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Interviews with the leaders, practitioners, and change-makers in the global Passive House movement. A production of Passive House Accelerator.
I've focused and specialized in Passive House since I I went to the class and drank the Kool Aid in 02/2009. And I've just loved it. I started my first project in 2010, and it's just what I wanted to do. It really, honestly, reinvigorated my whole professional trajectory. And I was like, this is it.
Sara Bayer:Regeneration, I think, means bringing life back, fixing the damage that we've done to our ecosystems. I've seen a sort of grounding of the lens of what we care about. We have to do energy efficiency as a foundation. How does that play into all the other things that we need to do for regeneration?
Zack Semke:Hello, and welcome to the Reimagine Edit, a special series of the Passive House podcast that shares curated insights from our experts and residents at the Reimagine Buildings Collective, our membership community of building professionals stepping up to tackle climate change. Today is 02/07/2025. And in this episode, we'll hear selected clips from Dan Whitmore of Blackbird Builders and Sara Bayer of Magnusson Architecture and Planning. And we even get a nice clip from Ed May. I'm Zach Sempke, director of Passive House Accelerator and host of the Reimagined Buildings Collective.
Zack Semke:And I wanna extend a big thank you to you for tuning in. Let's start with Dan Whitmore and his technical Tuesday Ask Me Anything session this past week. Dan is a dear friend. I first met him when he and I worked together at Hammer in Hand during my early days in the Passive House world, and he's one of North America's leading passive house builders and educators. In this first clip, Dan responds to a question about how one can pivot to doing passive housework exclusively.
Dan Whitmore:I've focused and specialized in passive house since I went to the class at Kool Aid in 02/2009. And I've just loved it. I started my first project in 2010, and it's just what I wanted to do. It really honestly reinvigorated my whole professional trajectory, and I was like, this is it. And it's all I wanted to do since then.
Dan Whitmore:The Pascabal crowd in my mind is the one that's like, okay, this is the path through the seas, the high seas or the passageway, you know. So how to get there and concentrate on that? I've really emphasized it. I've focused on it. I've done this.
Dan Whitmore:I've done my best to learn. I've done my best to put my work out there. The hardest part honestly wasn't finding clients, it was finding a team that wanted to get there. And so I've been good at finding clients. I've decided at this late stage that I just want to be my own client.
Dan Whitmore:The building behind me, I'm, I actually enjoyed and privileged to be a very small owner in it. So I was able to come in and say, no, we're going to do this. We're going this very small cost premium, but we're gonna own it long term and the value is gonna come out in the mix.
Zack Semke:So how does one take the first step though? How do you get there? Both Dan and Ed respond here.
Dan Whitmore:It's first starts with what inspires you. Unquestionable. Because you need to be inspiring to your clients and everybody else around. So my business model has to center around what I that's why I've shifted to the developing stuff is because I I lost my inspiration for for doing custom high end custom stuff.
Ed May:I totally agree with Dan. I think you have to start from your own strengths and your own capabilities. If you're an architect and you love architecture, then you're gonna do it in a way where you're folding it in to your typical practice. If you're on the outside and you wanna do it as a dedicated consultant, that's like a whole different business model. If you wanna work on single family, that's a whole different business model than multifamily.
Ed May:So a lot of it depends on your own proclivities and then a lot of it depends on your resources, your your resource base. Like I totally I think Dan is exactly right. If you can do this as a developer, like, that's awesome because that's the person making the decisions. My own circumstances, we have no I have no money. We have no, like, capital.
Ed May:We have nothing. So we did everything bootstrapped, and that just meant working as an outside consultant for other people on often a fee for surface basis. We tried to move towards fixed fee wherever possible as a way of sort of incentivizing efficiency, but it's not like we had any capital that we could use to do our own development. That would be awesome, but many of us don't have that. Most of us don't have that.
Ed May:And so it depends a lot on your own resources there. But I think I would at heart, I would still come back to I think I said this in the last thing we were talking about. Right? And this is what Monte Paulson always said. Passive house is not an end to itself.
Ed May:Passive house is supposed to be a tool to help you achieve other things. So you don't build passive houses for the purpose of building passive houses. You build passive house because it's a really awesome way in order to deliver these other things that you want, energy efficiency and comfort and durability and health and all that other stuff. So you don't sell passive house, you sell the other stuff. And then passive house is just a tool that you use.
Ed May:You don't sell a hammer. You don't sell, I own a hammer and I'm gonna use a hammer on your project. You sell the goal, the end goal, and then you use passive house if it's useful, and then you put it down if it's not useful. You only pick it up if it's a useful tool to deliver those actual end goals that are actually meaningful to people.
Zack Semke:Okay. So start from where you are and remember that passive house is a means to an end, not the end itself. In this last clip from Dan, he shares more about what launched things for him in Passive House, starting with his own labor.
Dan Whitmore:In terms of construction, one of my biggest resources is my labor. Labor being one of the biggest pieces of any construction project, being able to lean on my own capacity to work too many hours in a week, doing projects that is a passion, launching my career in passive, I leaned on that heavily, and I was excited to work fifty, sixty hours a week. That's not a healthy thing long term, but for launching my career, that was a very it was something I I could lean on. So having come having been a carpenter at that point for twenty years, twenty plus years, I could do a lot of the work. I can corral my friends.
Dan Whitmore:And so it was a passion project. It was also right at the end of the housing crisis, the financial there was a big recession. And so I was able to lean on a lot of my friends who were a little short on work. It's an aggregation of opportunities that were presenting themselves right then. And with that, I did.
Dan Whitmore:I built one of the first past vows, I still own it. Finding your peace and what you can lever and then go and then diving in with passion. And with that, people were coming to me. And I did. I I was a CPHC at night.
Dan Whitmore:I was the carpenter during the day. I was the builder sourcing all the parts and pieces and the trades. Did end up doing too many things that are now, that's not true, at the time I needed to do them. I installed my own ventilation system. I installed all the air barrier applications, all those parts and pieces, outsource the the siding and the and the drywall and insulation, those sorts of things.
Dan Whitmore:But but it definitely created a, oh, this guy knows what he's doing because he can turn the dials on the energy models to figure out what needs to be done. It also was a huge lever because then I'm out on-site going or purchasing the purchasing the products and going, wow, that's too expensive, and being able to turn over here and do the energy model and tweak it just enough and say, like, I can do that trade off, and I can value engineer. And then having done all of those parts and pieces in one, a lot of people were coming to me, and then I could outsource for the parts that I didn't wanna do. So I could I still do some energy modeling to today to to date, but it's all it's pretty selective. And instead, I turn to other folks to do that.
Dan Whitmore:I I now have teams I can turn to for to do good insulation, teams I can turn to for good ventilation systems. I still do most of the air conditioning myself because I like it, and I think that it becomes I I haven't come across anybody who can do as good a job as I can as quickly as I can, and and partly that's from the passion. And so now people, you know luckily, there's a big enough piece in in my market where people there are a lot of people doing it, but I still get regular calls from them, from my colleagues, from potential clients because of that passion, and also because I did so many of the pieces. But it was also the right size project for me to take on economically and time wise.
Zack Semke:Great insights there from Dan and a super valuable view into how he brought the pieces together, added in a big dose of long hours powered by his passion and mission, and became a first mover and leader. Let's pivot now to a few highlights from Sarah Byers' Ask Me Anything Friday session. So if Marvel were to launch a movie franchise of superheroes of Passive House, Sarah would star in her own feature film. She's associate principal and director of sustainability at Magnuson Architecture and Planning in New York City. She was recently named a Cranes New York Business 2024 Notable Leader in Sustainability and is a pioneer of large passive house building design and execution, including many NYSERDA Buildings of Excellence award winning projects.
Zack Semke:She leads MAPS efforts to incorporate passive house strategies and carbon reduction methods across all their work. In this first clip, Sarah fields a question from Mary about window frame materials and fire resistance.
Sara Bayer:So a few years ago when everybody started using ePVC windows, there was a little bit of a step back. Well, does that meet the fire requirements? I mean, it's just never great to have melting plastic. I would love like an aluminum solution because that's fully recyclable. Even though it takes high energy to recycle, I think we can just get better at that.
Sara Bayer:That's something that we can probably keep improving upon. But the fact that plastic has a toxic life cycle, I don't think we can ever really get away from that. But how do we get really well performing aluminum windows or even wooden aluminum or I'm not sure plastic. There are some just, there's some very durable plastics that don't work and they figure that out. But just to share openly, like the dismay of seeing all the toxicity released from the fires.
Sara Bayer:I just, it just breaks your heart. And it didn't, if it happened like fifty years ago, they, you know, maybe things wouldn't have burned so quickly because the flash point of all these materials that we have now in our buildings is so much faster and it just ignites, you know, when natural materials just don't have those same drawbacks. They perform better in the fire, I'm we think hopefully people are starting to realize some of those things and demanding better.
Zack Semke:It's a great point, and a reminder of the multiple potential benefits of using natural materials in our projects. Next, I asked Sarah about the geothermal system that she presented about as part of our recent Reimagine Buildings Electrification Conference, and whether what she learned about that system had changed her approach to practice.
Sara Bayer:Yeah, wow. I think its upfront cost is still higher than, and it probably will stay higher than the PTHPs or the PTACs or the unitized packaged terminal heat pumps. That is also really accelerating in their development right now. We used to have one manufacturer, now we have at least three in the city that can do it. So I see the upfront construction costs of geothermal or ground source being a barrier.
Sara Bayer:But right now, it's seen as a really is a much less, you know, lower global warming potential leakage risk. So I'm saying like the people who are thinking big picture about our society and trying to make it better, which is our government, right? We need people to think big picture and steer us in a good direction. They're seeing they're incentivizing ground source and geothermal. So it's got good incentives right now.
Sara Bayer:Our utility companies see it as a really good system because it's more efficient because it doesn't rely on the heat from the air, which is variable. And then it so it's peak demands on the grid are a lot lower. So as we change our grid over, it has so many benefits and it's resilient, it's long lasting. And then all the other things for the architecture are great too. There's no penetrations in the facade.
Sara Bayer:Each unit can be heating or cooling. Water is a pretty good medium to distribute heat with, so that's efficient too. Yeah, I see VRF going away, but I think geothermal is going to have a big competitor with unitized systems.
Zack Semke:Finally, Sarah reflects here about her role as director of sustainability at MAP, and what reaching for regenerative architecture means for her.
Sara Bayer:Regeneration, I think, means bringing life back, fixing the damage that we've done to our ecosystems. Primarily, I think that's the end goal, but I see it as it ends happening in the term regeneration, I think is happening in sustainability space more and more like Paul Hawkins last book is regeneration. It's just being part of sustainable is just keeping the status quo, which we know doesn't work. So I've seen the sort of broadening of the lens of what we care about. And then our work that we have to do energy efficiency as a foundation.
Sara Bayer:How does that play into all the other things that we need to do for regeneration? And I don't think anyone's actually really defined what regenerative architecture is. Some people talk about it being like a circular economy, just definitely one piece of it. But is it also how you deal with your local ecosystem? How is it that all your materials deal with their ecosystems?
Sara Bayer:How does it affect the human thriving so that, you know, we don't human thriving is critical in its own right and has its own value, but is also connected to, you know, when humans are not thriving, usually the environment suffers first. So yeah, I think my job has just been trying to really broaden our lens of what of all the things that we're doing with our actions, and just trying to find them and then find where the lowest hanging fruit is to address them. That's been my goal. So, you know, red list free materials. There's a lot of alternatives now in the red list free environment.
Sara Bayer:So living futures, worst chemicals list. I think that is something that should be more attainable for projects now. So if you're doing architecture and so we're going to start another study on trying to make one of our buildings redless free. So living future, what they do and just the bigger holistic view that they have is a great place to get inspiration from. So that's a few things.
Sara Bayer:But I also for me, personally, embody carbon because it just that science needs to be addressed and move forward really quickly. The fact that you can use carbon storing materials in your building is so powerful and also addresses the passive house concern, well, you need more insulation, it's not a bad thing. But what if those carbon storing materials came from regenerative agriculture? So it's like, how does your profession affect all of the other professions out there? Think about, so why should an architect care about soil science or agriculture?
Sara Bayer:Yes, we can, because we are changing the demand for things based on what we're specifying. And it's all connected. I guess systems thinking is another way to think about what we're all doing. So just some thoughts there.
Zack Semke:Right, just some thoughts there. Sarah's point about systems thinking is so important. We can't let ourselves fall into silos or fall four silver bullets here. Efficiency, upfront carbon, ecosystem health, grid transitions, all of it is intertwined. And when we can recognize that, we're better empowered to take part in those systems in ways that can approach regeneration.
Zack Semke:So easy peasy. A big thank you to Dan and Sarah for helping us out last week and sharing their wisdom with us. And as always, these clips just scratched the surface. So if anything piqued your interest here, please do dive into the full replays of these sessions. And if you're not a member of the Reimagine Buildings Collective, please join us.
Zack Semke:You'll get direct access to experts like Dan and Sarah. You'll get to know them, ask your burning questions, and expand your mind and your practice by engaging with these thought leaders. Head over to reimaginebuildings dot com to join. Speaking of joining the collective, I wanna celebrate this week's new members. A big welcome to Aaron Woods, Maria Lamanto, and Sara Bayer, our newest expert in residence.
Zack Semke:Welcome to the collective. With that, thank you for listening to the second episode of the Reimagine Edit, a production of the Passive House podcast by Passive House Accelerator. As always, don't hesitate to DM me with anything Reimagine Buildings Collective related. What you'd like to see on the platform, any ideas you'd like to share, we're building this community with you and for you, so feedback is incredibly valuable. And don't forget to invite your friends and colleagues to join us.
Zack Semke:Thanks, and have a great week. Be well.