The winners of the international Passive House Award will be announced on Friday 10 September as part of the 25th International Passive House Conference, which is fully available online. Tickets to the conference are still available.

RIBA has published a report urging the government, local authorities and the wider construction sector to adopt post-occupancy evaluation as standard practice to ensure all new buildings meet intended energy efficiency ratings and provide optimum value for money.

The best architecture responds skilfully and sensitively to its surroundings, so when a long and narrow plot beside a busy road became available in the Somerset village of Chew Magna, architect David Hayhow set out to design a passive house, inspired by nearby farm buildings, that would be both private yet filled with light — quite the challenge given the site’s tight restraints.

With this stunning, award-winning passive house in Camden, the legendary engineer Max Fordham — together with bere:architects & Bow Tie Construction — has produced a simple and beautiful urban home with no wet heating system that draws on his lifetime of work applying the principles of simplicity, practicality and replicability to the design of building services.

It’s no coincidence that Nordic countries are some of the most advanced in the world when it comes to low energy design. In this article, three assistant professors of architecture based in Denmark and Finland discuss areas where we can learn from our Nordic neighbours — and where we might return the favour.

Simply Architecture, and their new build residential project ‘The Fairways’ in Cork, has been named the winner of the 2019 Overall ISOVER Award, as well as being named Designer of the Year 2019, at the third ISOVER Awards.

A state-of-the-art archive building in Cambridgeshire, which has been built to house Imperial War Museums’ (IWM) rich paper collection, has registered the best airtightness test result ever recorded in the UK – and perhaps, the world.

Building designers need to undertake much deeper analyses of overheating risks, and do so under future climate change scenarios, in order to ensure their buildings can adapt and remain comfortable for occupants in a warming world.

Dr Marc Ó Riain looks at the influence of 20th century architectural giant Frank Lloyd Wright on low energy building design.

When architect Tony Godwin wandered into a seminar on the passive house standard at Ecobuild ten years ago, it was the start of a journey that would eventually see him design and build his own passive home on a sloping site — and learn some hard lessons along the way to achieving a comfortable, ultra-low energy family home with tiny energy bills.

This skilfully designed new passive house in Blackrock manages to be lightfilled and strikingly contemporary while taking its design inspiration from the very ordinary Dublin street on which it sits.

This year’s prestigious iF Design Awards saw Daikin Europe’s design skills recognised as the company scooped five awards for their residential heat pump and commercial control solutions at a ceremony in Munich on 9 March.

Designing a dwelling to take advantage of the sun’s free heat is a big part of what makes a passive house passive. So how do you meet the low energy standard when your narrow site faces away from the sun and is overshadowed by neighbouring houses and trees, while simultaneously hitting an A1 building energy rating – and with a stunning, architecturally expressive design?

An oversized passive house may be no more sustainable than a correctly sized house built to a more modest spec. In the latest instalment of her journey to build a passive family home, Nessa Duggan finds that visiting some real passive houses may force a change in approach regarding size and complexity, with potentially significant cost benefits.

Design-and-build contracts have become increasingly common in construction, a trend that must be reversed in light of the Grenfell Tower fire if we are to deliver safe and high quality buildings, says quantity surveyor Michael McCarthy.

We must discard the architectural baggage of the 20th century to solve 21st century problems – argues our columnist Marc Ó Riain – and relearn some lessons from before the advent of oil.

In the third instalment of Nessa Duggan’s column on designing and building a passive house for her young family, she describes the process of designing a house to suit the family’s lifestyle.

In her second column documenting her family’s self-build passive house project, Nessa Duggan details the process of choosing a build system and finding an architect.

With Ireland’s renewed focus on delivery of new housing, the country’s leading assigned certification practice, i3PT Certification is urging designers and other certifiers to exercise due diligence in order to avoid replicating past errors. 

Sustainable flooring company Forbo’s new Marmoleum Striato collection of contemporary linear linoleum designs has been awarded with the iF Design Award 2016. 

Ecohouse Developments, a new low energy design and build service, has launched in Ireland. The company employs a team of architects, engineers and builders, and can deliver turnkey passive houses to its clients, or simply build the principle passive structure if the client prefers.

The latest versions of PHPP and designPH are intended to make passive house design both easier and more accurate than ever before — and to plan for a future powered by renewable energy. Jan Steiger of the Passive House Institute explains the latest features of both software packages.

The Royal Institute of British Architects said that, despite some growing pessimism among architectural practices about business prospects, passive house design represents a new and exciting growth area that offers added value for architectural firms.

Huge expanses of unshaded glass are usually a taboo for passive house designers, but with his clients insistent on maximising their wide-angle coastal panorama, this project’s architect found clever ways to integrate the passive house approach with wrapping the house’s ground floor in glass.

This house on the coast of County Waterford is built from an insulated concrete formwork shell that delivers an inherently warm and airtight construction, and easily exceeds passive house targets.

Leading low energy builders Pat Doran Construction Ltd have advised anyone aiming to build a passive house using traditional cavity wall construction that correct detailing and installation is crucial.

The team behind this Surrey home intended to use it as a test-bed for passive house design and construction, without necessarily expecting to achieve certification. But as the house neared completion, they realised that they were within touching distance of the coveted low energy standard.

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.

None of the team behind Passive House Plus has the good fortune to live in a passive house – at least not yet – meaning our promotion of passive house comes with more than a hint of “Do as I say, not as I do”. That’s emphatically not the case with certified passive house designer Helena Fitzgerald, who chose to practice what she preaches with her own home, to stunning effect.

The winners of the Passivhaus Trust's 2015 UK Passivhaus Awards were announced at a ceremony in London on Wednesday night. The awards aim to celebrate the design and performance of passive house buildings in the UK.