Drop the Hammer | Santa Fe Report May 18, 2022
B.PUBLIC Prefab is designing homes for a changing climate
by Julia Goldberg
Between 2014 and 2020, the running five-year average annual number of structures destroyed by wildfires rose from 2,873 to 12,255—a fourfold increase in just six years.
This sobering statistic appears in a January report from the federal government, produced by the US Agriculture Department and Forest Service. “Confronting the Wildfire Crisis: A Strategy for Protecting Communities and Improving Resilience in America’s Forests” details some of the devastating impacts from recent wildfires to both human life and structures. Those stats include the fall-out from the 2021 Dixie Fire in California, which burned nearly one million acres, killed one person and destroyed 1,329 structures. Colorado’s Marshall Fire wasn’t included in the report, but Boulder County estimates in January said that fire had consumed more than 1,000 structures.
The threat to homes is only likely to increase, according to a report released this week by the nonprofit First Street Foundation, which forecasts close to 80 million structures—residential and commercial—could experience some level of destruction from wildfire in the next 30 years. New Mexico ranks among the top states (California is the top) with the highest proportion of properties at such risk.
B.PUBLIC Prefab co-founder and CEO Edie Dillman wasn’t necessarily envisioning a roster of clients whose homes had been lost to wildfire when she launched her company in January, 2020 after a year of business planning with partners Jonah Stanford—to whom Dillman is married—and Charlotte Lagarde, who serve as the company’s CTO and COO, respectively.
Dillman was, however, thinking about climate change.
B.PUBLIC provides panelized construction systems: standardized and prefabricated walls, floors and roofs, designed for low-energy use and high performance. The company describes the product as being “LEGO-like”—a tool architects and designers can use and customize—with 80% energy savings, 90% less construction waste, 30% faster construction and 90% carbon positive materials.
Dillman says the company initially identified New Mexico, as well as Northern California, Colorado, Utah and Arizona, as " big growth markets with really challenging…climate conditions to achieve a low energy, very comfortable house.”
New Mexico Inno | BizJournals.com May 17, 2022
Santa Fe company has eyes on a manufacturing facility for passive house components
By Collin Krabbe
Ever see a stack of newspapers and wonder: “why haven’t these gone in the trash?”
Well, a Santa Fe startup has a different idea — and it’s not about saving money on gift wrap during the holiday season. Instead, the firm provides the backbone for homes insulated with newspaper.
The company, called B.PUBLIC Prefab, subscribes to a growing building standard called “passive house,”focused on energy savings. Now the startup, which was founded in 2019, wants to open a manufacturing facility in New Mexico along with contract producers in other places.
In an interview on May 17, cofounder and CEO Edie Dillman spelled out the origin story and concept behind B.PUBLIC Prefab and its prefabricated building blocks.
"We do the off-site framing, sheathing, insulation, weather barrier and air barrier of the primary building envelope," Dillman said.
Those parts can then be finished off with other interior and external materials. The company has a focus on markets with high housing demand, a shortage of builders and where code, policy and incentives are geared toward what the company provides.
Dillman said that in 2019, the startup purchased intellectual property from NEEDBASED, a design practice with a focus on sustainability from Jonah Stanford, one of three co-founders at B.PUBLIC. Charlotte Lagarde, a filmmaker who Dillman said was looking to pivot her career to environmental justice, is the third cofounder.
"Effectively, passive house approach allows for a conservation of energy for heating and cooling of 80 to 90 percent above a standard code home," Dillman said. "So we're talking net-zero, nearly net-zero."
B.PUBLIC is located at the Santa Fe Business Incubator with plans to open the New Mexico facility in the next one to two years. For buildings outside the Southwest, B.PUBLIC will use contract manufacturers. Similarly, for all projects, the company will enlist others to assemble the final product.
The six-employee company has already raised $750,000 in debt funding, according to Dillman.
B.PUBLIC on the road | Boulder and Denver November 2021
Jonah & Edie hit the road to meet with Passive House and green building professionals in central Colorado.
They met up with our great friends in Passive at Emu Systems at the Colorado Passive House Happy Hour & Mini-Expo. What a blast to connect with other innovators and builders making a difference in the built environment, with BEER!
The Colorado Green Building Guild hosted us for a live presentation and conversation at the Environmental Design Department on the CU Boulder campus. Thank you to all the curious and talented builders, architects, and students who joined us and to the CCBG for inviting us! We had a great time and apologize for the dark video - but happy to do it all over again soon! Great partnerships and ecosystem being supported by CGBG!
We look forward to continued partnerships with organizations like these that are supporting and inspiring building professionals to go green!
AIA Santa Fe Award | 2021 Design ExcellencE Merit Award
Our first project in Santa Cruz California was recognized by the Santa Fe AIA chapter at their annual gala and awards ceremony. We were selected from a group of distinguished projects. The ROBIN HOUSE presentation boards from the in-person event are below. Congratulations to Lead Architect JD Scott, Project Manager Charlotte Lagarde, Builder Benjamin Riordan, our install team and manufacturing partners at Collective Carperrnty, and our wonderful clients on this home! Award-winning high-performance home design, permit, to install the structural thermal envelope in six months! We are so proud and honored for this recognition.
Climate Change Leadership Institute Innovation Award
WOW!
What a way to end 2021 by receiving this award! See letter and kind words of encouragement and acknowledgement from CCLI.
House Building — Praise for Passive House design
Santa Fe New Mexican HOME Sunday, November 6, 2021
What makes a house feel like home? When it is quiet and peaceful? Full of natural light during the day and good-and-dark at night for sound sleep? With favorite art on the walls and books unpacked on their shelves? Some might say when it smells like fresh baked cookies (or enchiladas). For New Mexicans, we can feel home in a double adobe; an unmistakable solid, quiet, grounded feeling of a craft-made home.
As one of the co-founders of B.PUBLIC Prefab based in Santa Fe, I spend my work life talking to people about building differently with deeply insulated walls to achieve Passive House-like performance for new home construction. Because Passive House is still relatively young in the U.S. (12 years as compared to Germany's 30), very few new home customers have ever experienced being in, let alone living in, a house built on such rigorous energy-efficiency principles.
The Passive House system is, admittedly, a rather technical and complicated design to understand. The main thing many people I talk to are interested in knowing is: How does it feel? Is a home that uses 80% less energy uncomfortable or seem like a sacrifice? I find myself using my hands, gesturing over Zoom and relying on metaphors to answer. For example, I will ask people if they remember the first time they experienced radiant floors in winter and how relaxing it was on their bodies. What a thing to have warm feet and relaxed shoulders! Passive homes are kind of like that, but with the additional gift of being so well-insulated and comfortable, from head to feet, that you always feel warmed like that, except without the heat on.
It is lovely to meet with clients in New Mexico because I can use the experience of adobe as a comparison to a Passive House in that Passives are incredibly quiet, have deep-set windows and provide an utterly relaxing sense of home within 17-inch-thick walls. New Mexicans also understand right away that things made with craft, care and natural materials feel like home and also last like a home should—for generations.
Outside of New Mexico, it gets a little tricky. For those folks in California, for example, I sometimes compare Passive House to having things in common with a Tesla: they’re both electric and super quiet. Passive homes are designed to be electric-only, for indoor health and energy conservation. They are 50% quieter, compared to code construction, due to well-insulated envelopes, paired with high-performance windows.
Clearing up some confusion For folks across the Southwest who confuse Passive House with Passive Solar, I use one of my favorite working metaphors: the stainless steel thermos. Passive homes are made to be inactive like an insulated thermos. Passive, in the sense that the interior stays hot by holding in the heat effortlessly, by design, rather than needing energy added to it to keep warm.
I understand why there may be confusion. It is difficult to truly share all of the amenities and attributes of the Passive system of construction on the page or computer screen. You must step inside a Passive Home to sense the fullness of its warmth and serenity. It's a surround-sound of comfort.
More and more builders are proudly joining New Mexico’s long history of green building with some new ways to save the planet. In the process, they are still honoring what home should feel like for everyone.
Edie Dillman is CEO and co-founder of B.PUBLIC Prefab—a component-based high-performance building company that prioritizes energy reduction, carbon-positive materials, housing creation and community collaboration.
About Passive House
Passive House buildings are healthy, comfortable, efficient and cost less to operate. Passive House design can create any architectural style and any building type, providing a predictable pathway to net zero energy and zero carbon building. Science-based design principles and tools optimize both building performance and cost.
For more information: www.passivehouseaccelerator.com
B.PUBLIC on the road | Upstate NY and Ontario Canada
Edie and Charlotte hit the road to meet with building professionals and prefab manufacturers in update NY and Canada.
Our great friends in passive house at Simple Life Homes gave us a tour of their facility and a recent install. What a great team and mission!
Next, they headed to Farmington, New York to meet up with New Energy Works, timber framers building high-performance panels for sustainable buildings. Just our kind of folks!
We look forward to continued partnerships with craftsmen like this who are enthusiastically changing the world one high-performance prefab building at a time.
Exciting news! Affordable housing development in Santa Fe
In October, we partnered with Habitat for Humanity to submit qualifications for an RFQ to the City of Santa Fe for the development of green affordable housing. The City has selected our proposal!
We are honored to work with Habitat to provide our hometown community with building systems that prioritize sustainability, reduce carbon footprint, and resilience for equitable development!
The property is a small, but desirable piece of property just blocks from the historic plaza on the Santa Fe River.
The six-unit multi-family complex will use B.PUBLIC pre-fabricated wall and ceiling panels for the building thermal envelope of each unit.
The building will meet Energy Star energy efficiency requirements and Net-Zero Energy-Ready, exceeding the standards established by the City of Santa Fe’s Green Code.
The units will be all-electric, equipped with energy-efficient electric appliances, LED lighting, a rooftop solar array, a hybrid electric water heater to maximize efficiency, and an Energy Recovery Ventilation System (ERV) to ensure clean and healthy air for occupants.
Maximizing efficiency and installing solar will allow the building to produce more energy than it consumes on an annual basis.
This will be a competitive process and we are gratified by our developing relationship with Habitat for this or future projects.
This is exactly the kind of non-profit relationship core to our mission for equity in housing.
The Greenest home in Bonny Doon - CZU Rebuild September 2021
““We believe this can be the new normal for building and rebuilding in California.” ”
Our clients had just replaced all the windows in their newly purchased home in the Santa Cruz Mountains before the CZU fire destroyed it in 2020. When they looked to rebuild, they wanted more than efficient windows – they wanted a super-efficient home that requires less energy, offers greater comfort, is kind to the environment, and could offer them peace of mind. They wanted a home that would suit their desire to get close to Passive House performance while getting away from polyurethane foam insulation.
An ordinary site-built home may take three months to frame, wrap, and insulate. A performance home that requires air sealing, continuous insulation, and a weather barrier to protect the home’s integrity may take even longer. The B.PUBLIC Prefab off-site panelized structure allow the building envelope (shell) for new homes to be installed in a matter of days instead of months.
The first email through design, permitting, and final installation took six months. The install process took a total of 3 days.
California’s housing crisis is in dire need for solutions to build faster and greener. Its newly mandated focus on solar and renewables is only a portion of what we need to fix. “When you consider that 40 percent of all pollution is caused by the construction and running of buildings, it is urgent that we change the way we build,” says chief operating officer Charlotte Lagarde. “At B.PUBLIC we tackle both sources of carbon emission by prioritizing deep energy conservation in our designs and the materials we use. The good news is that there is a carbon smart way to build craftsman comfort, low-energy, and resilient homes. It’s just a mind shift ”
““From the tragedy of so many homes lost to fire - we believe that if you are going to rebuild there needs to be heart and the environment central to the project. We are honored to help one home at a time” ”
B.Public’s Passive House-quality prefabricated wall, roof, and floor panels are designed to speed construction, ensure quality craftsmanship, and reduce a building’s energy consumption by up to 90% over its lifetime, while utilizing recycled and petroleum-free materials.
““While building a home was never part of our plan or dream and we entered the process reluctantly, working with B.Public has become another step in our journey to living more sustainably through building a resilient and efficient home. We are excited to share our experience with our fellow fire families, and we hope BPublic’s expertise can support many others in coming home soon,””
Word is spreading through the neighborhood network about this sustainable alternative - building beyond code and with great architectural style. We are working with families in Boulder Creek and Bonny Doon who are designing and rebuilding with B.PUBLIC Prefab with the goal to move back home quickly.
B.PUBLIC Microhome Competition 2021 - Shortlisted!
ABOUT THE COMPETITION:
The MICROHOME 2021 Competition challenged architects from all over the globe to submit designs for an off-grid, modular structure for a hypothetical young professional couple. The competition encouraged out-of-the-box thinking, pushing architects to rethink spatial organization and include new technologies, unique aesthetics, and innovative materials. The only requirement was not to exceed 25m², 269 sqft.
B.PUBLIC SUBMISSION: Casa Calibri
Santa Fe, New Mexico faces an affordable housing crisis. The city’s rental market is among the least equitable in the US, with a deficit of 7,300 units. This shortage has triggered a 46% increase in rent since 2016. Rent for a one-bedroom apartment now approaches $1,400. The COVID-19 pandemic has precipitated an influx of retirees and wealthy remote workers, causing home prices to skyrocket. In 2021, the mean home price reached $600; a couple would need to earn 120,000 per year to afford this price, twice the city’s median household income.
As a result of these historic shifts, Santa Fe has seen an exodus of educators and young creatives. If current trends continue, the very people who drive the vibrant cultural economy of Santa Fe will be priced out. The city government is seeking proposals for public-private developments on city-owned land.
Casa Calibri envisions a dense, off-grid community of micro homes clustered around shared open space on a parcel currently held by the city. As a grassroots housing cooperative the development targets teachers and young workers employed in Santa Fe’s arts & culture sector. Utilizing an innovative and cost-competitive system of prefabricated panels and Passive House performance, the project will set a new standard for resilience and low-carbon construction while fostering the next generation of Santa Fe’s workforce.
The project is 249 sqft and build with B.PUBLIC high-performance prefab panels. Additionally, the design includes a solar array, a rainwater harvesting system, and an ERV system that maximizes the home’s efficiency.
B.PUBLIC Team: Natasha Ribeiro & JD Scott, AIA
Congratulations on the great work on this project. Check out the International Projects Winners. linked
Climate Action Passive House Accelerator Magazine Winter 2022: BOOSTING Passive House AVAILABILITY
Make it stand out
Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
A Note from the Passive House Accelerator
As we ring in 2022, the Passive House Accelerator magazine once again brings encouraging stories of project teams, policymakers, and manufacturers delivering climate-friendly building solutions. Passive House techniques—in concert with building electrification, clean energy, and low embodied carbon materials—chart a clear pathway toward climate action for the building sector. We hope the practical guidance found in these pages will inspire imitations galore. And, while we are always excited to document the increasing adoption of Passive House approaches, in this issue, we are particularly thrilled to have an article by José Sosa Rueda covering the growth of Passive House in Latin America. Download the magazine here.
Boosting Passive House Availability
In recent years, an increasing number of affordable housing developments are being built to Passive House performance targets, especially in certain areas. Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, for example, have made affordable Passive House projects within reach using policy and financial incentives, and other jurisdictions have followed suit or are considering doing so. Meanwhile, for the affluent and interested, Passive House performance has long been attainable across North America. But, quite often, middle-income home-buyers lose out, trapped in an availability gap.
Natalie Leonard, founder of Passive Design Solutions in Halifax, Nova Scotia, believes that Passive House is for everyone and is trying to traverse the availability gap in her community with a simple solution: stock plans. “It breaks our heart to have to turn away anyone who is interested in building a better home,” Leonard says.
In 5 years Passive Design Solutions has completed 70 Passive House stock plan projects. Its 44 plans are adaptable to all six Canadian climates zones with roof, foundation, and assembly options for each. Its current catalog can accommodate 20 orientations with plans for single- or two-family residences ranging from 680 square feet to 3,200 square feet.
In the United States and Canada typical costs for custom design run between 6–10% of a construction budget. For a $500,000 home, custom plans would cost between $30,000–$50,000 at a bare minimum. Passive Design Solutions plans cost about $10,000 without custom work, though Leonard noted most clients opt to do at least some changes. The builder is also able to purchase the plans and rebuild the house, multiplying the Passive House impact.
Leonard navigates the building process through meticulously specific details and noted that most good contractors can build a Passive House if they are willing to learn a few things. Passive Design Studios also offers consultations with builders to answer any questions.
Architects in the United States, such as Olympia, Washington-based architecture firm Artisans Group, are also trying to address the need for more middle-market Passive House options. Artisans Group plans to release stock plans for six accessory dwelling units (ADUs) and three houses in early 2022, utilizing the new Phius prescriptive path tool to address climate zones across the United States. These plans will range from $1,000 for ADUs to between $10,000–$15,000 for house plans. Artisans Group is still navigating the building process but plans to work with local builders and provide some type of consultation throughout the construction process.
While Passive Design Solutions and Artisans Group have opted to work with local builders to achieve market- rate Passive Houses, B.PUBLIC Prefab has taken another route. Using prefabricated panels B.PUBLIC has launched a standardized envelope rated for climate zones 2–8. B.PUBLIC chose to standardize its components and assemblies to attain Passive House-level performance through prefabrication rather than relying on stock floor plans. Though they have a handful of what B.PUBLIC calls their “Fast, Smart, and Beautiful” designs, the company has expedited the design and build process while allowing for flexibility in unique finishes, window orientation, and site-specific design.
B.PUBLIC currently works with Collective Carpentry and Simple Life Homes to manufacture its standardized panels, and the company expects to bring on a third manufacturer in 2022. The assemblies are vapor-open, foam-free, thermal-bridge-free, carbon-reducing, fully insulated, and pre-engineered as well as optimized for Passive House standards. The assemblies’ insulation values range from R-35 to R-53 for walls and R-60 to R-80 for roofs. Plans can be anywhere from 324 square feet to 2,200-ft2 two-story homes.
A basic B.PUBLIC plan is priced at about $10,000 for 1,200 square feet, with average construction costs of between $65–$120 per square foot for the building envelope depending on the number of floors, foundation type, and other specifications. The standard kit-of-parts creates predictable pricing for consumers, and the quick turnaround time of prefabrication has its advantages too. Most home designs are produced in 3-6 months for complete plans and permitting with a 6-9 month lead time on panel orders and installation. In September 2021, B.PUBLIC delivered a prefab home to a Bonny Doon family that had lost their home one year before during wildfires that raged in late summer and early fall of 2020. The need for middle-market Passive House housing is clear.
According to a Harvard study released in 2020, 62% of renters were middle-income earners in 2018. The study found that, among many reasons for the high number of renters, there has been a decrease in new home construction resulting in lower inventory for potential buyers. The demand for market-rate Passive House is continuing to increase, and Passive House stock plans are one tool architects are using to create more access to high-performance housing for the middle market..
Behind the Walls: Architect Alex Yuen interviews Edie Dillman, co-founder of B.Public Prefab for BeInkandescent Health & Wellness magazine
A Note from Hope Katz Gibbs, publisher, BeInkandescent Health & Wellness magazine — As we look forward to 2022, I can’t think of a better cover story of the January-February issue BeInkandescent magazine than architect Alex Yuen who will be interviewing Edie Dillman, CEO of B.Public Prefab.
“B.Public prefab panelized off-site construction system radically reduces carbon footprint while maximizing comfort and low-energy performance for new home construction,” explains Edie of her company based in Santa Fe, NM. “Craftsman prefab designed to exceed your greenest dreams.”
Alex and Edie discuss:
Why green design is essential to the future of architecture
How architects are responding to the challenge of economic and supply chain problems
The obstacles in making a change to current thinking about what green building means
And so much more!
Note: Alex and his partner Weijia Song, both professors at Harvard University Graduate School of Design, are collaborators in the Inkandescent Health & Wellness Retreat Center. We introduced them in the January 2021 issue of the magazine, and are excited to share more information this year about what we are cooking up.
Scroll down to learn more about Edie and Alex! And click here to read more about the Future of Building in the January-February 2022 issue of BeInkandescent magazine.
About Edie Dillman: The CEO and co-founder of B.Public Prefab has created a decidedly disruptive company, committed to systems change and the rapid adoption of solutions for the natural and the built environment. She is a proven leader of creative and business teams from architecture studios, web design firms to magazine publishing within a large variety of companies across non-profit, government, and the private sector.
In her previous work at Innovate + Educate, she worked nationally to shift to skills-based education and employment in the critical change for equitable workforce pathways. Before that, she was Publisher & Art Director of New Mexico Magazine, an enterprise venture within the New Mexico State Tourism Division. As the owner of her firm, Small Fires LLC, she worked with private clients for 15-years in strategic growth, product design, marketing, and communications.
Edie currently serves on the board of directors of the Santa Fe Art Institute, North American Passive House Network, and Talentnomics. These organizations support activists artists, building science transformation, and gender parity/diversity in business leadership. Learn more at bpulicprefab.com.
About Alex Yuen: Alex is an architect and urban designer hailing from Hong Kong and San Francisco. He is a founding partner of Collective Operations, a young practice dedicated to the improvement of the built environment through the combined capacities of design, research, and development with ongoing work in the US and New Zealand.
Alex received a Bachelor of Architecture from Rice University where his work was published, exhibited globally, and received numerous awards including the William Ward Watkin Fellowship and the Odebrecht Award for Sustainable Development.
He subsequently received a Master of Architecture in Urban Design (MAUD), with Distinction, from the Harvard Graduate School of Design where he received both the Award for Excellence in Urban Design and the Urban Design Thesis Award for his research and design proposal for a new platform for innovation in the American Rustbelt. Alex has previously brought his emphasis on multi-scalar design and representation to the faculty at the California College of the Arts and the University of Virginia.
Prior, he was an architectural and urban designer at the New York offices of Diller Scofidio + Renfro and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) where he worked on a range of public, private, and research projects including the third phase of the Highline, and environmental resiliency plan for the city of Hoboken, and the competition winning proposal for the 11th Street Bridge Park. Alex is a registered architect in the State of New York.
BUILDING SANTA FE | A new build on Alto Street will be a test, but worth the wait
Santa Fe New Mexican, Sunday, Dember 25 2021
Upper Alto Street is the physical barrier to the barrio beyond. The high side has old historic homes set on traditional flat lots. The low side is a cliff two-stories deep. The homes there have grown up to street level, but some are only accessible by the last old-timey dirt road in the heart of the city, lower Alto Street.
The last vacant tract on the stretch, owned by the city, probably has been vacant since the upper barrio was settled some 200 years ago. The homes below, built after the river was tamed, are newer and fancier. The empty space will only hold five attached townhomes.
Now, to be tucked into the gap, will come five Habitat for Humanity homeowners, reminiscent of the hardworking, low-wage earners who originally established the barrio above. The city offered it free. The winning proposal came from Habitat and B.Public Prefab, a local women-owned high-performance panelized wall manufacturer headed by Edie Dillman, Charlotte Lagarde and Jonah Stanford.
It’s a perfect match and likely the only bidding team with the wherewithal to pull it off. Habitat builds cost effectively and with maximum energy efficiency under construction director Rob Lochner’s watchful, problem-solving eye.
But this is no ordinary build. Otherwise somebody would have built on it decades ago.
B.Public Prefab builds wall sections that are craned into place. Stanford and Dillman are stellar players in the realm of high-performance thought, design and construction in Santa Fe and beyond. Our local Habitat chapter already meets their high standards and is ready to embrace site challenges and new construction techniques.
One recent skillset mastered by Lochner and his core volunteers is working with concrete-filled insulating forms of Styrofoam blocks. They’re very energy efficient and can hold back tons of packed earth piled high behind a retaining wall. It’s hard to imagine a plan that would not employ such a scheme.
Those same concrete-filled foam blocks could serve as effective sound and fire barriers between the homes, which will have common walls. All five units will be two stories. Draft plans are for three three-bedroom homes and two two-bedroom homes.
Parking will be split between upper and lower Alto Street, but all five will have primary pedestrian access from lower Alto Street, which means all will have at least a little bit of private green space. The upper parking spots, made possible by the significant retaining wall and a lot of imported and compacted earth, will have stairs to bring pedestrians down from upper Alto Street.
B.Public Prefab’s walls, floors and roofs have sprung from Stanford’s pioneering work as a Passive House designer and builder. The sections use off-the-shelf products like I-joists, blown-in cellulose insulation, oriented strand board sheathing and water-resistant house-wrapping, but they are built to factory specifications and fit together like Legos.
It’s likely the Alto Street build will be a hybrid of B.Public Prefab panels and traditional techniques, like concrete slabs. Habitat’s lead architectural designer, Jacqueline “Jay” Urich, is a former AmeriCorps volunteer who discovered Santa Fe in her year of service with Habitat and made our town her home.
She is excited by the technical challenge and the challenge that modern townhomes must fit into historic vernacular required of new construction in historic districts.
Unlike other Habitat projects, where adjacent lots can be utilized for large groups of volunteers to meet and eat and assemble, this will be more surgical. With complicated site engineering and time-consuming historical approvals, Lochner is projecting a late-summer start but a quick build.
After a few hundred years, what’s a few more months? Take the time and get it right.
Kim Shanahan has been a Santa Fe green builder since 1986 and a sustainability consultant since 2019. Contact him at shanafe@aol.com.
City Selects Habitat for Humanity and B.PUBLIC Prefab to Develop Affordable Homes In Historic District
Press Release for City of Santa Fe
City Intends to Donate Lot at 635 Alto Street for Construction of Five High Quality, Low-Energy-Use Homes
November 29, 2021 – The City of Santa Fe Community Development Commission, chaired by Councilwoman Renee Villarreal, reviewed four responses to a Request for Qualifications (RFQ) seeking a developer to build five (5) affordable homes on a City-owned lot. The highest scoring application was submitted by Santa Fe Habitat for Humanity, in collaboration with B.PUBLIC Prefab.
The evaluation criteria for the RFQ called for demonstrated capacity in four areas: development program (unit mix and affordability); concept and design (satisfaction of desired design elements and zoning conformance); experience and financial ability; and demonstrated project financial feasibility.
Mayor Alan Webber says: “By dedicating this lot for affordable, high-quality, sustainable housing in a desirable area of downtown Santa Fe, the City is taking another step toward creating innovative and equitable housing solutions. When we talk about preserving the character of our neighborhoods in ways that are inclusive, this is the kind of development we have in mind. Thanks to all the respondents for their proposals, and congratulations to Santa Fe Habitat for Humanity and B.PUBLIC Prefab on their winning plan.”
Edie Dillman, CEO and Co-founder of Santa Fe-based B.PUBLIC Prefab, says: "Habitat Santa Fe has been building homes for better comfort and energy savings for many years. By building this development with our pre-insulated structural walls, the community can see the shell of this project complete in a matter of days. Then we all can cheer staff, volunteers, and partner families as they complete construction. Our craftsman-built prefab is designed for 100-plus years of comfort and 80-90% energy savings. Now that is housing stability for occupants!"
The application proposes five homes, made affordable through Habitat’s unique approach of using the future homeowner’s “sweat equity,” in addition to many volunteer laborers, donated materials, and self-financed 0% interest mortgages. Kurt Krahn, Executive Director of Santa Fe Habitat for Humanity, estimates that these homes will cost approximately $185,000 to construct, with monthly housing payments of $600-$800.
“We are thrilled to pilot this approach with B.PUBLIC,” says Krahn. “The thermal envelope goes up in days rather than months, which simplifies framing, sheathing, and insulation into a single sequence, greatly reducing construction time and construction waste and resulting in a home with much lower energy use.”
The lot is located in a downtown historic district and within easy walking and biking distance to the Plaza and the River and Rail Trails. Current zoning allows a multi-unit structure with at least five units on the lot. The final design and development plan requires approval by the Historic Design Review Board.
Recognizing that land cost and site control can provide barriers to housing development, particularly affordable housing on an infill lot, the City proposes to donate the lot; the Governing Body must approve the final donation agreement. In addition, City code allows qualifying projects to receive other applicable fee waivers and incentives to bring down the cost of building and providing affordable homes.
Contacts: Terry Lease, Asset Development Manager; tjlease@santafenm.gov
Alexandra Ladd, Director, Office of Affordable Housing; agladd@santafenm.gov
HOME: House Building — Praise for Passive House Design
What makes a house feel like home? When it is quiet and peaceful? Full of natural light during the day and good-and-dark at night for sound sleep? With favorite art on the walls and books unpacked on their shelves? Some might say when it smells like fresh baked cookies (or enchiladas). For New Mexicans, we can feel home in a double adobe; an unmistakable solid, quiet, grounded feeling of a craft-made home.
As one of the co-founders of B.PUBLIC Prefab based in Santa Fe, I spend my work life talking to people about building differently with deeply insulated walls to achieve Passive House-like performance for new home construction. Because Passive House is still relatively young in the U.S. (12 years as compared to Germany's 30), very few new home customers have ever experienced being in, let alone living in, a house built on such rigorous energy-efficiency principles.
The Passive House system is, admittedly, a rather technical and complicated design to understand. The main thing many people I talk to are interested in knowing is: How does it feel? Is a home that uses 80% less energy uncomfortable or seem like a sacrifice? I find myself using my hands, gesturing over Zoom and relying on metaphors to answer. For example, I will ask people if they remember the first time they experienced radiant floors in winter and how relaxing it was on their bodies. What a thing to have warm feet and relaxed shoulders!
Passive homes are kind of like that, but with the additional gift of being so well-insulated and comfortable, from head to feet, that you always feel warmed like that, except without the heat on.
It is lovely to meet with clients in New Mexico because I can use the experience of adobe as a comparison to a Passive House in that Passives are incredibly quiet, have deep-set windows and provide an utterly relaxing sense of home within 17-inch-thick walls. New Mexicans also understand right away that things made with craft, care and natural materials feel like home and also last like a home should—for generations.
Outside of New Mexico, it gets ta little tricky. For those folks in California, for example, I sometimes compare Passive House to having things in common with a Tesla: they’re both electric and super quiet. Passive homes are designed to be electric-only, for indoor health and energy conservation. They are 50% quieter, compared to code construction, due to well-insulated envelopes, paired with high-performance windows.
Clearing up some confusion for folks across the Southwest who confuse Passive House with Passive Solar, I use one of my favorite working metaphors: the stainless steel thermos. Passive homes are made to be inactive like an insulated thermos. Passive, in the sense that the interior stays hot by holding in the heat effortlessly, by design, rather than needing energy added to it to keep warm.
I understand why there may be confusion. It is difficult to truly share all of the amenities and attributes of the Passive system of construction on the page or computer screen. You must step inside a Passive Home to sense the fullness of its warmth and serenity. It's a surround-sound of comfort.
More and more builders are proudly joining New Mexico’s long history of green building with some new ways to save the planet. In the process, they are still honoring what home should feel like for everyone.
Treehugger: B.Public Designs Panelized Passive House Prefabs Building systems that prioritize sustainability and a reduced carbon footprint.
A hundred years ago, if you wanted a house, you could order it from Sears. They had good basic designs with everything people wanted in an affordable package.
By Lloyd Alter Published May 6, 2021 Fact checked by Haley Mast
A hundred years ago, if you wanted a house, you could order it from Sears. They had good basic designs with everything people wanted in an affordable package. Colin Davies, author and professor of Architectural Theory at London Metropolitan University, wrote in "The Prefabricated Home": "Sears Roebuck never claimed to make any contribution to the progress of modern architecture. Its houses were indistinguishable from their ordinary site-built neighbors and its pattern books included all the popular, traditional styles."
Edie Dillman, CEO of B.Public Prefab, is trying to do exactly that. Her company supplies thick super-insulated wall panels that can be assembled into houses and low-rise multifamily buildings, but she also offers stock plans that architects, builders, and the public can use as starting points.
She explains to Treehugger why she does this: "I grew up in Chicago, surrounded by Sears homes. We just need good housing, We need houses that are well designed that people can live in. So why do we reinvent the wheel in design as well as how we assemble it?
Not everyone needs or can afford an architect, which is why Treehugger has shown many examples of stock plans and prefab packages. As Dillman notes, people say "I can't spend $50,000 and eight months for a two-bedroom house."
The plans are a great starting point for discussion and can be modified as required. Unlike Sears, B.Public doesn't include everything and the kitchen sink—just the enclosure, the panel system. The client then has a local contractor do the approvals, site work, and interior finishing; the plans get your attention and speed up the process.
The panels themselves are seriously high performance, with insulation values for walls of R-35 through R-52. They are wood-frame with dense-pack cellulose insulation, smart vapor control, and exterior sheathing. "The panelized building blocks of Floor, Wall, and Top (roof) components work together to create an envelope ready to be finished with interior and exterior finishes and cladding." Add the right windows and ventilation equipment and they would easily pass the Passive House standards.
They are all made from materials with low embodied carbon, addressing the crisis of climate change:
"We believe that architects, developers, builders have a professional mandate and responsibility to the earth and our environment. Status quo building practices must be replaced immediately with practical solutions that reduce the carbon footprint. To address increasing environmental shifts and disasters, the housing we create must be resilient, scalable, rapidly developed and support an evolving landscape."
They really do look like building blocks or as they describe them, "lego-like components" that "work together to create an envelope that is ready to be finished with interior and exterior cladding and surfaces, allowing for aesthetic and regionally appropriate treatments, finishes, and roof customization." This image shows them assembled into tiny cottages up to apartment buildings.
Architects like the panel system, but Dillman says "we're also attracting consumers with simple forms and likable shapes, designs that we understand as "homes," very recognizable for our human souls." Having these plans as a place to start also speeds up the design process.
As Davies concluded in his book, "The Prefabricated Home":
"Prefabrication does not necessarily imply either mass production or standardization. In fact, non of the three therms necessarily implies the other two. Standardization is not essential and mind-numbing monotony is not inevitable. On the other hand, standardization is not necessarily a bad thing; people like standard products that are tried and tested and available from stock. .... Offering customers a choice is one thing; asking them to design the whole building from scratch is quite another."
This is why what Dillman and her partners—Charlotte Lagarde and Jonah Stanford—have done is so clever: B.Public isn't selling a product that is really all that different than what a number of panel fabricators do. They don't even build the panels themselves but subcontract them. They have instead built a set of design tools and catalog of pieces that can be put together into a design quickly on a computer and then quickly on a site with everything fitting together nicely.
They have developed a foundation and other details that builders and architects can use, described in Passivehouse Accelerator as "a soup-to-nut service that included education, along with our offering of specific pre-manufactured building components and designs. Because, as they say on the website: "To design rapidly and know that performance will not be sacrificed is liberating."
B.Public is truly a 21st-century company: it is not a builder, it is not an architect, it is not even a panel manufacturer. It is all about an idea that removes a layer of complexity in dealing with panelized prefabrication, and about an ideal.
As Dillman explains: "B.PUBLIC is a woman-owned Public Benefit Corporation based in Santa Fe, NM. Our public benefit purposes are Housing Sustainability & Environmental Responsibility: Providing communities with building systems that prioritize sustainability, reduced carbon footprint, and resilience for equitable development." And that is a very good idea indeed.
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Green Fire Times: B.Public Disrupting the Home Building Industry
We are trying to make this technology accessible so that it can be much more widely adopted,” Dillman said. “For low-rise construction with square corners and 10-foot ceilings,
“We are trying to make this technology accessible so that it can be much more widely adopted,” Dillman said. “For low-rise construction with square corners and 10-foot ceilings, we have created building blocks that will allow anyone to achieve high performance, comfort, sustainability and cost predictability. ”
With help from the Santa Fe Business Incubator, B.Public Prefab was recently launched to address the housing shortage and global climate crisis with a disruptive solution. The public-benefit (B) company offers high-performance, environmentally friendly modular building products and services. It was formed by partners CEO Edie Dillman, COO Charlotte Lagarde and Chief Technology Officer Jonah Stanford, who has been designing homes to Passive House standards since 2008. “Passive House” is a German standard for energy-efficiency that has been around for 30 years. B.Public’s prefabricated wall roof and floor panels speed construction, ensure quality craftsmanship and reduce a building’s energy consumption by up to 90 percent over its lifetime, while utilizing recycled and petroleum-free materials. The panelized components work together to create a super-insulating envelope. “Smart” vapor layers on the outside and on the interior breathe. The company offers licensed home designs with a complete set of construction drawings for single or multi-family homes, studios, eco-cabins and townhomes for infill or off-grid. B.Public provides technical assistance to homeowners, architects, builders and developers. “We are trying to make this technology accessible so that it can be much more widely adopted,” Dillman said. “For low-rise construction with square corners and 10-foot ceilings, we have created building blocks that will allow anyone to achieve high performance, comfort, sustainability and cost predictability. The innovative homes only cost 5 to 8 percent more than conventional construction. “We have lowered the barrier for builders and developers to be able to reach standards that only custom houses could aspire to achieve until now,” Dillman said. “Builders are key to serving clients and we are dedicated to supporting our local trades.” In January, after an installation crew of three erected and weathered a home near Angel Fire, New Mexico, in about a week, the B.Public team hosted local builders to tour the project. A growing list of clients are placing orders for the pre-fab panels.
Passive House Accelerator - Annual Publication Feature article
IF EVER THERE WERE A TIME TO ADDRESS THE HOUSING SHORTAGE, CLIMATE CRISIS, AND REDUCTION IN SKILLED LABOR WITH A COORDINATED, DISRUPTIVE SOLUTION, NOW IS THE TIME.
“IF EVER THERE WERE A TIME TO ADDRESS THE HOUSING SHORTAGE, CLIMATE CRISIS, AND REDUCTION IN SKILLED LABOR WITH A COORDINATED, DISRUPTIVE SOLUTION, NOW IS THE TIME.
That is the raison d’être behind B.Public, a recently launched, Santa Fe, New Mexico-based public-benefit corporation designed to change the status quo in building by offering prefabricated, high-performance, environmentally friendly building products and services. It was formed by Edie Dillman, Jonah Stanford, and Charlotte Lagarde, a trio of partners with complementary skills gleaned from a broad array of creative and innovative sectors."
