This Room Could Save the Planet

In a well-designed passive home, where elegance and insulation go hand in hand, anything is possible.

- By Tim McKeough

If you were building a new house or gutting an old one and could drastically reduce energy use, enhance indoor air quality, and contribute to a greener future, would you do it? Most people likely would, which is why Passive House construction-which offers all of these advantages, and more is rapidly evolving from a system that used to be viewed as a fringe curiosity embraced by eco-warriors to a preferred new way of building.

"It's just a better building standard," says Alan Barlis, principal of the New York-based architecture firm BarlisWedlick, which has been building Passive Houses since 2008. "We've always been interested in craft, and we've always been interested in making sure that our design offers great value for the investment. Passive House is just a way to bring it all together, into a series of techniques that are very clear and amount to real results."