228 Washington…garage to townhouse

April 26, 2012

these are the first sketches of how we’d like to convert the ugly 60′s garage into a modern passive house townhouse in a landmarked district… hopefully we’ll be lucky with the LPC… before you tell us that we are crazy to propose something like this in a landmarked area, please look at this nice image of a traditional shutter which can be found in typical Brooklyn brownstones… we are just mounting the shutters on the outside of the building, for 2 reasons: to give the interior some privacy, and with careful design of the louvres we can cut down on the scorching nyc summer sun…





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Plumbing Design at a PassivHaus…

March 6, 2012

…needs special attention. From the communal heat pump hot water heaters with individual flow meters to insulated roof drains. One major improvement is that the NYC 2008 Plumbing Code now allows PVC over cast-iron piping which makes for smaller thermal bridges through the envelope. Some would say these drawings are boring but they mean a lot to us! Click on the red arrows to find out more…

Drain Drain Drain Drain

Drain Drain Drain

Thanks to Sasha from Klein Levin Consulting Engineers for all the patience!

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Domestic Hot Water w/o Gas for an 7 unit apartment building…

  Most of our new projects have no connection to the City’s gas piping, so we need to find an efficient way to produce hot water. First we were thinking about a solar thermal system with electric resistance backup, but the more we learned about it the more we realized that they are quite complicated: [...]

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Heating & Cooling @ HAUS

  We had a kick-off meeting with our MEP consultant Benjamin Klein and I will try to summarize (before I forget everything which was discussed!): Heating / Cooling: Each apartment has its own ducted air handler (12,000BTU Mitsubishi), but we might have a combined 6 ton condensing unit on the roof. Here the link. Each apartment can have [...]

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First sketches of a warehouse conversion…

We started working on the conversion of a good ol’ Brooklyn warehouse into a single family Passive House residence. The existing structure was built in the 1960s and is a commercial building in the residential part of Williamsburg. The design concept is quite simple: We propose to create a courtyard to bring in natural light [...]

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Start of structural design at HAUS

It took us a while to decide which structural system we should use for our new building. In the end, we went with an “Insulated Concrete Form“ which is made out of cement-bonded wood fiber. Wood fiber, instead of polystyrene! The product is called Durisol -it’s a Dutch invention from 1932 and was widely used to rebuild European cities after [...]

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Hey, we won an award!

Today we were surprised (and very pleased!) to learn that we won TreeHugger’s Best of Green Readers’ Choice Award in the category “Best Young Architect.” Thank you, TreeHugger — for appreciating our work, and for including us in such esteemed company as the other two firms nominated, and most especially for being staunch advocates of [...]

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Interior shots of 174 Grand St

We just got some interior photos of the freshly cleaned interior all bright and sunny… Q: So why are there these exposed ducts everywhere? A: We like them, but they also serve a purpose… read on!

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NEW: 228 Washington Ave on the way to Passiv Haus (but in style)

Three photos from our new Passiv Haus retrofit project in Fort Greene: on the left, 1940 with no cars; in the middle, 1980 with gigantic cars; and, on the right, 2011 with no cornice. Our two main goals are restoring the beauty of this landmarked building by bringing back the cornice and bay windows, and [...]

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Say hello to Haus!

We started working on a new ground-up project in one of our favorite neighborhoods, Greenpoint Brooklyn. It will be a 7-unit Passive House apartment building called Haus, and will be built on a typical Brooklyn-sized 25′x100′ lot. Each of the floor-through spaces is ~700sqf; the 1st floor unit has a private rear garden and all [...]

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