36 - John Loercher - Northeast Projects
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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 John Loercher, owner and consultant at Northeast Projects, professor of architecture and director of the Building Science Program at RPI, and trainer at Phius. John, welcome to the show.

John: Awesome. Thank you for having me, James

James: My pleasure.

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

John: Absolutely. Yeah, so I'm located a little south of Albany in New York. Grew up on Long Island, made my way not too far, from there now. I teach at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, RPI, in the architecture program there the director of the building sciences program as well, which is a four-year degree within the architecture school. Outside of that, I'm operating as a CPHC most-mostly in the Northeast, although we'll talk about that later. Things have been expanding a bit, in the past couple of years. And then I've been involved with Phius for quite some time as a trainer since 2017 now.

James: It's a long time.

John: Yeah.

James: That's great.

John: Yeah, we've seen many variations of the training within those couple years

James: Is it hard to adjust for you, or does the kind of core of it stay enough the same that you're tweaking things?

John: the role of the Passive House consultant of the, the CPHC stays fairly consistent, minus a couple updates here and there as, protocols are evolving. So that makes it easy because I'm just talking about what I'm doing, and we can especially some of the older trainers, we can kinda just flow and teach the course at this point.

John: But that's actually one of my projects right now working with Phius to revamp some of the Phius CPHC training so it's not freeform there's a little bit more structure to it so that we can actually go in and gauge what the students need a little bit more in the training rather than always speaking from just our experiences.

James: I get that. That kind of makes sense, as a system matures, that the way of teaching it can mature as well with experience and

John: Yeah, absolutely. And, you get-- or I've gotten so stuck in my way of teaching the course that it's been really nice to step to the periphery for a bit and look at it from more of an objective perspective think about, feedback from previous students and then, how do we make this much more of a interactive experience where it's not so much just about teaching you how to use Wolfie Passive anymore, that's really what the focus was previous to now.

John: But then really, getting into the application of concepts. So we're teaching the concepts in the very beginning, but then the whole phase two now, which has been my pet over the past couple of months, has been really focusing on how to prompt students on how to actually analyze a wall assembly and apply all of the concepts that they learned in the first part of the training. So-- And it's been actually really cool even to pers-- take the perspective even further out to my practice than being able to fold in, like, how do you actually operate as a CPHC in the world and add that as a module within the training, right? Thinking about like liabilities and timing and scheduling and coordination with different consultants, and it's really just made the training a lot more interesting and I think a lot more useful.

John: Hopefully. We'll see.

James: Yeah, I think that's a huge... Especially with skill-based learnings, that y- people are drawn to it 'cause they want the skill, because they want to do something. And then once they've got the skill, they realize that the doing something generally requires also this other set of skills, which is about how to make that work as a business or even a job.

James: Like even I would imagine like finding a job, convincing someone that they should have a CPHC in-house would equally be a separate skill set, right?

John: Yeah.

James: Yeah.

John: Yeah, absolutely. There's all, different ways that this can be marketed,

James: Yes

John: actually selling the op- the house,

John: Building, or just getting people in the kind of general industry drink the Kool-Aid,

James: Yep

John: speak, right? Even though it's more and more mainstream as we're seeing in,

John: States now

James: Yeah. I have a couple of follow-on questions already. But

John: Sure.

James: first thing I was wondering about, which logically should be the second thing, but whatever I was-- I'm really curious to know when you're teaching, like when you're training, when you're doing CPHC trainings, presumably that's not within the, your teaching job, like your professorship.

James: So do you find that... and I also presume that you at least, that in the building science department, that it comes up with your students who are like doing, undergrad or graduate school. So I'm curious to know if the fresh people who have no experience yet what the difference is maybe talking about it with them versus training people who've maybe been in the industry for 20 years doing it a different way

John: Yeah, that is a great question. It is a very different perspective, but ultimately not. There is one big commonality in that everyone's trying to get a job, right? And it's not just about necessarily like having more credentials so that you can get paid more. I think it's also that a lot of people see this as just a way to live a life that they're in a little bit more in alignment with their values. So I have seen people take pay cuts to-- I took a pay cut to go work at a, at an architecture firm that was doing Passive House consulting. So I think that's an interesting thing that is definitely shared between professionals and students. They see it as something that's just going to make the work that they're doing a little bit more pleasant and worth doing. And I can resonate with that for sure. Yeah, but then the other part is of course, it's always it always comes back to energy energy efficiency. So I think that is a big thing that professionals are being forced to take on just by building code in general, but of course, going way past building code in many circumstances as well. And I think that students, especially the students that are going through like an undergrad or graduate education right now or within the past, ten years or so, I have seen much more of an interest in that, in the kind of engineering and let's say like environmental engineering, but specific to architecture,

John: And really looking at the way that buildings use energy and thinking about like the very real energy consulting that's possible now with simulation, whether it be a whole building energy consumption simulation like what we're doing for Passive House.

John: But, computational fluid dynamics, looking at passive ventilation systems and natural daylighting simulation and, there's just really amazing tools that are available right now that were not available to me when I was in school. So I see Passive House as, one major part of the pie in the overall building science curriculum. Whereas often in the professional world, when we're going through training it's like we're all in on that because it's ultimately when people are coming-- when professionals are coming to the training, it's to achieve that certification, right? So there's certain things that we're willing to say, "Okay, I'm just gonna take the default there."

John: We're not really getting deep into lighting design, and passive ventilation, things like that. But that being said it's a really narrow focus, which allows us to go deeper than we really go with the students. There's a very practical level that we need to teach professionals that the students don't necessarily need to know yet. And like the paperwork and verification of certain things and double-checking your model, like the student work will never ultimately get built for the most part,

James: Right

John: the professionals are going right into like real-world liability, like very soon.

James: Great

John: there's very much a difference in perspective there

James: Excellent. Yeah. I suspected like there-- on the one hand, learning something, a new way of doing the thing that you already know how to do can be really frustrating.

John: Sure

James: I-- not like people are showing up there out, not out of choice. So obviously there's like internal motivation for them to even be there in the

James: first place. But there's still this feeling of changing what you do that's just so hard for humans versus students who are just like it's the on- not the only way, but if at, from a young age, this is just in the air, it, it's it doesn't come across as I could imagine students being like how, why wouldn't you build a building like this?

James: Like, why wouldn't you use this model?" It's cheaper to create a digital building than make a real one and take--

John: Yeah.

James: change it after.

John: In a context like RPI, where they're very used to seeing technology implemented

John: In not just like the architecture school, but all across the campus. So it's kind of part of the culture. Of course, we're gonna like really figure out how this building works as a piece of equipment,

John: It's just like the mentality there is really nice kinda in like the overall ethos in the architecture school.

James: So aligned as,

John: Yeah.

James: aligned in a different way,

John: yeah

James: not necessarily in this case the I don't know what you would call it, moral environmental line, but the sort of technical best practices line.

John: Yeah,

James: Yeah. The other thing I was gonna ask about is I'm-- You didn't mention it, but how did you first...

James: do you remember when you first heard about Passive House and

John: bookmarked that when you said it originally. Going-- Actually, this is a good segue 'cause it's, it goes back to my experience in school. When I was in my graduate degree of my master's in architecture at Parsons so I was about a block south of Union Square, New York. Really wonderful program, like amazing networking.

John: I met amazing pra-practitioners and professionals there for my two years there. Just happened to be in the right place at the right time. My first year, they started into an, a two-year endeavor with a Solar Decathlon competition entry. That's the US Department of Energy national competition.

John: There's 12 schools every time they run it. We partnered with Stevens Institute of Technology over in New Jersey, and we basically put in the submission together and through Laura Briggs, who's now at RISD one of my first, like real mentors in the space she was one of the early adopters of Passive House in New York and me and was a team of two hundred students all together between like marketing students architecture students, engineering students financial students that were like putting together this business model. Just really a gigantic amount of work. It ended up being a Passive House, long and short. So this was twenty eleven, so

James: Oh,

John: was like right as PHIUS was really becoming a thing.

James: Yep. Yep

John: so it was just at the absolute right time. So yeah, all of us were exposed to Passive House through that and the values.

John: We didn't all receive the training. Only a certain handful of students actually did the actual formal training but we all, were really bought in. And that building was built on the Washington Mall in DC, and then after the competition was over, it was transported to I believe it was Arlington, ha- donated to Habitat for Humanity.

John: So it still exists, which is amazing.

John: And that was, yeah, the seed that kind of grew into a whole career for me, which was great. Although there was a number of years where I wasn't involved with Passive House at all between graduation and then kinda getting back into it

James: Interesting. Did you-- Was that intentional or was it just circumstantial, like this was the job that was available and that kind of thing?

John: circumstantial.

James: Yeah.

John: great opportunity to work with one of my mentors in grad school, and I was there for a number of years after I graduated before my wife and I moved up to Hudson, New York. So very close to where we are now

James: Nice. But you made your way back to the, into the fold, f- firmly into the fold

John: Yeah. That was one of the plans when I had left that previous job. I knew that I wanted to do my Passive House consulting my CPHC course. so I, I enrolled in that in 2015. at the time, they did this amazing 10-day in-person training at Yestermorrow up in Vermont, and I went up there in January. The instructor that was supposed to teach it originally canceled, so I got super lucky. It was Kat Klingenberg was my instructor for the first three days, and she just totally had me convinced, like I was gonna do, I was gonna do anything I could to get back into this work. She ended up leaving.

John: Ryan Abendroth came in, who I'm still close colleague with today. He was my original kind of Woofy instructor. And shortly after that training, I left what I knew was gonna be a temporary job for me and started working at River Architects in Cold Spring, who was another early adopter of PHIUS in just in New York State

James: Cool. That's a fun journey. I like hearing that kind of those passionate moments where you're just like, "This has gotta be the thing," or I hear a lot of people say once you learn it, you can't really unlearn it. It's just, it's, it...

John: Totally true.

James: Yeah

John: Yeah, and it explodes into like expertise that you can apply even to non-certified projects, which I really love about it as well.

James: Nice. Yeah I'm I always think about that aspect, and I purposely put in my introduction meet or aspire to, which isn't meant to sound pejorative But just the idea that you can apply building science and make a better building that'll last longer and be healthier and more comfortable

John: Yeah, absolutely

James: within or without the program.

James: Yes, there's lots of benefits to certification, and it makes sense, and I see that. But at the same time It's still better for you and the world

John: Oh, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. No, I'm-- As I'm renovating my own house,

John: I'm constantly applying the knowledge and, just because of the nature of retrofitting, especially a phased retrofit over an unknown timeline certification would be impossible. But doesn't mean I can't reduce thermal bridging at a slab edge,

James: Yeah. Yeah

John: in just the same way I would in, any new construction

James: Yeah.

John: so

James: And you'll live with the ultimate benefit, which is the more comfortable space, right? Yeah

John: Yeah, that's what it all comes down to, is that experience

James: So on going on that-- in that direction a little bit, I was wondering, so you, you're obviously maybe more than most in a position where you're preaching to the choir more often because the--

John: Sure

James: from the nature of who you're talking to. But do you have any experiences memorable experiences where you've saw someone realize maybe a non-technical person say the kind of, why it is you do what you do, that kind of thing?

John: Yeah, there's definitely a couple really rewarding experiences that I'd also learned from. Anytime that I see a student of mine, I have a lot of anxiety when I'm sharing this with students, 'cause I love it so much, so I feel a little exposed what if they criticize the training, or they think it's too hard, or what-- they're in their second, third year of architecture school when they're going through a very technical, rigorous CPHC program with me at least. so it's always a weight off of my shoulders when, they end up going into the actual practice. I have a student from the building science program, was really, He was a hard read. I c- I could never tell if he was into the content or not. But he did well, and he ended up going on to this great job with Steven Winter Associates over in Boston, and he's having the time of his life and doing really great work. That's a super rewarding moment and that's, I've had that a couple times. But then, outside of my students one thing in particular, there's a family the child had a kind of mysterious immunocompromisation. I don't know exactly what the desig- you know, diagnosis was.

John: But, good friend Dan Levy who built a passive house in Woodstock, New York had the apartment over his garage was a certified enclosure as well. It was just like a little studio apartment, and he would put it on Airbnb.

John: Little passive house group here in the Hudson Valley, we used to always tell people, "Go stay at Dan Levy's house."

John: If you're trying to get a client, encourage them to go stay there for a night on the Airbnb, and you can get that experience. unfortunately, he doesn't have that house anymore, long story short. But anyway this family came, and they ended up staying for quite a few months because it was, like, one of the only things that they could find f- as far as a building that they could really live in and feel safe.

John: I think there was some sort of mold or bacteria, kind of sensitivity to not

James: Right

John: but the quality of the air. I wish I had more details that I could really, give to you about it, but it was it was really heartwarming 'cause this meant so much to them to be able to feel safe in their space.

John: It's something that we just take for granted of I'm comfortable in my house. And not everyone is. Maybe it's a rarity, but what if we could all have amazing indoor air quality and just perceive the benefits of that a little bit more?

James: Yeah, I think bringing it too into the family realm, like

James: If your kid is n- not thriving and it's the environment that you're currently providing whew, that's heavy. Like you,

John: Yeah,

James: wanna...

John: heavy

James: Like you wanna do the best you possibly can and just the idea of there being more...

James: Like I love when I hear about affordable housing. Like in the UK there's a lot of affordable housing projects that are to the passive house standard because depending where you are on the wealth scale, but, fixing that problem becomes exponentially harder when you have no control.

James: You're renting, you're, taking what's available. So I think, yeah, that is very heartwarming side of things.

John: Yeah

James: you mentioned expansion or expanding, and maybe we'll talk about that a bit later. So you've been working in the Northeast, but are you...

John: good catch. Yeah. this is actually a good a nice connection here. One of my classmates from that class in Parsons, that graduating class, Steve Scribner good friend of mine lives and owns Shape Architects in Denver, Colorado.

John: And unfortunately, because of the Mars- Marshall Fire there-- over the past couple of years, there's really just been an upsurge in passive-- certified passive buildings in the Colorado region. And now some of the utilities in the Denver area are offering, very nice incentives very like similar to what's going on in Massachusetts for single-family homes. Currently, Steve and I are working on six certified projects together between me and his team, and then yeah, a number of other proposals out.

John: So it's just a really great region to work in. And I'm, been out there a couple times to visit the job sites and meeting the contractors, and it's familiar enough to what I'm used to here in the Northeast. But then there's also just a couple things that are really nice about it.

John: For instance, the builders that are doing that work out there, not that the builders here aren't, really into it, but these guys are really into it.

James: Oh, really?

John: yeah, it's like kinda similar to that idea that I was saying earlier, just about alignment. It seems like there's a lot of construction companies that are value-aligned with this whole kind of fair share, low energy building movement.

James: That's very cool. Do you think that's maybe influenced by or as in reaction to the fires? Like the smoke tightness of Passive House, that kind of thing?

James: Is it...

John: I don't know. I don't know. I'm gonna have to pick their brains a little bit more as I get to know the region a little more. I know Steve, very much like me, just drank the Kool-Aid at a, at, a- an early part in the career. So I think for him it was always a no-brainer that he was gonna be designing passive houses.

John: But yeah I'll be out there in June to teach a CPHC, and I'm gonna visit some of those projects, so maybe I'll have to report back.

James: Nice. Yeah. Yeah, I feel like that's not that I would call it marketing, of course, but it's big events where people who normally don't have to think about or worry about details like the airtightness of their house, and then all of a sudden en masse have to and are like, "Oh, is there something we can do?"

James: And then there is actually a solution sitting out there, and it instantly becomes more interesting to people, right?

John: Yeah, and actually that's why I'm really appreciating that experience because it's forcing me to think about new constraints that I don't really have to think about in my past projects like fireproofing. Just yesterday I was working on a hygrothermal assessment of a wall-- I'm sorry, of a roof, and it was failing.

John: There was condensation risk in the cellulose insulation. And I said the easiest solution here is you just vent the roof." I thought for sure no-brainer. But they came back with no, actually the previous owner lost their house in a wildfire anything fire-related is a sensitive subject.

John: Let's make this, an unvented cold roof, and we're just gonna have to find out some different way to detail it." So that was interesting. Foundations are also quite more challenging.

James: Really?

John: yeah, absolutely. I have one project that w- it requires a grade beam, and the grade beam has to have a minimum six-inch space under that ground-- grade beam for the earth to go up and down. So

James: Not related to fire. This is like

John: Yeah, this is like seismic

James: Okay.

John: Y-yeah, it's pretty wild. We had to create this this space perimeter detail where the insulation and the vapor control layer of the foundation, like of the s- the floor, need to have some flexibility so they can move up and down relative to the foundation wall.

James: Wow. While still maintaining the barrier

John: Exactly.

James: Interesting

John: Yeah. So some fun little, just mental gymnastics

James: Do you find that's, for you personally, a benefit?

John: Oh, for sure.

James: Yeah

John: Definitely when I'm happiest is taking a number of constraints. In fact this is a great design pedagogy in general, is just-- and I take this from an old mentor kind of catalyzing constraints. Take a inventory of all the constraints of a project or a detail.

John: It's telescopic in that way. And then and then you have to problem solve until you find a solution that works and satisfies all those different constraints. You can do that as designing a building, you could do that as designing, a perimeter foundation detail. And yeah, I enjoy it

James: Nice. Yeah. I've heard it described that way before as like puzzle... It's basically just like if you're into puzzles and you're an architect, you'll love passive house. Like it's...

John: Yeah,

James: Yeah.

John: There's a lot of push and pull. You got one thing working, but now something else is failing, so how are we gonna come back into balance? And,

John: Ultimately it quantifies your targets, right? And that's

James: right

John: wanted to get back to it because I was living in the world of very design-based subjective architecture,

John: There was a few projects where my gut was telling me "That's not a great design," but people around me were loving it.

John: I just started to question a little bit about, like, how do you find what good architecture is? And not that, everyone would think that every passive house is an award-winning design necessarily. But if your goal is to produce buildings that have lower impact on the planet and provide high-quality interiors for people, which, I'm on board with I can actually quantify that with Passive House and say if I'm there or not.

James: Yeah

John: there's no more subjectivity to it. to me, that's one of the first things I'll teach my professional students or my freshman students. Like, figure out what your objectives are, right? If you can clearly define your objectives, then you're gonna work towards something that you feel good about and you're satisfied doing and you're satisfied, producing for your clients, But if you don't know what your objective is, you're gonna be all over the place. So I think a lot of people can kinda latch on to that concept

James: Yeah, for sure. Like a hard backstop, something to press against. Yeah. Yeah. Or just the idea that like what gets measured gets made or, right? If you're, if you don't know what you're aiming for, you'll never get there kind of thing.

John: absolutely

James: Yeah. Cool. I'm conscious of our time, and it's been great to chat.

James: But before we go where is the best place for people to go to find out more about you online, maybe connect?

John: Sure. I do have a website uh, ne-projects.com, so please check me out there if you wanna reach out. Also Instagram is probably where I'm most active right now. It's also ne_projects. Actually right now I have-- I just had my 50th design certification this past month. So I've been on this campaign of sharing all of the 50 projects and It's been a really nice kind of retrospective to go through and collect images and kind of recap each of the projects a little bit. So yeah, I'd love to have people connect with me there.

James: Okay, excellent. I'll make sure to include those both, and of course, people listening can just go straight there.

John: Very good

James: thanks so much for joining me today

John: Awesome. Yeah, really great talking to you, James. I appreciate it

James: My pleasure

John: All right, cool

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