Shaping the NYC Skyline

David: Welcome to Shaping the NYC Skyline, a podcast that explores the stories behind the buildings that shape our city. I'm your host, David Shamshovich, and I'm here with my co host,
Brenda: Brenda Slochowsky.
Hey guys. Welcome back. I really enjoyed learning from Deborah Moelis of Handel Architects.
David: That's right. Founding member and principal. Handel. Which I think is a great name I know it's not on purpose because it's his last name, Gary Handel. We can handle it. We should be the handle it law firm. You want inclusionary housing bonus rights we can handle it.
Brenda: That's like the iPhone stores where it's like you break, I fix .
David: People like simple concepts like we can handle this.
Brenda: You're not giving people enough credit.
Speaker: No, I think I'm giving people just enough
Camila: Look at Nike.
David: Yeah, just do it. What about Con Edison? We're on it.
Brenda: Deborah Moeles of Handel Architects. She's one of the leading experts in passive housing. She knew the background. She knows where it's going. And she gave so many details that I think everybody's really going to love it.
David: Brenda, what is passive house?
Brenda: It's all about energy efficiency.
David: The image I have in mind of passive housing is a comical image of a house not wanting to participate. But what it really is these standards that create this airtight design for a building so that it maintains heat efficiently. There has to be air flowing through the system. Your bills are reduced, although there's an upfront cost.
Brenda: But the upfront cost is offset by the fewer costs on the back end.
David: Debra did speak about whether or not this will become the standard. You certainly will be able to meet the carbon emission standards if your building is a passive house.
Camila: There are two different concepts. Passive housing, it's like an allocation of X amount of energy that you can spend, rather than just saving energy in general.
David: She's one of the people that knows about this stuff, and it's a very complicated area. She talks about how she got certified in it, and the various projects that she worked on.
Brenda: She's shaped the New York city skyline. I had to add it here because I couldn't fit it in. I was too engrossed in the conversation to be able to put it that way. I had to put it here.
David: Not only is she shaping the NYC skyline, but she's also
Camila: She's saving the NYC skyline.
David: Oh.
Brenda: Wow. That's a good one. That was a good one. Props.
Camila: Thank you.
David: And one of the things that she discussed saving is waste water, which is pulling out heat from waste water and using that for heating the building, which I thought was interesting.
Brenda: It's not something I want to think about too in depth, honestly.
David: Every time, before I flush, I'm just gonna-
Brenda: No, please, I don't want to go into-
Camila: That was my first thought, but then she was talking about warm water.
David: It's just pulling the heat from the water because you've already spent the money to heat that water.
Camila: If you adapt your thought, it's way better than actually waste.
David: We were so fortunate to have her lecture to us when this is something that she does on major forums. And she's becomes something of an advocate for this. She wants to spread the word. And hopefully people will listen to this episode. Know a little bit more about what passive house is. We certainly learned a lot.
Brenda: Yeah.
David: If you and you have any questions, you should contact her. We'll leave her information in the notes and she's happy to answer any questions on this topic but I want to dive right into the interview. So without further ado Deborah Moelis from Handel Architects
Hello, everybody and welcome to another episode of Shaping the NYC Skyline I'm David Shamshovich and I'm here with my wonderful associates and co hosts, Brenda and Camila. Say, what's up?
Brenda and Camila: What's up?
David: We did not practice that.
Camila: That was actually perfect.
Brenda: It shows our cohesiveness as a team.
David: We do work cohesively, right? It's like, I'll run down the hall and give you an application, right?
Brenda: Run down the hall with paper. David, we are moving away from paper.
Camila: Even the signatures can be online.
David: Yeah. It's great. I can't wait till all that fraud comes back to bite us.
Brenda: You're thinking worst case.
Camila: You always have to think the worst case.
David: And also we're lawyers. The worst case is where we live, which is a great transition. No, it's not a great transition. It has nothing to do with what we're talking about, but today our guest is Deborah Moelis, a principal and founding member of Handel Architects. She is recognized as one of the leading experts in passive housing design. Her groundbreaking work in energy efficient architecture has not only made her a key figure in the sustainable design community, but also set new standards for what's possible in large scale building projects.
She holds a master's in architecture from Columbia along with dual degrees in fine arts and science from the University of Michigan and certified as a passive housing designer, licensed to practice architecture in both New York and California. I really want to welcome you, Deborah. We've wanted to have you here for a while and we're so happy and excited to have you on the show.
Deborah: It's fantastic to be here, to be a part of this fun activity.
David: Yeah. And it is going to be a fun activity.
Brenda: We keep it light. We keep it breezy.
Camila: We do our best.
David: It's a conversation. So Debra, why don't you give us an understanding of how you started your career and why you ended up in the real estate development community, architecture community? How did that occur? You can start wherever you want to start.
Deborah: Well, for me and a lot of architects, it's sort of in our bones and in our blood. I always wanted to be an architect when I was a small child, high school, all the way. It was something that was really a part of me. And so right away after high school, I went to architecture school and fine arts, studied interior design a little bit, and then shot off to Columbia for my master's. So, it was just a continuum of always being very focused on becoming an architect.
David: I've always been fascinated with people who know exactly what they want to do. But there must've been something that inspired you. Do you remember anything that made you feel that this is something that you wanted to do?
Deborah: Well, I loved making models. My father had a shop in our basement and we used to make little models and things. And so I just found that to be really fun. And the idea of combining that with the cerebral part of architecture. It was just really great. I mean, come on, everyone wants to be an architect.
David: I mean Ted Mosby.
Deborah: Ted Mosby. George Costanza.
David: Oh, that's right. George Costanza.
Brenda: I thought about being an architect for a little bit. It was on the table.
David: Was it?
Brenda: It was. I really liked math and I was very into design. But I'm colorblind. So the classes that I needed to take to get to an arts degree were never feasible. So I went to law.
David: When you finished with your education, what was your first opening into the field?
Deborah: During school, I was extremely lucky to work at SOM. And then after that, I did an internship at KPF out in London as well as in New York. So I got to work at some really cool firms during my education.
And then the day I left school, I went to work for Gary Handel. And it's been 30 years now. We were just about five or six people starting. And now we're all over the world. We have offices in New York and San Francisco and Boston, a little one in Denver and out in Hong Kong. So it's just been an incredible 30 year journey of growing every day at that job. Architecture, I think inherently, is a profession of growth. There's so much to learn. So every day something new. Especially with all these regulations, and all these contracts.
David: They definitely keep us on our toes and employed.
Deborah: So I started with actually a very interesting project for Handel Architects. We primarily design residential buildings, but our first project, project number 101, is the Sony Metreon, which is an entertainment center in San Francisco. No housing. And it is in the Yerba Buena Gardens Entertainment District out there in San Francisco. I moved out there actually for six months, which became six years. So my first job with Gary and with the team there was not residential. I spent six years doing this project. And then I came back to New York.
Brenda: I guess that's why you're certified in California as well.
Deborah: That's where I got my license, actually. And our office out there is lovely. It's smaller than New York, but it's great.
David: So then you came back here after that six year period.
Deborah: And then I started to delve into the residential. I do some retrofits and some new construction, something up on the Henry Hudson Parkway. As you go up to your weekend houses on the right there, there's a bunch of different residential projects.
So that's from 2000 to say 2000 and, I don't know, 11. And then in 2011, I needed a new project. And my colleagues come over, they're like, well, we have these three projects. Which one do you want? And one of them was the Cornell Tech project. I go, that sounds interesting. I'd never heard of passive house. Actually, passive house wasn't fully on the table at that moment, but it was very highly sustainable. Building goals were very highly sustainable. That sounds super interesting to me. I'll try it. And that's essentially when the trajectory of my life really changes because I make a decision to do this to help out with this project and it takes off from there.
It's a fantastic team in house. And then also we worked with Steven Winter and with Buro Happold, fantastic owners at Cornell and Hudson, Related, and all of these people that want to do this incredibly sustainable building. Not knowing yet that we're going to do Passive House, but it was a competition. We went in with this idea that Passive House could play a role. And ultimately we win that competition, and then we integrate this new thing called passive house, which no one had heard of.
Brenda: Can you go into a little bit of what it entails?
Deborah: Passive house design has its origins in Germany. In the late 1990s, it becomes codified by the Passive House Institute. So PHI, that is the European certification forum. There is an American certification forum, but the buildings that I've worked with just happen to be PHI certified. So it is a certification program that really gives the designers an energy budget, a maximum amount of energy that the building can use. And then you have the ability to get to that energy budget in your creative ways. You must provide a very beautifully tight, robust facade, so that no air is coming in or coming out. That facade is going to lower the amount of energy that you need to heat and cool that building. And then you provide a mechanical system to treat that air. So since you have such a tight facade, you also need to ventilate. 24/7, you are ventilating that building. So it's a combination of ventilation, robust facade, mechanical, fully electric, if you could do fully electric, doesn't have to be, but it's ideal. And then you lower those loads and then you meet this energy budget and that's the way you get certified. You also have to pass a blower door test, which is pretty common now in even New York City building code, where you pressurize the whole building and you see the amount of air that's going in or out of the facade.
David: You collectively made the decision, we're going to do a proposal for passive house here. What were the indications that this is going to win it?
Deborah: We were very lucky on our team. Related Companies had a particular individual named Luke Falk, who, by the way, would be an amazing guest for you to have. Besides being a fantastically brilliant guy, he's really funny. So we had Luke Falk and also Lois Arena. Lois is the brains behind the passive house design from Steven Winter and the two of them were on the team, Luke being one of the owners, and they had wanted to do this. They wanted to try this, Related. They had wanted to find a test case. Having this opportunity to do this, it was a perfect storm. We really rely on universities to get out there and show the world what we can do. That's what happened at University of Toronto with another one of my projects. We really want universities to be on the forefront, and they usually are with certain types of innovation. So I think it was the perfect storm of Related and Hudson wanting to test it as well, and then having Steven Winter on board as well.
David: If you want to do one of these passive house designs, what are the guidelines, if any, that you have to follow? How do you determine how best to design the building to make sure that it's as airtight as possible to make sure that you're not having fluctuating temperatures? How do you make those decisions when there's not really a handbook for this stuff?
Deborah: There is a certification program. So we did go out and get certified. So there is, I wouldn't say handbook, but there are methodologies and ways that you can reach these goals. And we know different ways to design a facade. Actually, SOCOTEC, which used to be a different name of Vidaris, they also helped detail the facade. So it's understood the way that you want to build the facade. You want it to have a certain amount of insulation and hit a certain value of robustness. And we know how to do that. It's a compilation of different methods, but it's not impossible. You can test through calculations, through modeling to find out if the facade is going to meet the standard. And then there's engineers. There's Buro Happold, who's following the engineering guidelines that are able to meet the criteria too. So it is a bit of a learning curve the first time, but it's not an unattainable learning curve. It's certainly doable.
David: What are the pros and the cons to doing passive house?
Deborah: In 2013, it was more expensive. But in 2024, it's getting less and less expensive as the code gets more and more robust. This is now just really becoming a means to meet the building code. So, we have to be careful about saying that it's more expensive, because it might not really be, especially when you look at the other side of how much you're saving in energy costs. So it's very hard to say how much more this costs, especially as codes are getting more robust. In Massachusetts, now you pretty much have to build to passive house standards to pass the code.
In New York, we used to have zone green where you could deduct eight inches of floor area when your facade was greater than eight inches. So we were able to recapture that eight inches of floor area. Now with the ultra low energy building deduction, which I'm not sure everyone's familiar with, it's a new zoning code deduction that if you're building meets a certain standard, you can get a 5 percent bonus on FAR, which is huge. It's not totally 5%, but the math works out to around 5%. So that's going to really help to make it cost effective.
David: This is the way you get a little bit of a bonus in order to offset whatever space you need to meet those standards.
Deborah: Because the machinery sometimes takes up more space. So they're now letting you deduct more of that.
David: And so what is the difference between LEED versus passive house standards?
Deborah: LEED is a checklist which takes into account a lot of different aspects of a building. If you're close to a subway, you get some points. If you use interior materials, you get certain amount of points. There's just a lot of categories for LEED, and it's a checklist. That's very different than passive house, which is essentially, you're designing a building to use a very limited amount of energy, and when you do that and make it airtight, you pass. So they are just very different in that sense of the qualities. Passive house doesn't really care about the interior materials. It doesn't care how close you are to a subway. There's hundreds of check boxes of things that LEED offers for credits. So it's quite different. But I do say that, Cornell was a LEED platinum out of the box, because we've got so many points for being passive house as well as some of the other easy checkbox things. We were close to a subway.
David: And if you meet the passive house designs, which are more stringent, I would think you'd meet LEED.
Deborah: You check a lot of boxes. You do have to still do some specific things. Cause as I said, LEED is concerned with a large range of issues. But yeah, we were LEED platinum and we won LEED for homes.
David: Have you guys gone back to look at that building to see how things are evolving over time?
Deborah: Yeah. We've gone back, I take people on tours there. And the place looks fantastic. The people that are operating the place, they're very proud of the place and they're also very in tune with how it's working and they're saying that it's working and we know the energy bills are extremely low and we're still looking for data. It's difficult to get the data from architects.
David: There's no way sometimes to even get into the buildings to collect the data or to determine whether the data is correct.
Deborah: It's a bit difficult. We're very lucky at University of Toronto, they did share some data with us, which was like mind blowingly good and just made us all very happy.
David: Is there any differences in designing, say, a dorm like in the University of Toronto or Cornell Tech? Those are both dorms, right?
Deborah: Cornell Tech is small apartments. Toronto is full on dorms, so they are a little different. Cornell Tech has kitchens and baths in the apartment.
David: For the dorms, as opposed to doing residential, is there a difference from a design perspective, particularly in the passive house area?
Deborah: We also have completed Sendero Verde, and that is 700, a little over 700 units of 100% affordable passive house project. It's up in East Harlem, Buro Happold three buildings. That is with Jonathan Rose companies and Acacia Development as well as L&M. And again, we have Steven Winter helping us on that. That's Cosentini for mechanical. And that building is mind blowing also because that building is now a hundred percent affordable. It's a brick building. You would never know, looking from the outside, that this building is this super high performance building, and it's occupied. People love it. It's working. Everyone's very happy.
Brenda: You talk about a robust facade to make sure that the temperature within the building is regulated to a certain extent. Are there different building materials that you're seeing work better than others? Or are there new materials that you're excited to see come about or changes to materials that you're looking forward to?
Deborah: Cornell Tech, that project is prefabricated panels that were made offsite and brought onsite. So they are, say, nine feet by 30 feet wide. That methodology is a little bit more expensive. And since then, we've tried to do more on site, just stick built. As I was saying, Sandero Verde, that project is a 34 story brick facade with mineral wall insulation and metal studs behind it. So it's actually the opposite in a way. To answer your question, we're not looking for unique materials. We want to be using regular materials so that it can meet cost and also that the folks building it can actually build it. Part of the magic in Sendero as well as Toronto is that we're trying to just use off the shelf products. Of course, all of our clips are thermally broken. We don't have metal to metal touching each other anymore, but everyone's doing that in their design. And we want to have mineral wall insulation because that's a natural product. Trying to get off the shelf products to do these quote unquote fancy things or make this robust wall. There are a lot of taping. There's taping at the joints of things is necessary to make sure things are really tightly secure.
Brenda: Do you find that as the building is larger, the more difficult it is to source these materials?
Deborah: From a calculation standpoint, we have found it is actually easier for a large building to meet passive house standards than for a single family home. Reason being is that a single family home, first of all, it has six facades, a roof, the four walls and the foundation. In a large scale building, there's just so many more people living under the area, it's called the surface to area volume ratio. It's just so much easier in a multifamily building to meet the standard than it is in a single family home due to exposure and a lot of other aspects.
Camila: Going to the materials. Nowadays we see a lot of modular houses and container buildings. How does that play in with the passive housing? Is that even possible?
Deborah: I would think it's possible once the modular pieces were put together, you would just need to work on how they were well connected. We have not done modular passive house yet. We'd like to.
David: Very good questions, by the way, guys.
Brenda: We came prepared.
David: Yeah, you did. For some reason, whenever I think green or sustainable, I'm thinking electric, but that's not necessarily the case. How does passive house work in terms of electric. Passive doesn't have to necessarily be electric, it just has to meet certain standards, and that budget that you were talking about.
Deborah: Right. Reducing the amount of energy needed to operate a building is what is really making it a high performance building, which is why passive house has such a great role in the electrification conversation. Because we're saying we want all buildings to be electric, but we want to lower the load as much as possible so that each building has the smallest footprint so that each building puts the least strain on the grid. So if you designed a passive house, you have just shrunk the load 50, 60 percent smaller than a typical comparable building. So the goal is to design this building to use less energy so that all buildings need less energy so that we have to just make less energy.
David: And electricity still has a carbon footprint?
Deborah: It does. We are counting on electricity becoming clean. We all know that currently electricity is not clean. It's made from burning fossil fuels. But the goal is to get that electricity to become clean. So we want to build our buildings that use electricity to be a part of the celebration when electricity is then clean. Also if we could utilize geothermal more, that is also a great way to lower the footprint of the building on the grid. And one other very interesting thing, I hope you'll find this interesting.
David: I find the whole thing interesting.
Deborah: Is a wastewater heat recovery. So this is super cool.
David: I hope it's exactly what it sounds like. We have a name for our episode, I think.
Deborah: Architects are in charge of coordinating all of these things. We don't figure them out, but we have to get them all in the building. So wastewater heat recovery involves literally pulling the heat off of the water before it leaves the building. Makes sense. You spent all this money heating the water, so you want to get that heat out of the water before it leaves the building.
David: Yeah, why give up that heat?
Deborah: Why give up that heat? It's the same thing with energy ventilator recoveries. We want to pull all the air out of the building through an energy ventilator recovery, an ERV, and pull the heat. Not the smells, not the this, not the that, just the heat. So all this heat recovery, it's happening all over, like I'm sure it's happening in this building. It's happening everywhere. Everyone is collecting heat that's generated. We're trying to figure out how we can pull the heat off of all that energy of even the subway running along the tracks. People are trying to figure out how to get all that heat. So heat recovery is very interesting. It's bringing that heat back into, let's say the hot water system and that heat will help to raise your hot water a few degrees.
David: It's recycling. It's a basic concept, but I didn't realize that we pull heat from waste water.
Deborah: Yes, we should do it more.
David: If it is going out into the sewers, why not utilize the energy that you've put into it before it goes out the window?
Deborah: Not just heat, but like money. Think of money just pouring out and going up through the chimney. All this heat is just money. We spent all this money to get it hot, and then we just let it go.
David: It does take time to think about this stuff and to plan it. It's not something you would think about right away. So you did this Cornell project. Is that why you got certified in passive house?
Deborah: I wanted to know more when we were designing the project and went to a couple conferences, a course, and learned a bit of the science behind it and a bit of the calculations, because there are calculations that you want to be familiar with as an architect. And took a test, and I passed.
David: You go from there to becoming in awe of it. There's something that you really like about it. Does that happen during the certification process while you're doing work at Cornell Tech? Because there's lots of people that do their job, and then there are people that become leading names in that area, which is the case here. So how do you go from zero to 100?
Deborah: Well, I think being a part of Cornell Tech was so motivating, so inspiring. Architecture, you're always making something from nothing, which to begin with is amazing to stand on top of a building that you've made. But here we're standing on top of a building that's going to really change the way the whole world is putting buildings together. It's amazing. And so we're given many opportunities to talk about the building. My colleagues and I from Handel, I spoke with Lois from SWA a lot. We were invited to speak about this building, which was really interesting. That people were interested in what I was doing was interesting, and that I had something really valuable to share with people. People wanted to learn about how to put these things together. We shared our details, we shared our processes, our methodologies, and people were really interested. And when Cornell was ending is when the Sendero Verde RFP came out, which was a natural fit for us to be involved in that. And we were invited to participate with L&M and Jonathan Rose, which was a great opportunity. So of course we took it. That had to be passive house. HPD required that that be passive house. And so, we can do this. No problem. We're able to tell a story that we can do this. And we won that, which was amazing, and that took seven years. It was three buildings. We finished it before COVID and then the construction is during COVID.
We are doing a senior affordable passive house for Catholic Charities right now for the Grand Street Guild, which is an amazing combination, because seniors affordable passive house sounds great. But we are actually surprised that we're not doing more, which is a bit worrisome. We don't really understand why the development community is not building more yet. Perhaps this will happen as people start to digest the code even more. Not sure.
David: What would you say to a group of developers, if they were listening, and I hope they are, about why they should be getting involved in building passive design developments?
Deborah: I think what's very trendy nowadays is health and wellness, right? And a lot of developers, they are interested in that, in promoting health and wellness for their marketing and for a way to sell their building, and passive house is a doorway to health and wellness. It provides filtered fresh air. Also, this incredibly acoustical separation. So you're building this robust wall with this triple glazing, but what you're really doing also is providing an incredible acoustical barrier. So that is a benefit.
David: Especially in New York city.
Deborah: Of course. Cornell is actually right next to the Queensborough bridge and you're in there and you do not hear the bridge. So there's the wellness factor of filtered fresh air, the acoustical benefits, and also it's a way to meet all these crazy new codes that are out there, and the last thing is also, it ultimately gives you a better building. You are building a building that is watched more carefully because part of the certification, you do have to have a lot of on site inspections. So you're sitting there watching, are they putting the insulation? Are they taping it? Are they really doing it? And it's all photo documented. So that very careful construction is really giving you a better building, which I would think is great.
David: You know nothing is hidden in the walls. You're getting the insulation that you need for that design.
Deborah: Yes, you are really getting what is on the drawings.
Brenda: After working on projects like the Sendero Verde, do you find that there are aspects of that project that you want to be utilized within future affordable housing projects? Are there specific details that you're like, I need to see that in another one.
Deborah: Yes. We are integrating passive house details into all of our projects. First to meet code, a lot of these details are becoming more normal, but also to slip them in because we know they make a better building. So we're like, Oh, we'll just slip that in, and sometimes it doesn't carry through because contractors are like, I don't know what that is. But then sometimes they're like, Oh yeah, we do that all the time now. Yeah, I know what that is. I did that on my last project. Or this looks interesting, we'll do this. And so we do try at the beginning of projects, to insert all of these different things and talk to people and get it in there. We've got to talk to mechanical engineers and there's a lot of players in these projects.
David: You've lectured in many places about this topic and are involved in many groups. What are the responses or the pushback you're getting, whether development community in New York City or elsewhere, if any pushback you're getting to the passive design in response to your promotion of it? What are the counter arguments you're getting?
Deborah: People always assume it's more expensive and they're just like, that's not for me. So we were interviewing a window supplier for Cornell. Now this is back in 2013 or so, or 14. And this window supplier looked at the details. I was like, this project's not for me. Like, I don't know what, this is like my next project. I don't know what this is, but this project is just not for me because it's not business as usual. So this guy who has been doing the same thing for 26 years does not want to change. And this is the problem. They want to do what they know how to do, what they know how to budget, not just budget money, but time, manpower. They want to do what they know how to do, which makes sense. So we did not hire that person to do the windows, but we did execute the windows, and now there's more and more companies. What's been really awesome is to see the difference in people's websites, in the amount of materials, and just the conversation, it has exploded. We needed a door for Cornell that was really robust on a mechanical room and we could not find a door. So we used a refrigerator door, like an ice cream truck door, because we could not find one. And that is a great example. Now they're making doors that you can just get into your spec that are real products that are made for real people going in and out of them, with real locks, and they're extremely robust doors. So it's just so interesting to watch the construction industry and the material suppliers and everybody, it's just changed radically.
David: I know that passive house has been much more accepted, at least in Europe or Germany where it came from, and not as much as in the United States, or at least it seems like it's coming more to fruition in the US now. Why is there that difference? What's different between overseas versus here? Maybe there are certain states that are more open to it than New York. Like California.
Deborah: There are definitely states and regions that are more interested in passive house than others. Vancouver up in Canada happens to be a hot zone, New York, Ireland. There are certain hot zones around the world where this is happening. Passive House U.S., which is Phius, they're super active and there are a lot of passive house projects in the country. I don't have the statistic of how many, but there are a lot and it's growing, certainly since Cornell was the first one. Look at how far we've come. Now HPD, they have it in their language, in their future housing initiative. They have it in as a pathway to code compliance. It's really a word that I think a lot of people in the industry now know.
David: One of the things you said is it's not business as usual. And so people aren't used to it. But once people start getting used to the fact that this is the new standard, it's not going to be as crazy as it once was. And also the technology is developing significantly. Like you said, there are doors that you actually use versus ones that you're retrofitting.
Deborah: Yes, yes, I think everyone's growing with technology.
Brenda: You've been one of the pivotal people who've been advocating for passive housing in different spaces. How do you approach developers or city planners when you're trying to advocate for passive housing?
Deborah: Many of my projects, they start off, we're going to do a passive house, especially competitions, we're like, we're going in with passive house because it's going to tip the scale. And so we very often start with those aspirations and then certain things come along and do change the trajectory of that project or we just don't win. Handel, now we have a sustainable design director, his name is Louis Koehl and he's incredible. He was involved in some of these projects and we elevated him to become that role so that he can be trying to get every single project, not just passive house, but to integrate more sustainable design features. And so, we try to have that conversation and we're able to have that conversation, which I think developers appreciate. But unfortunately we're only the architects. There's just so much we can do. We can try our best, but we are not the ultimate decision makers.
David: The new standards for carbon emissions in New York City, a lot of older buildings in New York City are going to have to do some retrofitting, which is extremely expensive. From what I understand, there's a way to retrofit to passive house.
Deborah: There is a whole program for, PH, Passive House Institute is called Enerfit. It is a whole separate section, whole section of criteria and methodologies, energy budget is more, but there is, and you can 100 percent retrofit buildings. And there are a lot of architects who really don't want to be doing new construction. They want to be doing retrofits because that's the work of the saints. You really need to get into all those buildings. And get those buildings up to speed. So there are a lot of architects that are out there right now that are working on that with their consultants.
Brenda: Aside from the climate benefits or the energy benefits and the cost savings on the back end from retrofitting a building. What's the developers incentive to retrofit their building now?
Deborah: It's these new codes. All these crazy penalties. Some developers are willing to take the hit because, they do the math, but I don't know that that's going to last as the years go by, the penalties are going to increase significantly. You gotta start somewhere, and hopefully it all leads to a more sustainable future. That's what we need.
David: In working on these passive house design developments, are there any standouts that came up similar to the door scenario where there was an interesting way of dealing with that problem?
Deborah: In general steel that is supporting your canopies or your balconies or your dunnage on roof. Steel does not want to anymore be going straight into your building in a non broken way. We are always breaking it now with a isolate, something to thermally break steel from coming from the inside straight to the outside. On old buildings is more concrete example. When you look at these eyebrow buildings. We used to call them eyebrow buildings where you'd see the edge's slab sticking out of the building. We don't do that anymore because the heat is just flowing out. You put a heat gun up to that building and you would see red at all of the edges' slabs, you would just see the heat coming pouring out. So we don't do that anymore. We thermally break things. We bring the insulation straight across the edge of the slab, nice and tight, like a nice big sweater.
David: And another thing is balconies. Balconies are open areas. They're killers of the air tightness and then the heat insulation.
Deborah: So balconies, if you could imagine like the concrete slab coming out, but there's like a break in it. It's not fully broken because you keep some sort of rebar, but you're literally putting like mushy stuff into the concrete. So you are breaking that you're separating those two lines of concrete. A thermal break is exactly what it sounds like. It is breaking the conductiveness, the thermal conductiveness of a material. It is stopping it, so that the heat is staying in. It's not just traveling along straight out your balcony. And people now are using thermal breaks in regular designs, and actually DOB requires that you show thermal break details in your energy code drawings. This is something that passive house used to require and now energy code, you have to show these type of details.
David: It makes sense. If you're leaking some of that energy outside where it could be kept inside, then you're wasting something, like the wastewater. You want to make sure to keep it as tight as possible and keep everything inside, so you're not losing any of those resources that you're spending the money to generate. Let's use the things that we're using, not throw it out.
Deborah: Absolutely. So thermal break details are very exciting.
David: And I'm sure that there are passive houses out there, whether designed by you or someone else, that there are things that could be more efficiently done that you just didn't think of. Has that happened where you've said, we should have done this and we're going to improve on that design?
Deborah: Definitely. And out in the field, you're doing smoke tests. You're literally testing the wall to see if there's any holes in the facade. So right at the first window and the first wall, you're testing the facade to see if what you drew and what you think you're building actually works. And then you make tweaks on the site for sure. And then repeat it 6,000 times, but you really have to make those tweaks. And of course we bring that to the next project. And the facade consultants, Steven Winter, they're doing loads of calculations and watching how all of these details are coming together. We're trying to get what looks good as well as what works. They're really schooling us all the time on different ways and very subtle ways that make a big difference. This is a team effort. A hundred percent.
Camila: So the thickness of the facade, for example, it has to change to retain energy. Does the wall inside the apartment also change?
Deborah: I just want to clarify the facade doesn't necessarily need to be very much wider. We don't want people to be scared of this. Our overall facade for our brick construction, I think is only one inch thicker in the cavity and maybe two and a half inches on the inboard side. So we're not talking about huge. And I don't know if you're familiar with EIFS. Not very pretty material, but EIFS is literally just insulation. It's not the most beautiful material, but it really is conceptually a great material to think about. It's just a big piece of insulation that's on the outside.
David: A lot of people were using it because it was cheap. We had a lot of issues with it because of the way it looked, especially if you have a fully affordable building. That's where my familiarity comes from.
Deborah: It does do the trick for keeping your building insulated and continuous insulation. It passes right by the edge of slab. It's pretty cool material in that sense.
David: The architect, as far as I know, don't necessarily double check and confirm that the contractors are building per design. That's, at least that's what I understand. But how involved are you in going back to the building after having done the design to do these tasks and make sure that everything is working the way it's supposed to?
Deborah: Firstly, you had asked about the interior walls, which I think comes back to this. There's really nothing on the interior walls that's different. Apartment to apartment is still straight up regular that we've all seen, and all of the inspections for passive house are really done by inspectors, which is not Handel. We hire inspectors. Steven Winter often does them, different folks do the facade inspection. We know that they're building the facade as we've designed it. And the interior layouts, we know they're building them as we did it, because if they don't, that would be crazy and nothing would fit. And we're constantly on site looking at things. So I don't think that that would ever be an issue. We trust who is putting these together.
David: When you're designing it, the numbers, the science behind all of it, it's meant so that it's going to work. They test it to make sure, but generally there's not really any hitches in that.
Deborah: In that overall assumption, no. But maybe how the jam detail is overlapping with the exterior sheathing, exactly how that's going to be installed maybe that condition needs to be refined in the field, but it's not a systemic overhaul of the basis of design.
David: Are you seeing anything in the world of the office to residential conversions given the new statutes, tax exemption and all the promotion they're doing to try to do these conversions and what are you seeing and what are you working on?
Deborah: We are involved in a couple of those, a huge one down in D.C. It's definitely possible. We are happy to do that type of work. It's laborious for sure, because, first of all, getting the right floor plan that can accommodate the right depths for light and air, because that's a little bit of a problem. Office buildings are very deep. You often end up with a lot of nice storage. Sometimes people are coming through and making new cores, new light wells into existing giant office buildings. If you make a new light well, maybe the numbers work. There are challenges, but we're doing them and it's great. That concrete, you don't have to repour it and all that steel that's in there that is a green building. The greenest building is the building that is already built, because if you can reuse that building, you've really saved.
Brenda: Reduce, reuse, recycle. It's classic.
Deborah: Reduce, reuse, recycle, yeah.
David: Given how involved you are in passive house, what would you like to see happen going forward development wise?
Deborah: Of course, I would like to see more of these, and be a person that can inspire other people to do more of them. I'm happy to talk about this with pretty much anyone that wants to talk about it.
David: And this is exhibit A over here.
Deborah: And I think it's really important. And I think I really feel like I've had an impact, which I find to be awesome, and I would like to continue to not only inspire people out of the firm, but my own firm. We're 150 people, and just even keep the firm on the same track so that we're constantly lifting everyone up. We just need more buildings to do more. And there are new technologies that keep coming out, in HVC systems that are super interesting, like this wastewater heat recovery and such and geothermal that I'd love to have a chance to integrate. I've never done geothermal.
David: I would like to know more about that, too. I was looking at a house to buy that had geothermal, and they're like, your savings are gonna be amazing.
Deborah: It's because three feet below the Earth's surface, you're at like 51 degrees or something. Very quickly, when you get below the Earth's surface, the temperature is quite low. Geothermal is kind of low tech, actually. You run pipes, sometimes extremely deep, because you need the length. But you run pipes and you are able to extract that. In that sense, you are either extracting heat into the 51 degrees or you're going reverse. You can go reverse too with heat.
David: So that's how it works. It uses heating and cooling from below the Earth's surface.
Deborah: Yes.
David: Then bring it to the surface where you can utilize it.
Deborah: Because if it's zero degrees outside and it's 51, I believe it's 51 degrees, then that's great. 51 degrees, you've just raised the air temperature. So you're constantly moving heat around in energy heat recovery.
David: So you're trying to save as much as you can, like we talked about before that recycling concept. In one of your interviews you said, if there was a sleeve that can fit a PTAC, that that would really be a game changer in terms of passive house.
Deborah: Maybe 10 years ago, the sleeve that goes through the facade that accepts kind of what is, you're probably all familiar with PTACs, they're almost like through the wall air conditioner. That sleeve was very leaky and could not meet passive house standards because it was so leaky, meaning leaky of air coming through.
David: It wasn't airtight.
Deborah: It wasn't airtight. And we spent a lot of time trying to get that thing to be tight. And we Handel, I say we, but we were working with all sorts of people to help make that happen. Now they do have a high performance unit that is airtight, that is running on electricity, has refrigerant inside of it. Our project for the Catholic Charities in the Grand Street Guild, we are using those in a passive house design. So it is a through the wall unit that meets the passive house standard. And so, yes, this is a game changer. This unit, it makes it more attainable to actually meet passive house in low income projects.
David: You said that would be significant. And I didn't know whether or not that had come to fruition.
Deborah: That's pretty cool that I said that, I don't know when, and it's actually happened. That's how the industry is changing, right? It really is changing. I think we're identifying needs and then the industry is filling those needs.
David: There are all sorts of technology changes and things that are hopefully for the better, as long as people are using them for good, sustainable designs and to lower emissions. People are going to have to come on board no matter what, but you still have a lot of old school people who are thinking in the old mentality or they just don't want to spend the money to do the designs.
What kind of things are you seeing now? When we were in such a turbulent time, with no tax exemption, high interest rates, capital being difficult or expensive to get. All these problems that made development very difficult. Are you seeing anything new, given these new housing packages that have come out?
Deborah: We are not seeing as much private development as we had in the past right now, because. It was nice that 421-a was extended. So some of those things are actually coming back to life a little bit, but prior to that, there was a lot of not developed. And so now we are seeing some of those projects come alive. So that's really exciting. We've been focusing on a lot of university work. Dormitory work is something we would really like to do more. And a lot of universities put on the website, sustainable is really important to us. Well, at some point they have to start really doing something, not just saying it. And their new buildings have to be to a very high standard. And so we're having some traction with other university projects and things such as that.
David: We talked about residential, but for commercial passive house, is there some kind of need or desire for that?
Deborah: Absolutely, and Handel, up in Boston, we have done a building of which the middle portion is office, it is almost 800,000 square feet, is the largest office building that meets passive house standards. It is passive house certified. Just that piece.
David: Just that sliver?
Deborah: The sliver, which is 800,000 square feet.
David: I can't imagine what the rest of it is.
Deborah: It's a very big building. That is called the Winthrop Square in Boston. That's Millennium Place. Millennium Partners is the developer for that project. And that is an amazing project, triple glazed curtain wall, and it has the mechanical system to support it. And it's meeting passive house standards and it's certified. And what's really interesting about that is that in these terrible times of people wanting empty office space, they are doing fantastically well on leasing it. And one in particular is Deloitte. If you go on Deloitte's website, sustainability, sustainability, and we're really into it. And they are doing what they say. They are a tenant in that building and they're super proud to be in that building. And they are now working in a passive house environment, which is the same benefits, acoustical benefits, ventilation, lowering their electric bills, using less electricity, using less energy, all those same things. And you're probably in your office more than you're in your house.
David: We're definitely in an office, whether it's in the city or in a basement in our mom's house. This was wonderful. We learned a ton. We love to geek out with you, by the way, on this stuff. When you don't know about a topic, to learn about it, not to actually have to do it, is a pleasure, but to go and then doing it, I could tell you about my job and you're like, Oh, that's fascinating. And then you can go back to your life.
Brenda: Right. Information for information purposes is so nice.
Speaker: But also tell people where they can contact you so that they can discuss any questions they might have on passive house design or energy efficiency or any of the other great things that you and Handel are doing.
Deborah: A lot of my articles and other articles that have been written by our company are on our website. And so we talk about our projects so you can learn more about them there. Hopefully I'll be lecturing someday soon, somewhere near you. You can also just give a call. I've talked to people from all over the world that are interested in this topic. And then I find out five years or seven years later that they've actually executed one of these and that's just super cool. So, happy to talk to anyone.
David: And we'll share your email address in the notes so that you can contact Deborah directly about this. She's an amazing source of information and you were so lovely to have and we so appreciate you coming.
Deborah: Thank you so much.
Brenda: Thank you for coming.
Well, everyone, that's our show. Thanks so much for listening.
David: And of course, don't forget to subscribe. Also, don't forget to leave comments, because we love to hear from our audience, right Brenda?
Brenda: Yeah. Feel free to reach out at [email protected] or visit our website at seidenschein.com. We really look forward to hearing from you.
David: You could also reach out to David and Brenda at [email protected] and [email protected].
Brenda: Those are lengthy last names. You can just find us on our website.