Design Criteria

Our research and field-implementation of a variety of sustainable technologies starting in 2004 has been summarized in the lecture and presentation “Sustainable Technologies for Buildings” (available in a digital PowerPoint presentation upon request). Since the implementation of sustainable technologies is difficult to quantify and put in perspective for commercial building projects, which have naturally an immense range of scale, we focused our research on the scale of residential single-family homes.

Over the past years it proved to be very difficult to find clients who are willing or able to commission a residential home that enabled us to realize a majority of the technologies and features we had identified and rated.

While the above could have been realized at times within the architectural language of a colonial or maybe a post-modern eclectic home, our ultimate desire to house the invisible performance and features of such a home in the corresponding and adequate language of a modern home, proved almost impossible.

In 2013 the plans for a new home for one of Partners For Architecture’s own principals, Rainer Schrom, AIA presented an opportunity to put a large selection and combination of features to the test, and control their implementation.

The following criteria for our understanding of a modern, sustainable and high-performance home had been established as follows:

• Geothermal heating & cooling
  
• Heat pump domestic water heater.
• Pervious paving on all exterior hard surfaces (except steep slopes)
• Cellulose insulation (recycled newsprint)
• Stone wool insulation