In a recent post titled “The Icebox Challenge Comes to Glasgow,” I noted: “The great thing about the Icebox Challenge is it’s usually really hard to explain the benefits of Passivhaus design. It’s not like solar panels that people can point to: it’s all in the windows, walls, and the build quality.”
We have discussed the question of how to sell the idea of Passivhaus before; I wrote a few years ago:
Due to the necessary brevity of a tweet, I summarized this as “inconspicuous consumption,” which got a bit of a reaction. I meant it to be the opposite of “conspicuous conservation,” a wonderful term used by Steven E Sexton and Alison L. Sexton in their 2011 study “Conspicuous Conservation: The Prius Effect and Willingness to Pay for Environmental Bona Fides.”
The study starts with a quote from Adam Smith:
It then follows with Thorstein Veblen, who coined the term “conspicuous consumption.”
The researchers might also have included Mel Brooks, who first wrote “If you’ve got it, flaunt it.” These are powerful, primal forces that drive our actions and our purchases.
The researchers found that the distinctive (ugly?) look of the Prius was an important part of its success because it was conspicuous. But there are other expensive ways to get noticed, other “costly actions in order to signal their type as environmentally friendly or ‘green.’”
Later in the study, the authors note:
The study is mainly about the Prius, but the truths are universal:
Let’s Make Passivhaus Conspicuous
Perhaps the Passivhaus world should accept the principle of conspicuous conservation—that people who live in them might actually want them to look different from normal buildings. When Wolfgang Feist and his team designed the first Passivhaus building, it was basically an undecorated shed, a simple form, what architect Mike Eliason might have called a “dumb box.” It probably still stands out in the neighborhood 30 years later.
Perhaps Passivhaus architects should consciously go for what engineer Nick Grant calls radical simplicity in their designs and embrace the box. Make it conspicuous. Make it, as Bronwyn Barry calls it, “boxy but beautiful.” Make it a style. This is not easy, But as noted earlier in “Buildings Can Be Boxy but Beautiful if You Have a Good Eye,” I wrote that “we might even have to reassess our standards of beauty.”
It will be cheaper, too. A recent study by Evangelia Mitsiakou and David Cheshire of AECOM found Passivhaus buildings might cost less than 1% more than conventional, but they had to be properly designed: “To achieve Passivhaus standards within budget, cost savings must be sought elsewhere, such as creating compact built forms and simplifying the architectural detailing.”
This will take courage. When I first saw the Saltbox Passive House by L’Abri I thought it was a gutsy move to have that one teensy window in that big important gabled wall. But it has an elegant simplicity that grows on you, and it screams Passivhaus.
I have previously described Grant’s radical simplicity, where he tells us to “embrace the box.” GO Logic in Maine does this; Architype in the United Kingdom does this—more designers and architects should.
Think of Dieter Rams and his designs for Braun: It is recognizable and it is conspicuous in its radical simplicity. You just look at it and you know it is a Rams. The Passivhaus world should adopt his tenth principle for good design, and forget everything else, and adopt the principle of conspicuous conservation:
