About This Book

OUR GOAL in writing this book is to provide a comprehensive introduction and guide to the subject of passive solar architecture, a field the two of us have been working in for the past forty years. Our hope is to revive the name passive architecture as an umbrella term that includes in its purview all dimensions of green building and sustainability in the built environment.

Our paths first crossed in the 1970s. We were each working in one of the four passive solar “hot spots” in the country, Ken in San Luis Obispo and David at the University of California–Davis. (The other two were at Los Alamos and on the East Coast at MIT and Princeton.) By the 1980s, passive was a common term, and hundreds of passive buildings had been built. Performance and prediction modeling were developed, so that the application of various architectural elements could be evaluated before construction to determine optimum design features.

However, with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, most federal support for solar energy was removed, an oil glut developed, energy prices shrank, and the United States drifted backward toward its old wasteful energy ways. The passive architectural movement lost its immediacy, and most of the research and development was picked up by European countries, particularly the United Kingdom and Germany.

By the end of the first decade of this century, neglect and indulgence with regard to energy and building financing caught up with us in the form of the worst recession since the Great Depression. In addition, some began to recognize that looming problems such as the peak in fossil fuels, global climate disruption, and resource wars could only be addressed by shifting to a green economy.

At present, green architecture is very broadly defined and can mean different things to different people. Smart-growth concepts, healthy interiors, sustainably produced materials, energy conservation, life-cycle costs, new urbanism—all these and more are considerations for a green building. Stricter definition and quantification of green buildings is starting to occur with certification programs such as LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design), Green Globes, Living Buildings, and others. These programs are based on checklists of prescribed points given for various green characteristics. With this situation, is the term passive architecture still relevant?

There are several reasons why the term passive is even more relevant than ever. One is that because of the breadth of green building and the greater difficulty that designers have in conceptualizing energy aspects than they do other green aspects, energy concerns in green buildings can often take second place, which is what happened in the early LEED checklists. There was a tendency to lump energy concerns under “energy efficiency” where they could be more easily dealt with by prescriptive standards. This type of simplified categorization misses the whole point of good passive architecture, which is a method of energy production as well as energy efficiency. Providing natural light by a well-designed atrium is energy production just as much as providing the same amount of light by electricity produced from a distant coal plant, except the passive approach is healthier and does not involve line loss to transport the energy, pollution, and other embedded costs. An energy-efficient building is a necessary prerequisite for a passive building, but energy efficiency by itself does not make a passive building. Therefore, we still need a term that allows the emphasis on producing thermal effects with building elements. Passive architecture fits the bill.

Green building really consists of three major concerns: sustainability, passive solar design, and triple-bottom-line accounting. All three topics and their interrelatedness are discussed in chapter 1. These are not static concerns, but a set of evolving techniques, all critical to obtaining the synthesis we call green building. Passive design must be a core consideration in a green building. We explore the latest developments and techniques for passive heating, passive cooling and ventilation, and natural lighting in chapters 2, 3, and 4, which are the heart of this book.

We see the shift to sustainable thinking and building as a continuum that contains starts, stops, and temporary reverses, but in general remains an evolution of building design and technology. Passive design is a necessary core element in green building because it embodies a shift from lightly differentiated design where discrete parts perform discrete functions to highly integrated design where one part contributes to many functions. This shift in the design process allows for dynamic synergy, where the whole is more than the sum of the parts, and the parts all contribute to the whole. Synergy is more biological than mechanical; synergy is what will allow a sustainable culture where there is greater health, wealth, and equity because in the final analysis, systems with high synergy are more effective, reliant, and efficient.

The passive approach to building is not a fixed practice. If we look at its development over time, we see more and more functions being accomplished on-site using building elements. First there was heating, then cooling using the same building elements, then lighting, then electricity production. Now advanced passive buildings are going for water collection, carbon dioxide sequestration, and waste processing. What we are striving for is combining more and more production and use at the scale of the individual building. The harvesting of on-site resources is the focus of chapter 5.

In chapter 6, we invite some other voices to join us in looking at the big picture and at reimagining the present and the future. It is at the macro scale—where we can reconnect perceptions and assumptions about production and use—that passive architecture finds its cultural relevance. When building users can once again be more than just inhabitants of sealed boxes where energy production is out of sight and out of mind, then we can regenerate the awareness of energy and resources that is a necessary part of our transition from an industrial to a sustainable society.

Oily wasteful wolf and practical passive pig will help illustrate this story.