Kāinga Ora’s priorities for New Zealand social housing were laid out in a recent detailed article in Architecture Now, which is worth reading in full. It charts the agency’s journey toward building very high-performance homes, right up to Passive House standard, and slashing embodied carbon.  Sustainable Engineering has completed pre-construction (design stage) review and approval for Nga Kainga Anamata and

Passive House social housing in New York City is taking off, according to this Guardian feature story. Two things stand out: the extent of the uptake (dozens of affordable Passive House developments are currently underway throughout the city) and the way developers and occupants are describing the benefits. It’s great language I will remember when I’m describing the “why” of

This analysis from The NewStatesman, comparing Vienna’s tradition of social housing to the UK, is a concise and insightful account and I recommend you go and read it in its entirety. Vienna’s accomplishments are enough to make millenials shut out of the home ownership in New Zealand weep. For all of us, it’s a stark reminder that there are other

The first time you do something, it takes longer. If you’re paying staff to do it, it costs more again. If you import just one new building component and you have to explain to Building Code officials why it’s so very much better than the crap considered an Acceptable Solution and how they should allow your project to include it,

Exeter, in England’s south-west, is blazing a trail for Passive House social housing. Its Chester Long Court, 26 high-quality, affordable homes built to the Passive House standard, has won design awards (along with, I expect, abiding appreciation from those who live in them). The Council’s goal was to create apartments for their over-60s social housing tenants. By downsizing, larger Council homes

Here’s an excellent discussion of the overall benefits to the tenants of this social housing project for low-income tenants in a high-cost area. It’s a six-story building with 98 units in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Plus, it spells out the benefits to society of building right. “In each case, the goal is to give heating and cooling systems very little to do.

A small line tucked away in the Healthy Homes Standard, which came into law in May this year, has the potential to bring big benefits to some of New Zealand’s most vulnerable people, those renting social housing. Its significance is only just being recognized. Private landlords of single-family homes can have a heat pump installed in the lounge of their

Great article by Australia writer David Thorp on a Passive House social housing project in the UK. Delightful, lovely, socially connected and award-winning Passive House homes. “Mikhail said that he hopes this will give a new dynamic to the construction of council housing in the UK. “At this time when we have a housing and climate change crisis we need

Poor design means your home is cold, damp and mouldy even with a high power bill … here is some bubble wrap for your windows. That seems like a joke but it is reality for many New Zealand tenants. Poor design of buildings is a legacy – just one we don’t want to have. “It’s cold enough to freeze your

Recently came across the great article on Passive House social housing planned at no extra cost in Melbourne, Australia from early last year. I’m looking forward to hearing about this project and some of the large commercial projects in Australia at the next South Pacific Passive House Conference in February 2019 in Wellington. We’ve two multi-family projects in NZ that

Here’s another significant Passive House milestone met: New Zealand’s first certified community housing project. Dunedin City Council (DCC) shares the glory with the experienced Passive House design team at Architype. This project owes a lot to the Toiora High Street co-housing development for which Architype provided architectural services. Firstly, DCC was deeply involved during that project’s long gestation period and

Great to see Tim Ross of Architype guiding James Shaw around the building site of the Dunedin co-housing project. When this project is completed next year, it will (if it meets the certification standard) jump us up to over 50 Certified Passive House dwellings in New Zealand. If we can use this template to guide our social housing design and

Building scientist Jason Quinn lays out five ways government can stimulate the economy by setting effective performance standards for housing and public buildings. Plus, these measures would improve public health and help New Zealand reach its zero carbon targets. We can learn from overseas successes and lift outcomes without hiking the cost to build, he says. New Zealand buildings, particularly

I try and read Daniel Overbey’ posts for the technical content but in his first post of the year, he presented a real challenge. “John Elkington is often credited with first coining the term ‘triple bottom line’ in his 1997 book Cannibals with Forks. He defined the triple bottom line as a sustainability framework that examines an enterprise’s social, environmental

Damp mouldy housing and early childhood hospital admissions for acute respiratory infection: a case control study Bottom line for the Wellington Region alone 1710 hospitalizations per year for children under 2 years old would be prevented if all housing were free from damp and mould!! “This paper presents the largest ever case–control study of the association between housing quality and hospital

The THRIVE 2026 Australian Passivhaus Conference in Melbourne last week was great here are my highlights. Well worth nipping across the ditch for two days. I’d set up (and Clare Parry organized) a get-together for most of the Australian Passivhaus Certifiers and a few other keen conference folks at the Melbourne Sun on Wednesday night. Chaotic and unplanned, in the

I’ve been deep in the weeds working on the Deep Energy Retrofit Guide for New Zealand, and naturally, that means looking overseas for data we simply don’t have here yet. I came across a report by the UK Passivhaus Trust: A Retrofit Costs Comparison Translating Expenditure to Value that stopped me in my tracks. They analyzed actual project costs across

Years ago I warned of what I dubbed cargo-cult architecture, where architects throw in a few high-performance components like expensive windows and lots of insulation and expect a high-performance building to magically result. It’s a recipe for disaster and particularly risks creating houses that are unbearably hot in summer. This approach is based on guesswork and magical thinking, not building science. So