An Introduction to Passive House

Preface

Searching for integrated design in the 21st century

The best Passive House architects are masters of integrated design, searching for aesthetic beauty on the one hand and technical excellence on the other. No longer can it reasonably be considered adequate for buildings to look good in photographs while performing badly in terms of their comfort or resource consumption. I believe clients expect their buildings to perform well, and are becoming much more demanding about this – and so they should be.

The light-filled, graceful, flowing spaces produced by architects such as Alvar Aalto, Louis Kahn, Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier were, in part, the result of the monumental social progress that occurred during the 20th century. However, ...