and how to keep their indoor air as healthy as possible. The primary pollutant of concern from smoke is PM_2.5.

There are numerous ways to keep polluted outdoor air outside, but what about the additional exposure to PM_2.5 that can happen indoors?

Homeowners and renters can create a ventilation strategy to maintain safe levels of PM_2.5 in their living space—whether there are outdoor air quality warnings or not. Keep reading to find out how. (more…)

At the baseline, “healthy” materials should not have a negative impact on people living or working inside of a building. Beyond that, there are materials that have a low impact on people and the planet throughout their entire lifespan—and then there are materials that can have a net-positive impact, such as those that absorb carbon from our atmosphere.

Jonsara Ruth, Co-founder and Design Director of the Healthy Materials Lab at Parsons School of Design, joins this episode of the Buildings + Beyond podcast to discuss the spectrum of materials and resources available. Jonsara chats with guest host Sarah Nugent about how to phase out toxic ingredients and select materials that are healthy and affordable.

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