Mike Eliason, architect, founder of Larch Lab and author of the must read Building for People, reflects on how a series of personal and global crises – from pandemic lockdowns and climate disasters to urban housing challenges – shaped his mission to bring sustainable, community-focused, and climateadaptive neighbourhoods to North America.

Sometimes reality is stranger than fiction. And sometimes strange but breathtaking fiction subverts reality.

In issue 47 we took a break from our normal approach to Big Picture, with good reason: passive house playing a starring role in an extraordinary US TV show.

If you were choosing how to build in a bushfire-prone region of Australia, you could be forgiven for skirting over the possibility of packing your walls with straw. Talina Edwards of Envirotecture describes an extraordinary off-grid passive house which uses straw and a range of low embodied carbon building materials to blitz regulatory requirements on fire, while delivering year-round comfort levels that the neighbours can scarcely believe.

Issue 43 featured an off-grid prototype house in British Columbia, designed and constructed to demonstrate an innovative approach to future building.

This issue features a passive house hostel situated in the town of Zegama, on the route of the Camino de Santiago.

This issue features a new nursery school in Paris, built to the Passive House Institute’s low energy building standard.

This issue features a passive house ‘plus’ certified three-storey office building in Strasbourg, France.

This issue features an intriguing new passive house apartment building in north-west Spain.

This issue features the passive house ‘plus’ certified headquarters of Métropole Rouen Normandie, located on the banks of the Seine in Rouen, France, and designed by Jacques Ferrier Architecture.

This issue features an off-grid passive house situated on a ten-acre vineyard, in south-eastern Australia.

This issue features two new buildings built to the passive house standard - an elementary school in Austria and a gorgeously simple house in the Ore Mountains of the Czech Republic.

This issue features a low energy community centre in a mountainous region of Austria.

This issue features a low energy community centre in a mountainous region of Austria.

Forget passive house, is Powerhouse the most crazily ambitious energy-related building standard around?

A selection of passive & eco builds from around the world, this issue features a rustic holiday home in New Zealand designed using the key principles of passive house design, and the 26-storey House at Cornell Tech, New York, now the tallest certified passive building in the world.

This issue feature a passive house cabin in the Rocky Mountains, and a jaw-dropping new passive house in Majorca.

This issue features the world’s smallest certified passive house in France, and the first certified passive house on New Zealand’s South Island.

The Living Building Challenge is arguably the world’s toughest environmental building certification program. In order to achieve the award, buildings must meet rigorous standards in seven different performance categories, also known as ‘petals’: place, water, energy, health and happiness, materials, equity and beauty. Our selection includes three American buildings that have been certified to one of these standards. 

This issue’s collection of inspiring international passive houses includes a striking Black Forest family home, the world’s first ‘passive house premium’ building, a deeply ecological Canadian house, and a New York tower that’s set to be the world’s tallest passive house.

This issue’s international selection features an embassy in Indonesia, an educational building in South Korea, an experimental solar-powered house in France, and social housing in Philadelphia.

This issue’s international selection features a developer-built passive house in Philadelphia, a big new research centre in Frankfurt, a sleek family home in Vienna, and a new low-energy factory in Canada where passive timber buildings will be prefabricated.

This issue’s international selection of passive and low energy building includes two homes built for retirement —one in Austria, one in New Mexico — a striking house in a Romanian forest, and an out-of-this-world passive-certified dome in tropical south-west China.

This issue’s Eurocentric selection is drawn from the International Isover Energy Efficiency Awards, including a German renovation that generates an energy surplus, a Danish nature reserve, a Romanian Solar Decathlon entry and a Polish church.

This year’s international Passive House Awards featured 21 projects — out of about 100 entries — across six different categories, with shortlisted projects coming from across Europe plus New Zealand, South Korea, and the United States. In this issue’s international section, we pick four buildings from an exceptional selection.

Virtually any building, anywhere can achieve certified passive house status, as these four transatlantic buildings show – including a Viennese skyscraper, an upgrade to an NYC home predating the Empire State Building, a German museum housing valuable works of art and a net zero energy home in New Mexico. 

Picking from some of the best current sustainable design the world has to offer, we profile a floating passive house currently moored in the Netherlands, a ground-breaking timber hybrid tower in Austria, a multi unit passive scheme in Malmö, and an Enerphit upgrade to a brutalist Connecticut home originally designed by one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s colleagues.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Dubai's 828 metre Burj Khalifa might soon be overtaken as the world's tallest building. What's more, construction firm Broad Sustainable Building plans to build the 838 metre Sky City tower in Changsha, China in just 90 days.

When Construct Ireland asked Vivienne Brophy of the UCD Energy Research Group to select projects for this feature she suggested that the second year UCD Architecture students make the selection, using UCD’s sustainable building rating system tool to verify their choice

Green architect Minka McInerney profiles six unique green buildings including a cardboard school building, a globe-trotting recycled museum & the tallest timber building in the world