Sara Solovitch, a former staff writer at the Philadelphia Inquirer and columnist for the San Jose Mercury News, is a California-based freelance writer. She is the author of Playing Scared, a memoir and history of stage fright, being published in June by Bloomsbury Press.

In July, when Portland was sweltering at upwards of 100 degrees, the tenants of The Orchards wondered if they had air conditioning. The temperature in their apartments never rose above 70.

They had all just moved into the newly opened affordable housing project in Hillsboro, a Portland suburb that over the last decade replaced thousands of fruit trees with silicon chip factories. Some of the tenants were workers in those factories. Others were clerks at Costco and nearby supermarkets. As they knew all too well, affordable housing didn’t come with air conditioning. So why were their new homes so comfortable?


The Orchards is an L-shaped building with bare bone apartments that overlook the light rail station. Its lobby is small with two striking features: a glassed display of tree trunks, cross sections of those cut down from those eponymous orchards and marked by fruit typology (Orenco apple, Green Gage plum, Royal apricot) and a five-foot TV screen prominently mounted, with a readout that monitors the minutiae of each apartment’s energy consumption, alerting tenants to the nuances of their neighbors’ electric budgets.

But it’s what you don’t see that makes it so unique. The Orchards is a “Passive House,” currently the largest one in North America. It’s a high performing energy-efficient complex whose 57 apartments stay cool on the hottest days and can be comfortably heated with a hand-held hair dryer on the coldest. Its windows are triple-paned. Its walls and floors are stuffed 11 inches deep with insulation. The ventilation system in the attic acts as the building’s lungs—continually pulling exhaust from every kitchen and bathroom, sucking stale air through a heat exchanger before carrying it to the outside and returning with fresh air.

“Every day I find a new reason to love it,” gushes Georgye Hamlin, whose one-bedroom apartment is as noiseless as a recording studio. “It’s cool, it’s quiet, and I don’t even hear the train. During the heat wave, my girlfriend came over to sleep because it was so cool. Yay for German engineering!”

Passivhaus, a building method developed in Germany in the early 1990s, relies on an airtight envelope—the roof, exterior walls and floors, literally, the physical barrier that separates in from out—to create a building that consumes 80 percent less energy than a standard house.

As translated into English, the term is almost a misnomer. It implies single-family housing, when in fact the approach can be applied to any size building. In Europe, supermarkets, schools, churches, factories and hospitals have been built to passive house standards. The number of certified buildings there exceeds 25,000.

Resident Georgye Hamlin stands in the front doorway of her passive apartment in The Orchards in Hillsboro, Oregon. | Mark Peterson for Politico Magazine/Redux Pictures

The American market is tiny by comparison. There are about 150 certified houses nationwide and most people, on hearing the term, assume it refers to solar panels. That is now starting to change, along with concern about climate change and a growing understanding that, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, houses and other buildings account for 40 percent of all energy consumption and a third of carbon emissions nationally. Widely applied, passive construction could fundamentally alter the world’s carbon balance, but only if it can get over the internecine fights that have torn the concept’s European and North American backers apart.

With the virtuous equation in mind, hundreds of passive houses are now going up around the country—from bland, boxy cubes (like those at The Orchards) to elegant condos and Victorian retrofits. Volunteers for Habitat for Humanity have constructed passive townhouses in Washington, D.C. An ambulance dispatch center in Brooklyn was last year retrofitted to passive standards. An affordable housing project, built for youths aging out of foster care, just opened in Pittsburgh.

Last September, New York Mayor Bill De Blasio released a 35-year plan, One City: Built To Last, for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from the city’s buildings. The report named Passive House construction as a pathway for achieving the city’s goal of 80 percent reduction. It was the only building standard specifically identified in the report, a fact that made architects, builders and public policy experts take notice. In Europe, where all new construction must comply with “Nearly Zero-Energy Buildings” by 2020, passive building is a best building practice.

Then came the news that ground was being broken for the world’s biggest passive house—a 350-unit apartment house, owned by Cornell University on Roosevelt Island in New York City, to be completed by 2017. “This is going to open people’s eyes about what’s possible,” says Ken Levenson, a Brooklyn-based architect who will be working on the Cornell project. “It’s a huge building and it’s significant in terms of its breaking out of a stereotypical low-rise building. And it’s a blue chip customer, with all the associations of Cornell University—plus the fact that it’s being embraced by New York City and the mayor’s office. It changes the conversation in a big way.”

Despite all the talk of “r factors,” kBTUs and “air changes per hour” that breaks out whenever Passive House engineers and designers assemble, the approach’s appeal is its simplicity: Orient a building to take advantage of solar heating; install plenty of insulation and topnotch windows and doors to seal out the drafts; let the structure’s energy draw upon heat from appliances and human bodies.

It’s like feng shui for geeks, a way of engineering that turns a house into a fine tuned machine—and with performance-based data to back it up. The technology is in the design. The actual equipment—the heating and cooling units—consists of nothing more than two fans and a radiator.

New Window OPTICS: The Passive Houses of Portland. From high-end townhouses to affordable apartments to converted Victorians, passive houses dot the Portland landscape. Click here to explore the neighborhoods and homeowners who are leading an urban environmental revolution. | Mark Peterson for Politico Magazine/Redux Pictures.

“You know how people buy Priuses because they’re efficient and good for the environment?” says Graham Irwin, a San Francisco architect who was the consultant for the first certified passive house in California five years ago. “And then, because there’s a readout on the screen it encourages them to get as good mileage as they can. There’s a similar effect for Passive House. People move in, see how little energy they’re using, and they turn the gas off. They try to dial it in as much as they can.”

***

If the Pacific Northwest is a hotbed of the passive house movement, then Portland, with its temperate climate and progressive mindset, is North America’s Ground Zero. With a comparable climate to Germany—warm, dry summers and cold, rainy winters—it is relatively easy to build according to rigorous passive standards. The city has more Passive Houses than anywhere else in the country—100, according to one count—and more certified consultants.

The consultants are the crusaders of the movement—the designers, architects and engineers charged with mapping out energy metrics, building envelopes and mechanical systems. A performance-based standard, passive house construction may be easy to understand but it’s challenging to attain.

The design software appeals to tech nerds and scientists, people like Kurt Hurley, a software engineer, and his wife, Chie Kawahara, an economist, of Santa Cruz, California, who wanted to do “something green” and ended up remodeling a Craftsman bungalow. “At this point in history, we’re at the edge of a great tragedy,” says Hurley, describing how he felt compelled to take action and “do something” about climate change. “I can’t rely on a jet manufacturer or car maker to make something more green. But I can do something with my house.”

The result is a 1,500-square foot house so energy efficient that the monthly utility bills have plunged from $155 a month to $50. It’s so quiet that a diesel truck can roar by and the only way you know it’s out there is because you see it.

Many practitioners express Hurley’s level of fervor. In Portland, they include architects like Robert Hawthorne who, halfway through an informal brown-bag presentation in 2008, decided to abandon traditional architecture for passive building; builders like Stephen Aiguier, whose 13-year-old company, Green Hammer, was once ridiculed at the lumber yard for its mission to build energy-efficient, toxic-free houses; and homeowners like Tad Everhart, a former prosecuting attorney who in 2009 tore out all the walls of his house in order to install thicker ones with the requisite 11 inches worth of high-density cellulose.

“I didn’t think about climate change until we had a child,” Everhart says. “Then, every time I heard the furnace kick on, I realized that, in a very real sense, I was burning up my child’s future. In search for a solution, I came across Passive House. And when I found it, it was like a religious experience—to see that buildings can be built so they consume a very tiny fraction of energy.”

Portland has become Ground Zero of North America's Passive Housing movement. With a comparable climate to Germany—warm, dry summers and cold, rainy winters—not to mention it's legendary progressive bent, the city now has more Passive Houses than anywhere else in the country. | Mark Peterson for Politico Magazine/Redux Pictures

He gestures around the living room of his yellow American Foursquare, which he and his brother built 20 years ago—along with the other 10 houses lining the cul-de-sac in the city’s Mount Tabor neighborhood, named for the extinct volcano that is Portland’s most commanding landmark. His 88-year-old mother lives in the house next door.

It’s a comfortable house, filled with thick armchairs, good books and the casually strewn detritus of teenage girls. There’s nothing particularly unique about the place—until, that is, you notice the door leading to the backyard.

It tilts on its bottom axis and swings in from the top, like a casement window, allowing for a rush of ventilation. (It can also open like a good old door.) It was imported from Europe, along with the house’s 17 quadruple-pane windows. Five years ago, when Everhart retrofitted the house to passive standards, he tore out all the old windows, reduced their number from 33 to 17, and reoriented their placement to take advantage of a more southern exposure.

The whole project cost $130,000.

“When our grandchildren ask what we did about climate change, we can show them this,” Everhart says.

***

Given the passive house community’s change-the-world ethos, it’s perhaps not surprising that fierce disagreements have arisen. An ideological rupture now splits the German parent, Passive House Institute (PHI)—which has overseen the international standard since the early ’90s—from its American counterpart, Passive House Institute U.S. (PHIUS), founded in 2003. It’s been an ugly divorce, with broken friendships, flameouts on social media and, in Portland, endless discussion within the local chapter about whether it should side with PHI or PHIUS. One perplexed observer has likened it to the fighting between Shias and Sunnis in Iraq.

The split dates to 2012, when PHIUS rolled out a new set of standards for North America. The American standards were intended to adjust for variations in extreme climates like Miami, Florida, and Fairbanks, Alaska. As many American builders had noted, it was relatively easy to meet passive standards in Portland and Seattle, with temperate climates similar to Germany. It became far more challenging in a place like northern Wisconsin, where builders once sought to meet passive standards by installing 16 inches of foam insulation under the floor slab.

The traditional German standard limits energy use in any passive structure to 15 kilowatt hours per square meter per year for heating and cooling—about one-tenth the energy footprint of houses built to regular U.S. building codes—and the standard is meant to apply to all climate zones. Its inherent strictness is purposeful, meant to ensure that no human is using more of the planet’s energy than another.

Simply being “more” energy-friendly than normal was never the goal for passive houses, the backers of the German standard say. “Incrementalism is death,” explains Portland homeland Tad Everhart, who has pledged allegiance to the German standard. “That’s what [the founders] taught us. That we can’t be just 10 percent better than code, we have to reach for the stars. [They] said, ‘Keep it simple. If you want to live in Alaska you can’t use more energy than a person living in Bangladesh.’ That’s what made Passive House inspiring to all of us: its inherent equity.”

Tad Everhart and his family make dinner in their passive house. A former prosecuting attorney, Everhart retrofitted the house five years ago to passive standards, tore out all the old windows, reduced their number from 33 to 17 and reoriented their placement to take advantage of a more southern exposure. | Mark Peterson for Politico Magazine/Redux Pictures

Yet some of the early adopters in the U.S. found the German model ill-suited for North America. Passive housing was introduced to the U.S. by Katrin Klingenberg, a German-born architect who has become the de facto voice of PHIUS and the American movement. Her German counterpart—and now her nemesis—is her former mentor, Wolfgang Feist, a physicist who coined the term Passivhaus and directs PHI.

Klingenberg first encountered the concept as an undergraduate student in Germany in the early ’90s. She recalls that she was almost immediately dissuaded from pursuing it. “The faculty were outraged by the amount of insulation, which was seen as the enemy of the aesthetic,” Klingenberg says. “I filed it away.”

She got a graduate degree in architecture from Ball State University. But in 2003, alarmed by the election of President George W. Bush and the Republican administration’s repudiation of climate change, she returned to Germany to study under Feist, who founded PHI, an independent research institute based in Darmstadt, which employs a staff of about 70 scientists. He is often described as “cantankerous” and “brilliant,” a word also applied to Klingenberg.

Feist says he shared everything he knew with his protégé who, upon returning to the U.S., built the country’s first passive house—a small demonstration house in Urbana, Illinois.

Klingenberg soon founded PHIUS and began offering classes for designers, architects and engineers, certifying them in the science of passive building. Everhart and San Francisco-based architect Graham Irwin were among her first acolytes, making the pilgrimage from the West Coast to Urbana, Illinois, to learn her skills. “By the end of it, I was convinced I was going to save the world—or at least California,” Irwin recalls.

Now based in Chicago, PHIUS has certified more than 650 consultants, though many more professionals have attended its eight-day course without seeking certification. The organization has also begun to certify builders to meet the demand of the past few years.

Klingenberg says that from the beginning her mission has been to make passive housing a mass-market solution to the impending crisis of climate change. She wants it to be affordable and mainstream, accessible to builders and homeowners of all economic levels—not just the wealthy. “It never made sense that I had to tell people they had to buy very expensive European components,” she says. “We should be able to build with American materials.”

She began questioning the German model after a couple of what she says were “painful” projects. An early example, built in Louisiana in 2010, failed miserably. By not taking into consideration the humidity of that specific climate—a climate that has no counterpart in Germany—the house developed excessive moisture buildup and overheating problems. Similar problems have arisen in very cold climates, she adds, such as Edmonton, Alberta, where an excess of south-facing windows and an inadequate heat recovery system led to discomfort in both winter and summer.

In 2012, armed with a U.S. Department of Energy grant channeled through Building Science Corp. (BSC)—a powerful American research institute that for years had opposed passive housing as a one-size-fits-all approach—PHIUS conducted a study that concluded that BSC had it right all along. The German-style single energy target (15 kilowatt hours per square meter per year) was “not scientifically defensible for all climate zones,” it concluded.

A Passive House during construction phase in Portland, Oregon, with signature triple-layered windows and a new air exchange duct system awaiting installation. | Mark Peterson for Politico Magazine/Redux Pictures

“We finally did the math and had to agree with them,” Klingenberg says. “We’re now on the same page as the building science people. Their main objection was excessive insulation. That it wasn’t cost-effective, as the Germans claimed.”

Feist doesn’t have much sympathy for the American concerns. His take is that regardless of local climate, Passive House refers to a performance standard—one that’s defined by a single numerical energy target of 15 kilowatt hours. “There are a lot of things in the United States that are just misunderstood,” he says. “Of course, passive house is a performance standard. It’s not a descriptive standard. The standard is defined by the performance.”

He goes on to say that while different climates may demand different solutions, their heating and cooling standards should be measured by the same yardstick. In Germany, he explains the majority of new windows being installed are triple paned. In Helsinki, they are quadruple paned. And in Rome, they are double paned. The same distinctions should apply to cities as diverse as Miami and Fairbanks.

That explanation doesn’t satisfy builders like Sam Hagerman, co-owner of Hammer and Hand, Inc., a Portland- and Seattle-based builder that is currently consulting on a Passive House project in Bhutan. “The Germans didn’t listen to us,” Hagerman says. “They didn’t believe we had real problems that had to be accounted for. We were ‘lazy Americans.’ We were telling them, ‘Your model says this thing works this way, and we have building failure on our hands.’”

The revised approach has met with outrage from early adapters in the movement, many of whom have aligned themselves with PHI and accuse PHIUS of gutting the standards. They argue that as long as a single rigorous standard is maintained, American manufacturing will be forced to meet the demand. It’s already happening in important ways, according to Everhart, who points out that several large window makers have recently begun producing triple-pane windows.

The split got nasty quickly. Everhart and Klingenberg effectively ended their friendship. In 2010, Klingenberg accompanied his family on a short vacation to the Columbia River Gorge. Today, they don’t speak. When his house appeared on Portland’s Passive House Tour last year, she waited on the sidewalk and didn’t come in.

Internationally, matters became so fractious by 2012 that the German organization demanded that the American one be forbidden from using the term Passive House. (The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office denied the appeal.) That same year, PHIUS issued a cease-and-desist order against its estranged New York chapter, which had thrown its weight behind PHI. PHIUS demanded that the New Yorkers stop describing themselves as certified Passive House consultants.

In 2012, PHIUS rolled out a new tool, known as WUFI Passive, that aimed to capture all the climatological nuances of North America. It employs metrics for around 1,000 different climates—so extensive that there are three different climates just for Portland. The formula is based on the “sweet spot” for performance and cost-effectiveness in every location for which there exists standardized climate data. The energy standards can vary from 3.15 to 41.64 kilowatts per year per square meter for heating, and 3.15 to 67.5 for cooling.

Stephen Aguier in front of Ankeny Row, the seven-unit co-housing community in Portland’s up-and-coming Buckman neighborhood that he helped design. | Mark Peterson for Politico Magazine/Redux Pictures

The new standards are so complex that some builders say it’s become more obstacle than help. “In the effort to tailor it to the various regions, I think PHIUS has made it incredibly messy,” says Jeff Stern, a Portland architect who lives in a passive house of his own design. “It was already complicated and data driven. But now the west side of Portland has slightly different criteria from the east side of Portland. They’re changing how air tightness is measured. They’re creating their own language.”

He quickly adds that the differences between the two groups don’t matter to him. He just wants to work, keep his head down and stay out of the fight. Indeed, he no longer bothers with certification—PHI or PHIUS.

“It just becomes a badge,” he says. “My clients don’t care.”

What they want—and get—is “an amazing performing house.” At home in winter, Stern and his wife rarely turn on the heat. Nor do they need air conditioning; to cool the house, they use exterior blinds on the south windows.

At the end of the day, after all the fighting, it’s still about simplicity.

***

The kerfuffle over the Passive House standards is a microcosm of the politics that have long surrounded the history of energy-efficient building in the U.S., which was born out of the worries of the 1973 oil embargo. Jimmy Carter’s administration began offering federal incentives to build houses with highly efficient envelopes. The president installed 32 solar panels on the White House roof and set a goal of deriving 20 percent of U.S. energy needs from renewable sources by 2000.

That policy was reversed under President Ronald Reagan. By 1986, his administration had gutted the research and development budgets at the DOE and recommitted the nation to a reliance on fossil fuels. As final insult, Reagan ordered the solar panels removed from the White House roof. (They were reinstalled under President Obama in 2010.)

It was during the Reagan years—as some American building scientists moved to Europe and others changed career paths—that Feist took up the slack. German energy was still costly and he, along with Swedish physicist Bo Adamson, began refining the principles first pioneered in North America.

One of their most important models was a 1977 demonstration house called the Saskatchewan Conversation House. This nearly airtight Canadian building had triple-glazed windows, large amounts of insulation in the roof and walls, and one of the world’s first heat-recovery ventilators.

Stephen Aiguier was eight years old when his father, a jack-of-all-trades, sought to build a similar airtight house in Hinesburg, Vermont. His father oriented it for southern exposure, with shade trees for hot summer days, large amounts of insulation and quadruple pane windows.

The project had a profound effect on Aiguier, who 18 years later moved to Portland to build energy-efficient houses. He recently completed a seven unit co-housing community in Portland’s up-and-coming Buckman neighborhood, near downtown. Known as Ankeny Row, it was inspired by Passive House and certified for Zero Net Energy, which means that the amount of energy consumed by a building is equal to the amount of renewable energy created on the site.

The townhouses’ bamboo floors sit atop 16 inches of insulation. Their doors are four-inch thick Meranti, a tropical wood sometimes known as Philippine mahogany. The stairway is maple. All wood is certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, guaranteeing that it’s been harvested from sustainably managed forests.

The windows and doors were imported from Poland, and the white European tiles of the backsplash glisten behind an induction cooktop so efficient it can boil a pot of potatoes in five minutes. When guests come over, the ventilating system can be boosted to “party” mode, bringing in more fresh filtered air from the outside.

Ever since Dick Benner and Lavinia Gordon moved in last January, their energy bills have shown a surplus. They wanted a wood-burning fireplace, but Aiguier said no; the toxic emissions of burning wood didn’t align with clean air goals.

along.

Residents of the Passive Apartment complex in Ankeny Row | Mark Peterson for Politico Magazine/Redux Pictures

He did, however, allow for the installation of an ethanol fireplace with a small flame that adds ambiance and, in a passive building, enough heat to warm a 1,400 square foot structure.

“When people come in they very often say, ‘Boy it really smells great in here,’” says Gordon, a retired lawyer. “We wanted to create a place to live that was walkable and hikeable and close to a grocery store, a place where we could `age’ in place, and that also was green. That’s why we were so attracted to passive house.”

The cost of buying into Ankeny Row reflects the attention to detail—and the fact that building to passive standards costs an additional 15 percent over regular construction, according to Aiguier. Each of the two-story townhouses sold for between $600,000 and $725,000—approximately double the $340,000 median price for a three-bedroom house in Portland.

That price premium was just one reason why housing advocates in Portland were taken aback by the announcement that the Orchards project would embrace passive standards. Green building was for the likes of Ankeny Row. It didn’t typically appear in the same sentence with low-income housing. “It took what I thought was very much an outlier in the green building continuum and brought it into focus,” says Alisa Kane, Green Building Manager of Portland’s Bureau of Planning and Sustainability. “Up to now, green building has been for the haves. When I saw this project, I thought finally, it’s arrived for the have-nots.”

In fact, Orchards is not the only affordable housing project in the country. The one in Pittsburgh opened last February. Both of these projects were sparked by a tour of German passive houses that American housing advocates took in 2010.

What they saw “made so much sense,” recalls Dee Walsh, who was on that tour. At the time, she was executive director of REACH Community Development, the nonprofit agency that commissioned and currently operates Orchards. “It didn’t seem complicated. It was just a very straightforward approach. You orient a building in a good way, insulate the walls and take advantage of natural airing and cooling in the evening.”

Walsh was so impressed that upon her return she insisted that a passive building be written into REACH’s five-year strategic plan. “It totally synced with our mission in terms of lowering people’s cost of living,” she explains.

These days, Walsh is an executive vice president at Housing Partnership Network, a Boston-based collaborative made up of 100 housing and community nonprofits around the country. And like a growing number of housing experts, she believes that affordable housing may prove one of the critical markets for passive building in the U.S.

Linda Metropulos, director of Housing and Neighborhood Development for Action-Housing Inc. in Pittsburgh, was on that same tour and returned from Germany similarly inspired.

Architect Rob Hawthorne says that he can’t build passive homes fast enough in Portland these days. | Mark Peterson for Politico Magazine/Redux Pictures

Four months before Orchards opened its doors in early July, Action-Housing unveiled its Uptown Lofts on Fifth, a 24-unit housing project for 18- to 23-year-olds phasing out of foster care. The project received low-income housing credits from the state of Pennsylvania—the first time any state has awarded tax benefits for passive housing.

There were no such incentives in Oregon. In other ways, too, the Orchards project encountered more pushback than welcome, Walsh says. She remembers several community meetings in which neighbors from the surrounding market-rate apartment houses and condominiums questioned the advent of an affordable housing project in their midst.

But the biggest challenge was in the building’s materials. The triple pane windows and four-inch thick doors had to be imported, and the initial cost estimates came in 25 percent over standard construction. The final bill came to $14.5 million—still 11 percent over standard construction but considered manageable.

Most importantly, the project delivered REACH’s goal of delivering affordability for its tenants. A recent cost analysis projects that the utility bills for one-person households will be reduced by 50 percent—a substantial savings for workers on limited incomes ranging between $15,450 and $25,750.

But the tenants can achieve those savings only by attending to a strict regimen that includes “night flushing”—otherwise known as opening one’s windows, when the outside air turns cool during summer months. A conspicuously placed stairway tacitly encourages people to use it instead of the tucked-away elevator.

REACH wants to capitalize on “the Prius effect,” to get the occupants so invested in the results that, in the words of Graham Irwin, they’ll “try to dial in” and use as little energy as possible. To accomplish that, management mounted the five-foot screen on a wall in the lobby, encouraging tenants to pay attention to every kilowatt consumed in the 57 units. “It’s not foisted on them,” emphasizes Ben Sturtz, REACH’s housing development project manager. “But it shows each unit and cycles through it. It almost treats their energy usage as a budget. We’ve worked to educate the tenants on using windows, opening them at night and closing and using shades during the day.”

Complaints about privacy invasion were countered with a reward system, offering prizes to the thriftiest energy consumer each month. At first, it was suggested that the winner be offered a prime spot in the building’s parking lot. But when it turned out that many of the tenants didn’t own cars, management decided it had to find a better incentive. They’re still looking.

***

Rob Hawthorne says that he can’t build passive homes fast enough in Portland these days. He built his first passive house on spec during the economic recession of 2008. Work had slowed to a crawl at GBD Architects, his employer. Layoffs were the rule of thumb.

Hawthorne asked for an unpaid leave, and bought an abandoned house in Portland’s North Tabor neighborhood. It was in such disrepair that he was able to tear it down by hand, before beginning the slow process of building it back up—according to Passive House standards, using an Excel spreadsheet that required the input of details “down to the centimeter, a ton more information than anything I’d ever seen.”

The most challenging step was the blower door test, which measures the amount of air leakage in a building. A piece of red fabric, called the “shroud,” is stretched across a doorframe, and a fan, inserted through a hole in the fabric, begins pulling air out of the building. The more air it is able to extract, the leakier the building.

Ryan Shanahan of Earth Advantage Home Certification conducts a blower test, which evaluates how much air the house retains. | Mark Peterson for Politico Magazine/Redux Pictures

That test is the crucible of passive building. A builder like Hawthorne approaches it with the precision of a heart surgeon, knowing that a single errant nail hole somewhere in the house can make all the difference in the results. Though it only lasts half an hour, the lead-up to it is months in the making.

“It’s exciting,” Hawthorne says. “Like building a boat and putting it in the water for the first time. There’ve been times where we hooked up the fan and we were way off. And the problem turns out to be a drain trap for a bathtub that didn’t have any water in it, so the air will be sucking through the plumbing system. Or we forgot to close a window all the way. Or the time we realized the roofer had put a screw in the roof and decided to take it out.”

As of today, Hawthorne and his partner, Bart Bergquist, have completed six single-family houses. All were built on spec and sold before construction was finished. Their average price was $450,000. One of his houses was listed among “The 7 Best AirBnb Rentals in Portland” by Travel + Leisure and “10 Amazing New Homes” by Portland Monthly.

Which is why he remains puzzled by the feedback he’s gotten from many of the area’s traditional builders. Asked to take part in a recent panel discussion by the Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance, he clearly was recruited to play the part of “the crazy builder.” “It was depressing,” he recalls. “The other builders said, ‘We like the idea but unless the additional cost to us is zero, we aren’t interested.’ They said no one was interested. But that’s not my experience.”

The cost of building a passive house is still under debate. A few years ago, German-based PHI said that the extra cost in the U.S. ran at around 6 percent. Many Portland builders today put it between 10 percent and 15 percent.

Yes, they say, energy-efficient windows and doors continue to drop in price as more companies enter the market. But building an energy efficient house will always be more expensive. Its very design necessitates a more rigorous approach, beginning with waterproofing details typically waived in standard construction. “In a typical house, if you get water in a wall, it dries out,” explains Hawthorne. “But in a house that’s got a lot of insulation and is very airtight, it doesn’t have the opportunity to dry out. So it becomes much more important to keep the water out in the design of the envelope.”

Architect Rob Hawthorne at one of his Passive House construction sites, with building partner Bart Berquist. | Mark Peterson for Politico Magazine/Redux Pictures

More than granite countertops and high-end faucets, such rigorous construction is an example of the true amenities that no visitor will ever see. No water in the walls, no mold. Which is why Aiguier argues that when it comes to passive housing, a stronger case can be made for the health benefits of clean air than for energy or cost.

The future success of this revolutionary approach may rest upon something as prosaic (and American) as market rebranding. It’s time to give Passive House a new name, Aiguier suggests, something that gets across the green lifestyle it promises without leaving luxury behind. “It’s a straight translation from the German—and the Germans are not known for their humor,” Aiguier says. “It has a bit of a negative connotation in the U.S. In people’s minds, it’s about hippies in long hair and Birkenstocks. Abject denial of energy, exclusive of luxury. We’re trying to change that with our product.”

Perhaps Wolfgang Feist was really doing those American upstarts a favor when he tried to stop them from using the passive house trademark.