EEBA Academy

This is where the building science rubber meets the architect’s road. Steve uses his many high-performance projects to show how high performance is translated into actual assemblies, with real materials, and with tried-and-true project management done cooperatively with the architect and builder. 

High performance zero energy homes provide many benefits including cost savings, energy resiliency, durability, comfort, and sustainable operation. While these types of homes have been built for a long time, the knowledge of how to build them has historically been kept by few. Now with increasingly stringent building codes across the U.S., driven by long-term energy policy and growing demands on the energy grid, all builders and implementers need to know how to build high performance. 

Although below-grade waterproofing and insulation are out of sight, they are integral to a building’s thermal performance. While there are countless steps you can take to make homes more energy efficient, starting from the ground up is the best approach.

Since the 1990s residential buildings have shown dramatic and consistent improvement in their energy efficiency: Average energy use per square foot is down substantially, and so are average energy use per household and average energy use per household member. How do we account for this extraordinary progress, and what can architects do to continue to improve energy efficiency in residential architecture?