29 - Elrond Burrell - VIA architecture
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James: Hello and welcome to Marketing Passive House, the podcast where we hear from architects, designers, builders, suppliers, owners, and other experts in the passive house and high performance building space. We'll be talking about what's working and what's needed when it comes to marketing buildings that meet or aspire to the passive house standard.

James: I'm your host, James Turner, and today I'm joined by Elrond Burrell, architect and owner of VIA Architecture. As well as the program director for Building Science and a senior lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington's, faculty of Architecture and Design Innovation. Elrond, welcome to the show.

Elrond: Hi, James. Nice to chat to you.

James: Thank you. So before we get into it, and for people who are just meeting you for the first time, could you share a little bit more about who you are, what you do, and how you started on your passive house journey?

Elrond: Sure. As you said in the introduction, I'm an architect and I studied architecture at the Victoria University of Wellington, the one that I'm now teaching at.

James: Nice.

Elrond: obviously a long time ago. And then after studying architecture, I worked in New Zealand for a little while. It wasn't, the economy wasn't that great, so I got a short term job and then and then I went off to England and my. My family had come out from England a few generations back, so I had to easy kind of route into moving to England and working there. Essentially then I spent 18 years working in England. So the first half of my career as an architect all in England. And while I was working at England I worked for. latter part of my time there. I worked for a decade for a company called Architype And Architype, it's specialized in sustainable architecture since their inception. Really, and they still do now, We were doing projects that were energy efficient using mass timber and timber construction and green roofs and getting green building ratings and things like that.

Elrond: Very early on. So before this sort of became more of a mainstream concern,

Elrond: While we were doing that, we what did we do? We did some research on our projects and we worked with the university and went back and monitored a number of our completed projects, and we also explored some of our ongoing projects that we're working on, and we found that, we found that although we were building very energy efficient buildings, they weren't really living up to our own expectations for them and that they weren't performing as well as we had hoped or as well as we thought they should be. And this this really alerted us to this idea of a performance gap, which became quite a topic of conversation in the UK for quite a long time and still ongoing. And. Other parts of the world as well in that we design buildings, but we don't often check that they live up to our expectations or meet what we promised them to deliver. And building regulations and building codes are really just about compliance at the stage of, preparation for the building not even when it's completed usually.

Elrond: And so there was nothing that was checking and so many other things. We have this feedback loop where we design and build or manufacture and then we test to see does it, does it live up to what expected to before we sell it to a consumer or before we pass it on? Whereas with buildings, we have a bit of a blind spot there where we just every building is a prototype and done once. And then we design it as architects often design it and walk away and then we don't know what happens. because we did this research and found, we had this really clear gap and, our buildings were performing much better than what the regulations required, but still not what we had expected some of my colleagues did some research then into other options and found that the passive house standard was something which had already cracked this issue in a sense.

Elrond: The building physicists that created the standard had really identified where the weaknesses were in design and construction and the kind of whole quality assurance of the process. in place this building standard that meant you could design something with very high certainty of your predictions about how it would perform very good match with what it actually delivered in the end. And so we took that as a sort of, challenge in a sense. And so we went, we had a client that we were doing repeat projects for, which was a city council. So we went back to them and said, okay, on our next project we wanna do passive house because we think it's gonna give you the outcomes that that we are predicting and we think it's gonna give you better outcomes.

Elrond: And what we've been able to deliver so far. And they were they were very sympathetic and very understanding clients. This was in about. Oh, I'm trying to think when, it would've been about 2008 or 2009 or something like that. And they said, sure, that's fine. If you wanna do passive house. the next projects.

Elrond: You can do that if you want to. We don't have any extra budget and we don't have any extra time on the program, but if you wanna do it and you think you can, then yeah, go for it. And these were, we were doing quite substantial school projects, so they, they had a reasonable sized budget and they had a reasonable, program to deliver them and things.

Elrond: So it wasn't like a small house on a very tight budget. These are, substantial projects. And so we did those first, we did two projects in parallel with them, and we did those first two projects and aimed for passive house. And in the end there was some other people in the country doing passive house at the same time, but there'd been in the UK at the time.

Elrond: There'd been very limited number of projects built to the passive standard. And so when we got the two, these two schools we did certified. at that time there was maybe. One other school that got certified around the same time or something like that. So it's like really the very first of the

Elrond: Scale passive house projects in the country. And it really built from there very quickly. Like we really found that. I guess we did publicize quite a bit the performance of it as well as the sort of architectural side of it. So some of those projects won architectural awards, but they also won awards for performance and for sustainability and things like that.

Elrond: So that sort of helped cement the reputation of what we were doing, but also of passive houses living up to what it promised.

Elrond: And so we quite quickly ended up doing. Like large scale apartment buildings and things like that. And so developed quite a large portfolio of projects that were large scale passive house, and we hadn't done any. Private homes or individual houses passive us at that point. Which is the reverse of quite a few people,

James: Yeah.

Elrond: a few architects come into passive from the individual, the single family home kind of project. So that was quite interesting and had its own set of challenges. And we had a couple of consultants that we'd worked with on sustainability for quite a while, and they really championed the passive house and they did the passive house energy modeling on the first projects with us and. Really helped us develop our internal skills working with them. then some people in the office got trained and so we could carry on with some of that ourselves. although we found on the really large projects, it was really. good to work with some external consultants because even where we might have had comparable skills, they brought a different viewpoint to things and they brought an outside pair of eyes to look over what we were doing. And they weren't, they weren't like embedded in the architectural process so they could look at it very objectively and just give us pointers about where we needed to think differently or innovate on our solutions or things like that, that we were maybe a little bit blind to 'cause we were just too close to it.

James: Yeah.

Elrond: So in those projects we worked with Nick Grant and Alan Clark, and both of them have presented at passive house conferences and things like that. So people in the passive house community probably know who they are. They're quite legendary and great to work with. yeah. And then we that was our journey as a firm.

Elrond: And then me personally, I was an associate in the firm and so I, I was kinda managing teams of people and some of these big projects and things, and so so much in the nitty gritty of the energy modeling or the details of some of these. And so it was only like about six years later in 2016 that actually I got round to doing the passive house training myself. And my argument was that even if I wasn't gonna be the one doing the energy model on, on one of these big projects, it was really valuable to that personal insight and understanding into what was going on there and the physics of it. And so also quite different to a lot of other people by that point.

Elrond: I'd had several years delivering passive house projects and knew what they meant from a construction and design point of view in quite some detail without ever having done the course. So that was really good because I found the course was. Very practical and down to earth and easy to relate to because it, I'd been working on projects that were doing it already.

Elrond: It wasn't, some courses feel a bit abstract because they're really opening your eyes to something very new. It was still tough though. It was still a lot of

James: Yeah.

Elrond: which really caused me to really caused my brain to really grow to kinda deal with that stuff. And as well as that, my sort of interest in it was really. I felt as an architect, it was really like a, an epiphany when I first learned about passive house. Not even when I did the course, but just when I first learned about it and started working on it because I just felt as architects, so many of our design decisions around the performance of a building are made on. Either very elemental approaches, so just looking at something in isolation like the wall performance or the window performance, or they're made on really intuition and kind of guesswork and obviously intuition's got a good place in design and there's, it's important. But passive house, just giving us the tools and the methods to quantify those things

Elrond: Be able to say, okay, if we change the design and, have more windows or fewer windows or bigger windows, or have the roof shading this side of the building more or less or whatever, that it was very quick and easy to quantify the difference that would make on the energy performance of the building and on the comfort and the experience for the people in the building, which was. Maybe just having a slightly sort of scientific brain or something like that. But that just really appealed to me very strongly about being able to quantify and provide more evidence for kind of design decisions that I was making rather than just having a conversation with a, client and saying I can assure you it's gonna be better because I,

Elrond: As an architect, I have authority and I know what I'm talking about. Or because I feel it will be better or, you know, whatever. And just actually being able to back that up with some more evidence was really good. And especially dealing with institutional clients there's, it's a different relationship with clients with somebody's own house than it is for an institutional project, like a school or a apartment building or social housing or things like that. And so that I felt that was really a. And added strength as an architect to be able to bring that into the design process. And and I never, even in those early stages, never really found it to be. A sort of an undue constraint, like as architects we're used to working with constraints all the time, and because we were doing a lot of public projects, they always had budget constraints and time constraints and lots of other kind of logistical constraints and things.

Elrond: If you're doing schools you have to work out like where does the school operate while you're building and what happens to their playgrounds and everything else. There's always constraints you work with and they

Elrond: Help shape the design process and the solutions you come up with. And, really important part of the creative process I find. And so passive house just fitted into that quite well and in the sense of some other constraints that we could work with that helped shape what the outcomes are gonna be. So it was it was a really but I still feel excited about it today, which is, years later it's it's still just I still feel a real passion for it in the sense that it feels like it's, it feels like it adds another layer of really important meaning to architecture, and I feel like

Elrond: I've always felt like this pursuit for meaning in what I'm doing, whether it's architecture or other things as well. And so for me that is a real sense of sort of satisfaction and, importance about the work in terms of doing that.

James: Yeah, that really hits home that when you said that, you make these buildings and you move on, you don't really know what they're

Elrond: yeah.

James: happen to be friends with the client, you probably aren't invited over for tea where they say, oh don't sit there. You'll be too cold near the window, or, that kind of thing.

James: So

Elrond: True.

James: this way you get. That feedback.

James: And when were you drawn to Architype because of their sustainable sort of cutting edgeness or was that just a coincidence and you just fell into it?

Elrond: That was the draw card really, because I'd worked in commercial architecture for quite a while and I'd worked in small practice doing, private houses and small additions and other small things. And then I'd walk, I'd worked in public architecture for a council as an architect on a swimming pool project and various other things.

Elrond: So I'd had quite a varied career before then,

James: Gotcha.

Elrond: always personally had quite a deep interest in sustainability and. In New Zealand the standard form of like house construction is timber frame. And so I'd been very interested in that seeing that doing a lot of timber construction in the UK as well.

Elrond: And so that appealed to me from a sort of a feeling, like a connection or a knowledge about that side of things. Whereas it was quite unusual in the uk, like the majority of.

James: Right.

Elrond: Buildings and houses were more concrete and masonry and things rather than timber frame. But yeah, sustainability was definitely part of it for me and starting from working in quite commercial practices to introducing sustainability within the commercial practice and trying to move that along a little bit, but not getting that far and to, yeah, eventually ending up working for Architype and. Where they specialize in sustainability. And the thing about it that was just so different from other architect's approaches is that sustainability wasn't like an add-on or an extra, or a sort of a bonus. It was just like sustainability was embedded in the thinking right from the start and not seen as something to. Not seeing as I said, not seeing something extra. It's just like in the design process, sustainability is one of the core elements of design,

James: Yeah.

Elrond: so the solutions were always design solutions, not add on or other things that was separate, and, when people see sustainability as something to add on to a, typical kind of project,

James: Right.

Elrond: very easy to take that off again as well if there's cost cutting or there's other things.

Elrond: Whereas if sustainability is actually embedded in the design and so the layout and the form and the shape and the materials are all part of the sustainability, then they're not extra. They're not something you can just take the scissors to and chop them off because you wanna save money. If you take that approach, you start with the budget and that's the envelope you're working within. So you are working on your design with the sustainability inherent in it, within that budget scope and not, again, so then you are working to the sort of outcomes you want rather than starting a process and trying to add things to it along the way because additive processes do add cost as well as adding other things.

Elrond: Whereas integrated processes are less of that kind of nature. So that was yeah, that was a big part of it. And and they had a very, and they still have a very human sort of ethos in the sense that it's very collaborative within the company and very collaborative with their consultants and things, and not such a hierarchical kind of top down. Somewhat traditional sort of architectural approach that you get.

Elrond: And so that was also one of the appeals of it was the sort of sustainability wasn't just about the. buildings that were produced, but also about the ways of working with each other and with people and things.

Elrond: Actually since I've moved back to New Zealand or actually just before I came back, I think they transitioned to an employee owned business as well.

Elrond: So

James: Nice.

Elrond: Very clear kind of interest in putting humans at the center of what they're doing in terms of the business and the project. That it was all appealing.

James: I like that that, yeah, the human centeredness. You brought that up too, in terms of passive house. And I feel like as far as integrating, like this is just what we do. I've heard it. People say that, you know, once you learn it, you can't unlearn it. Like you can't build a house knowingly. I mean, not can't obviously, but, you know, knowingly going against building science, let's say have you found, yeah.

Elrond: it's a real eyeopener.

James: Yeah,

Elrond: I wrote about this one time and I think I'll make the claim. I think I was the first person to write about it this way, and lots of other people have quoted it from there. And they may not know they're quoting it from me, but I think I'm, I think I'm the person that starts this

James: you heard it here.

Elrond: I wrote

James: Reclaim that.

Elrond: yes, and then I wrote about passive house like taking the red pill, like in matrix. that, you get the option as do you want your eyes open to reality? And then you you can't go back once you've done that with, for good or bad. Or you take the blue pill and you go back to sleep.

Elrond: The color, I think the colors are that way around. But anyway,

James: I don't know, but I know.

Elrond: and your eyes are open, you take the other, you go back to you know, the simulation rather than the actual reality.

Elrond: And, you know, part of my own personal interest in passive house I was doing podcasts and doing a few other things about it. Quite a well known podcaster in the uk being Adam Smith who has the House Planning Help podcast

James: Yep. Yep.

Elrond: After he had me on, he was kinda like, you show up in lots of places talking about these things, but why haven't you got like your own place where you talk about it yourself?

Elrond: And he suggested that I started writing a blog about passive house.

James: Right.

Elrond: I don't know if, I don't think there was any sort of other dedicated blogs about it at that stage, or not in the English language anyway. obviously there may have been in the European context in. German or what have you. I think he, he actually gifted me the domain elrond burrell - dot - com

James: Oh, nice.

Elrond: of a, as a kind of a nudge saying, here you go.

Elrond: You should really start something here. And, so I I chatted to him a bit about it and I did a bit of research about blogging and all that. 'cause I hadn't done that sort of thing before. And then I started writing a blog called Passivhaus in Plain English and Passive House spelled the German Way.

Elrond: So it was a bit of a sort of joke on the fact that in the UK we used the German spelling to make sure it's distinguished as a, a thing as a standard not, or like a brand almost, not as a general descriptor of like passive design, which gets confused with all sorts of

James: Yeah.

Elrond: And and yeah, so one of those, one of those blog posts I wrote was 10 things I hate about Passive House, which was, I think today to even till today is probably still the one that gets the most traffic because there are lots of people that get quite riled by passive house.

Elrond: And so they see that headline and they're curious about what that is. And and it was really about writing about how it changed my mindset and my career in lots of ways that I wouldn't have predicted.

Elrond: One of those was that sort of eye-opening of like, once you do passive earth training, or once you do a passive earth project, you can't look back.

Elrond: And like everywhere you look, thermal bridges or heat loss or kind of issues with buildings around you. And and I think that's true of many things. Once you understand something, then your mindset changes and you see the world different. It's you know, my kids play the game of yellow car or something like that, and suddenly everywhere they're

James: right.

Elrond: where the yellow cars are.

Elrond: They didn't notice before. And it's a bit like that, it's,

James: Yeah.

Elrond: a different part of your brain working. And there were some other things in that 10 things I Hate which was a play on a movie,

James: 10 things I hate about you. Yep. Yep.

Elrond: yeah, 10 Things I Hate About You, which is a, similar kind of thing in the way in that these two people start out really annoyed with each other, but that passion turns into falling in love with each other because of the kind of the friction created by it, and

Elrond: In a sense it was a bit of a joke about that as well as these things that were like irritating from a traditional architectural career point of view were actually things I'd started to love about passive arts too.

Elrond: There was other things like I found myself arguing with mechanical engineers about ventilation on projects or things like that because they wanted to stick to the rule of thumb in the traditional way.

Elrond: Whereas we knew there was a better way of doing these things and we wanted to do that.

Elrond: Which, is not that common for architects to start arguing with the engineers about things which are really in the engineering domain. Yeah, I can't remember. Can't remember the other, what the other 10 were right now, but I'm sure they're still all relevant,

James: Yeah, I'll link to, I'll link to it too. So if you're listening and you wanna check it out, check out the show notes.

Elrond: I did get some, I did get some interesting feedback from it as well. There's some people that actually to this day are still not. Keen on Passive House that, wrote me very short emails saying Yes, me too. And I was like, okay, obviously you didn't read the blog post.

James: Oops.

Elrond: And then I did get some I did get some emails from people in the Passivhaus Institute that were less than enthusiastic about it because they felt like it was not the sort of language they wanted to use about these things that they saw as a, see it

James: Heretical.

Elrond: Yeah.

Elrond: And I think the thing is I've been really. studying how to, like, how to write effective blog posts, how to write effective blog posts in a way that catches people's attention.

Elrond: And part of that is like headlining and like catching people.

James: Yep.

Elrond: And so it was really. It was like, it was really, felt like it was the height of blogging at that time though.

Elrond: There was like, blogging doesn't seem to be such a big thing now.

Elrond: Not in the same way that it was then. I guess there's things like substack now and that which are a bit more serious. Whereas back then it was just seemed to be this really big upturn and blogging and people blogging about blogging and

James: Yes.

Elrond: blogging and

James: Yep. Yep.

Elrond: sort of thing.

Elrond: And a sense, my blog rode that wave a little bit of just picking up the lessons other people had got from blogging about other things. was part of the fun of writing was like I'm not strictly writing about marketing, but the lessons from marketing apply in the sense that I really want to figure out how to communicate something which I'm passionate and excited about to other people that may not have yet caught the bug of it.

Elrond: And how can I bring that across? And the name passivhaus in plain English was meant to really give across the idea that this is gonna be easy for people to understand because,

Elrond: Some aspects of passive house are quite technical and quite complex and not everyone needs to know about all that sort of stuff.

Elrond: It's only if you're gonna be the one doing the energy modeling that it really matters. Or if you're doing the construction detailing. And, if more people know about passive house and ask for passive house, then that's gonna drive more uptake. And I was convinced, like on my blog, I wrote a manifesto, which was about you know, feels quite it feels like the sort of naive enthusiasm or whatever a little bit at this point. But but it still, I think it still mostly stands for what in terms of what I feel about architecture and what we should be doing in terms of meeting human needs and addressing climate change issues and energy scarcity and other aspects like that.

Elrond: And I think passive houses like a really important tool within that

James: Yep.

Elrond: within that sort of space. And, yeah, so I think I think on one hand though, I definitely failed in the plain English in terms of getting across to the average reader, I think, and it became apparent after. Maybe a year or so of writing that really my audience were other architects and other consultants and things. And so it's definitely still a plain English VER version of passive US compared to reading the PHPP manual or doing the course or something like that. But it was still at a reasonable level of sort of technical ability or whatever that an architect or a consultant would bring. And I guess that was, maybe because I was working in the space of large buildings and so clients were institutional clients and the people I was working with were consultants and that, and I wasn't, wasn't, so it wasn't really addressing householders or people that might commission a private home, because that wasn't really the space I was working in or what I was doing. But yeah, and I think it was, became like a real. Go to for quite a while and I think, it still has reasonable, small, steady sort of rate of traffic to the block these days,

James: Excellent.

Elrond: regularly for it for quite a while. But really got a lot of attention and like Lloyd Alter, who, at the time was running for tree hugger, which was like

James: Yep.

Elrond: biggest sustainability and green sort of websites in the world in the Western English speaking world. And

James: That's where I first

Elrond: on it and.

James: heard of you for sure, was from his writing. Yeah.

Elrond: Yes. And yeah

James: Okay.

Elrond: picked up on some of the things I was writing about and referenced them and quoted them and it I think some of them spurred on his thinking and understanding of how to talk about passive house and things as well. And there was this big shift, it was quite early on when I was writing blog posts, I think. But a lot of, all the initial stuff you read about passive house was very much about the technical performance and very much about the metrics and that sort of side of things because that like really excited a lot of people working on it first because like my journey, it was like suddenly I could deliver a building that was gonna meet the performance that we predicted it was going to for energy.

Elrond: But I picked up quite quickly Partly from projects, but partly from the training I did. I just remember one of the people, Peter Warm, who was teaching us in one of the workshops we did, Peter Warm was one of the certifiers in the uk. he did a workshop in the company for us. And I just remember him talking on one slide about some of the metrics of passive house and actually all these metrics are about comfort. They are about energy efficient, but the efficiency, but they're about providing comfort for people

Elrond: The experience of people in the building. And it really it really just, that was another like epiphany for me was that it, what passive has was really about comfort and not about, what it is about energy, but it's not just about energy.

Elrond: Of all the energy efficiency and the purpose of all the metrics about air tightness and heating demand and all these sort of things are really all centered around how you can provide comfort to people in an efficient way. And for me, that was really, as I say, that was another epiphany.

Elrond: And so I, I think I, I can't remember what the title of that blog post is, but it was something like Passive House. Comfort Efficiency or something like that, I think. And it was this social media and blogging and marketing kind of thing going around the time

Elrond: Gary Vaynerchuk, who was quite a big name, and the blogging and marketing where he was a proponent of this idea in social media marketing that you should focus on giving to your audience and providing value to your audience before you ask them for something.

Elrond: So lots of people tried marketing and they're just out there like slamming people, trying to get their money off them and do whatever, and he was like, no, you should give value and you should educate people and you should do things that are helpful for people.

Elrond: And then they will form positive relationship with you, and then they'll want to. Buy something from you or have a business relationship with you. So he had it as a boxing analogy as jab, and then right hook. And and so I basically just took that and interpreted that in a passive house way. And that was, like I said before, part of the fun of taking these marketing ideas and thinking like, how could we apply those to passive? And it was like this idea that passive houses, three quarters of it is about comfort and providing humans something they want and need. And then at the end of it, the take is actually then suddenly you're getting a very energy efficient building out of it, which in reality is not taking anything from the people.

Elrond: But

James: Yeah.

Elrond: it's it's the benefit of energy efficiency is partly for the people in the building, but it's partly for the bigger system of climate change and other things like that and what have you. So it's like a. It's not always the homeowners or the building user's kind of primary concern in a sense for them.

Elrond: They wanna be comfortable in enjoying the spaces there in

James: Very much. I feel like I've taken the torch a bit and that's what I'm trying to do now with this podcast. And I, and that's also my thinking of using the German spelling of the word. I bought both domains and then right at,

James: Right at the end, and I made both graphics and I was, I couldn't decide for a long time.

James: And then right at the end I actually it was a Lloyd Alter post that I think he was reiterating a point from previously. And he just completely convinced me. No, that's the way to go

Elrond: This is the other thing I just love about passivhaus so much, and I did write about it in, I think it's in a blog post or two as well. It's just you make connections with people because there's some sort of shared mission we're on. And like I said, Lloyd Alter quoted me and we had, we, we had very little correspondence early on and then. think there was like a really hyperactive community of people on Twitter about passive house and this is Twitter and the and that

James: The golden days.

Elrond: different place to

James: Yes.

Elrond: But but yeah, and so Lloyd was really involved in that and so we, we had lots of conversations and chats about.

Elrond: Stuff and various other people around the world as well, not just locally to where we were. And so passive house conferences, people were just like really open and sharing the good and the bad, like

James: yeah.

Elrond: what didn't work, and really. Prepared to be honest about their work and say, we did something and it didn't work out the way we wanted to, and if we did it again, we'd do it differently. Whereas a lot of architectural conferences and construction industry conferences are really about putting on a really glossy sort of good face on things and not necessarily telling you the things that go wrong.

Elrond: And so I think some people went to passive house conferences. They were a bit shocked because they felt like, oh, this is everything that's going wrong here.

Elrond: But it was like. People talking about it was like, it's a lead into like how you find a solution to that because it's a bunch of very creative people and very committed people.

Elrond: And I met Lloyd at a conference some point after that and, met various other people and, Wolfgang Feist, the scientist behind the standard,

Elrond: Active on Twist.

Elrond: He's very active on LinkedIn now actually.

James: Yep. Yep.

Elrond: And and I know you've had him on your podcast and he's very, makes himself available and gets involved in conversations

James: Yeah.

Elrond: It's really, it really is amazing the kind of connections you can get from that and through the blogging and through those connections, I ended up keynoting a passive house conference in Oakland in the US and

James: Nice.

Elrond: in Munich at the International Pathways Conference there one year and other things. And so really, think a lot of people really got that kind of point that we need to talk about passive house in a way that gets across what it means for people, not just about the sort of energy metrics or the technicalities about it or things like that.

Elrond: Yeah.

James: did.

Elrond: No, you go.

James: I was wondering if you found that the blogging did, did it bring you clients or work or was it more about the becoming someone to you? You were marketing it to architects more than the public, but I'm curious.

Elrond: very hard to, it's very hard to put actual figures to that.

James: I know, but

Elrond: Architecture takes, yes, architecture takes a while to build a relationship with a client before they'll pay you because it's like,

James: of course.

Elrond: it's a big, it's a big investment. Employing an architect is not just like buying a book off Amazon or something like that.

Elrond: And so I think I think it definitely. Helped in terms of the general marketing for what was going on in the UK at the time? I don't know. I don't know of any clients that came to Architype that said, oh, we heard of your, we know of you because of the blogging

Elrond: Architype had a strong reputation anyway, so it's like you.

Elrond: And the blog was very much my personal voice at that time. So it wasn't really, I wasn't taking on clients or anything myself. If anyone came to me, either bring them to Architype if the project was suitable, or if it was, if it didn't seem suitable, point them to a local architect. So there are definitely some people that I talked to that I pointed them in the direction of local architects in the UK that,

Elrond: They wanted to design their own house and then in. 2016 or towards the end of 2016 for family and personal reasons, decided to move back to New Zealand. at that point I did get a number of. A number of inquiries for work directly through the blog in the

James: nice.

Elrond: and maybe it was 'cause I made clear I'm leaving Architype, I'm moving back to New Zealand, I'm setting up my own business VIA architecture I'm available to work for you or do whatever.

Elrond: And so I did immediately get did immediately get a number of small projects and consultancy from that. So that was directly from the blogging.

James: Cool.

Elrond: And I also got, it also really helped me develop a network here in New Zealand before I came back to live here of other architects and people working in passive house, which was, I got contract work from some of them to help set up the business, which was good, also some suppliers, and so I. ProClima were very, I dunno if they're in Canada where you are, but they,

James: I know the name.

Elrond: company and they're, they're around quite a lot of the world and they provide air tightness, membranes and tapes among many other things.

Elrond: And they do a lot of educational work around building performance. Part of their marketing, but actually very strong educational work. So even if you don't, even if you're not interested in marketing, they do provide very useful kind of information to the industry. And invited me when I came back to. Do a kind of short speaking tour with them.

James: Oh, cool.

Elrond: them and another industry association took me around several centers in New Zealand and set up like small symposiums where there was a few presentations and I gave a large presentation about passive house and my experience in the UK and the sort of relevance to New Zealand and things like that.

Elrond: And so that was very helpful for setting up a business. Nothing

James: Yeah.

Elrond: getting a lot of visibility.

James: Yep.

Elrond: known straight away. And they referred a client to me quite early on. So actually the first first private house project I got in New Zealand was actually directly referred from at ProClima, which was very nice of them.

Elrond: So yeah, it definitely led to some projects but as part of the sort of just having awareness of. Of who I was and what skills and what have you. I brought, and yeah, and when I came back to New Zealand, there was just really the start of passive house growing in New Zealand.

Elrond: Like the very first project in New Zealand was in 2012. And so I got here at the end of 2016, start of 2017, got underway

Elrond: And grew from just being myself up to having, four, five people working for me at one stage and we

James: Nice.

Elrond: doing exclusively passive house projects, so private houses and passive house consulting.

Elrond: So working with other people to provide the passive house modeling and the thermal bridge modeling and de like review of construction details and assistance and how they do that. You know, when we were when the, so the business is very quiet now because of, I've had a few career changes, which I can talk about, but also

James: Yep.

Elrond: the economy here has changed and so lots of architects have really got much lower workloads or gone out of business even. And so when we were really thriving and had a lot of work going on, then, we were split half and half between doing our own projects and consulting for other people. And it made for a really. A really interesting work life because I

James: I bet

Elrond: many other people's work and help them do their work better and also doing their own work.

Elrond: And so it's just if you're a small architect with just a small business, you may not see many projects. But because of doing the consulting, I just saw lots of other work and got lots of insights into how people design and build stuff in New Zealand that, I hadn't been working here for quite a long time, so things had changed a bit from when I'd last worked here,

Elrond: Which was really interesting.

Elrond: And we did at that point end up doing a lot of consulting on projects that were not passive house, but it was just part of the general. Move where more architects and more clients were looking to have more have higher level of energy efficiency in their projects. And they wanted to understand their performance, which is, helping them, helping along the path towards thinking about passive house when they start to just actually get clear on the building performance.

Elrond: I think so, yeah. So that was yeah, so it was good. It was really enjoyable. And yeah, the business is still running today. We've got only got a couple of projects on as I said I had a bit of a career, a few

James: Yes.

Elrond: actually, and that I actually got headhunted to go and work for the government and work in the building performance branch of one of the ministries here in New Zealand to work on a program called Building for Climate Change, which is looking at how the bidding regulations could, Develop towards a very high level of energy efficiency and towards a very good level of embodied carbon and resilience for kind of extreme weather events and things like that. And so I worked there part-time while running the business for four and a half years. It was wanted somebody that had, good experience with energy and carbon and international experience and good connections and what have you. So was it was really good from my perspective. I could really really contribute a lot to that kind of work. after a while it was became quite frustrating because of working in government bureaucracies quite a different experience to working as an architect and

James: I can imagine.

Elrond: sector. Yeah. And then politics changed quite a bit. And then and then that program got shut down. And so then, a lot of jobs got removed at that point, including my own one. So, so I went back to practice and then or went back to being fully in the practice side of things. then, I was just talking to some people at the university about what was going on there with research and other things, looking to see where there was some opportunities for collaboration on the research front maybe.

Elrond: And they said we've actually got a job opening here, so why don't you apply for the job? And I was really like, it was never in my kind of idea. Never in my mind that going into teaching would be part of my career or anything like that. And I guess you could say like. Doing the blog writing and some of that other stuff was in a sense sort of teaching, like

James: yeah. Mar marketing and teaching, there's a,

Elrond: Yeah.

James: or there should be a line

Elrond: the

James: you.

Elrond: yes, and all the kind of work that I've done, like Architype and my own practice were very, had a lot of research involved in it because we were always looking for solutions and not just doing, following the rule of thumb or taking the kind of status quo is read and

James: Yeah.

Elrond: always looking into things and understanding things at a deeper level was very much part of it.

Elrond: And, we did a lot of research into materials and durability and all sorts of things, so university job involves teaching and research. So although I hadn't ever had that kind of, I hadn't had an academic job or a tertiary education job. It was felt like it might be building on things I had experience of.

Elrond: And so yeah, so I'm just starting my second year of teaching at university this year.

James: Nice.

Elrond: Yeah, and I've been doing a mixture of, so last year I had a design studio and a construction course and. Although those things on the face of it may not have much to do with passive house, those just about passive house when I introduced myself to the students.

Elrond: So they have an awareness of something which they may not have otherwise heard of. them some examples of my project so they know my background and where I'm coming from, which again, just gives them something sort of way to locate me and to think about how things work in architecture. And then. Also talk about, like in the design studio, talk about some international process projects which have won awards for good design or have been, or have, like particularly I talked about the the Belgium, some of the work at the Belgium company, A2M who were very early proponents into a lot of.

Elrond: Passive house projects and they did some really interesting work with parametric design and using digital tools and scripting to develop some of their designs. And so that related to some part of the design studio I was teaching. So I introduced those ideas to the students that, doing really, up to date contemporary kind of digital design and using scripting and parametric tools and things like that is a. to use those tools to design really funky and interesting architecture,

Elrond: It's also possible to use those tools to like really integrate sustainable design and think about energy performance and shading and daylight and all those sort of things as part of the design process. Again, like this idea of integrating

James: Yeah. Yeah.

Elrond: process. So it didn't really feature heavily in the course, but it was I introduced it in different parts of it and construction the same as in the construction course they're doing detailing for high rise buildings, and so I was introducing them to the different control layers that you work through, which is not that common in New Zealand construction to have an understanding for control layers.

Elrond: Like some places like Canada, it's much better Understood. And that building science and the technicality of that

Elrond: And talked about talked about some of that in relation to passive house and. Do some lectures for other students introducing passive house as a construction methodology as well as a kind of performance standard. I worked with a bunch of people here in New Zealand in the Passive House Institute to the, sorry, the New Zealand Passive House Institute, not the German one. Develop a handbook of high performance construction details, which was taking construction details from certified projects in New Zealand and showing them in comparison to typical status quo details and then some high performance ones in between and different things as well. And so that book is free to download from the Passive House New Zealand website, so just passive house - dot - nz. Can download a copy of the High Performance Construction Details Handbook, which has details, thermal bridge calculations FRSI, so the kind of moisture calculations and embodied carbon calculations for all the kind of details in the

James: Oh wow.

Elrond: a really, a big project.

Elrond: And I, I. Oversaw the project. I didn't do a lot of the technical work. We had a, Jason Quinn, one of the certifiers here in New Zealand, do most of the technical work in that and his team. But that was like, for the students, that's like an incredible resource because they can go to that and they can see these are details that we know there's a certain performance of and we can consider. And the other thing was that in the construction project, in the construction course, some students, building science students. And so they do, I get them doing energy modeling and carbon modeling. And so they're not doing passive house or using PHPP, they're looking at international energy and carbon goals. And so some of the UN goals are quite closely aligned with passive house. And so it's putting it to them if we're gonna build to this level of performance, what do you need to do to achieve that? and this is again, on large scale buildings, so it's quite different to

Elrond: Single family home. And then this year I've, I'm teaching a different course. I'm teaching an environmental science course for second year students. And the university has actually built, bought PHPP for all of those students. So all

James: Oh wow.

Elrond: gonna get to use PHPP and they're not going to, they're not gonna have to design a passive house in this course because it's not really set up to do exactly that. they are gonna use PHPP for modeling the. The thermal performance of the construction envelope, the building envelope, and for calculating heating demand and a few other things as well. And so will come out of their second year course with the skills of. At least understanding the basics of using PHPP and the benefits they can get from using it in terms of a design process.

Elrond: So yeah, so I'm really I'm still like, this is second year in the thing and it's like, it is a much bigger career change than I anticipated. Teaching and researching and everything involved in that is like just a very different world to practicing as an architect.

Elrond: It is challenging and. At this stage of my career, like a big change like that, or in my age kind of thing, it's like, it feels a huge amount of brain growth and like a lot of challenges in terms of shifting like that, which is, I enjoy a lot of it. But some of it is still very tough. And,

Elrond: And so this year, my second year, hopefully it's gonna be a little bit easier than my first year. A little bit more familiar, not so many new things.

James: Yeah.

Elrond: just a lot of preparation for these courses and a lot of preparation for the teaching and things like that. It keeps me very busy. And,

James: I suspect you're,

Elrond: talking to students like the, these young people who just come outta high school and they're just starting on their journey and just see them understanding the. The reasons why you might do something different to the kind of status quo approach to stuff. So

James: yeah

Elrond: good. Yeah.

James: I feel like the, at the human level, you're integrating. Passive house into the design of their brains at an early stage. Like it's just there as a, like you've left little red pills scattered all around. And the greatly,

Elrond: Part of the thing is that people hear the term passive house and they think of, think it's something alien and it's only when they've had a look at a project or had a go at it, they realize, oh, it's not that different to what they normally do. It's just achieves a certain level of performance and delivers what it intends to deliver and it's not and like until they've just understand it's a thing they could be doing and should be doing, then it's just an alien concept.

James: Yeah. You don't have to learn German. There's a,

Elrond: right.

James: it's not

Elrond: Yeah.

James: a complete paradigm shift. It's just.

Elrond: actually, it wasn't actually me that did it, but while I was working for the government, one of my colleagues there actually amended the energy efficiency part of the building code in New Zealand and actually wrote in that if you're doing, if you're doing energy modeling as your means of compliance with the regulations, then you can use PHPP for that modeling.

Elrond: It wasn't like there was anything actually preventing you using it before then,

James: Right.

Elrond: that it's written into the building code and people reading through it will see it there. It's oh, okay, this is actually a valid option. We could do. That

James: Yes.

Elrond: Quite an important sort of thing of just like bringing awareness to the options that are available.

Elrond: So

James: Yeah. It feels like

Elrond: small things.

James: the end goal would be that just everyone adopts it as, oh, okay. If we're gonna build, we should build like this. And it would just become part of standard education.

Elrond: Different ways to get there. Like Scotland's going through this transformation moment to

James: Right.

Elrond: the the passive house equivalent to their building code. And if you read the sort of information published about it from the government there and from the Passivhaus Trust in the UK can see that. They've realized that passive house as a standard isn't like a, isn't like a perfect match for how regulations work. And so they do need to do something which they're calling equivalent rather than just wholesale adopt passive house. But they seem to have arrived at while they're doing that. Is also just saying passive house could, certification could be deemed to comply.

Elrond: So if you do that, it's one way of doing it. But,

James: Yeah.

Elrond: Is that. What we want is to sort of final outcomes for regulation things, I think is the things you get from passive house. So it doesn't necessarily have to be passive house, but it's okay, why would we do passive house?

Elrond: And the reasons why we do it are the same reasons we'd wanna regulate those kind of things

Elrond: Sure we can achieve it.

James: Yeah. I feel like your career it, in a word, is marketing passive house from, doing it to writing about it, to spreading it, to now teaching it low key teaching it. So thank you for coming on here to talk about that 'cause you know, it's the whole point of this podcast, so

Elrond: You

James: I really appreciate it.

Elrond: too much of a monologue for those listening, but hopefully it's interesting and people that dunno me, maybe it's a good introduc introduction to what I've been up to and things and if you, yeah, if you provide a link to the blog, I'm sure people will find some things of interest there.

Elrond: In there.

James: Yep.

Elrond: details there. They're welcome to email if they want to get in contact or chat about anything. And yeah.

James: Excellent. Okay. Anywhere else to find you online that you want or is that's the best one. The blog.

Elrond: I mean I'm active on linkedin

James: Are you active?

Elrond: just under my name and active there. And so if people want

James: Cool.

Elrond: and I although I'm not regularly blogging, there's one thing I still do in terms of the marketing space, is it just. Because I still enjoy finding out about new passive house projects, and so I just make it part of my regular routine that I just read stuff that's available about passive house, which is going on.

Elrond: So it's not it's not so regular now, but every week or every two weeks or something like that, I'll just put together a collection of projects I've seen going around the place and I'll just post them on LinkedIn and sometimes make a few comments about them or sometimes just share about them. LinkedIn's a bit of a funny place. Some people assume that there must be my projects and they from a marketing point of view, they try and approach me to sell me products for the project or whatever, which I always find a bit strange because, if they only have to read the article to realize it's nothing to do with me.

Elrond: It's just I'm enthusiastic about passive house and want other people to see that and understand it. And there's so much interesting and fascinating work going on around the world.

Elrond: And people don't always appreciate it because people are. Some architects are just working on their single family homes and their small part of the world, and they don't realize that there's museums and art galleries and police stations and hospitals being built around the world and in Canada, like fire stations and

James: Yep.

Elrond: things like that, which are which are being built and certified to the passivhaus standard.

Elrond: And just, I still find it, I still have a passion for all that. I still find it really

James: Yeah.

Elrond: find out about it. Yeah. So if people want that. That sort of awareness, then yeah, if they connect with me on LinkedIn, they'll see that I post stuff about things quite often.

Elrond: Welcome to if they want to.

James: Perfect. Thank you again for joining me today.

Elrond: No problem. You're welcome.

James: You've been listening to Marketing Passive House. I'm James Turner and I hope you'll join me again next time. I.