DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY'S RACE TO ZERO COMPETITION // MULTI-FAMILY HOUSING WINNER
FREEDOM'S PATH TO ZERO
Freedom’s Path to Zero is a multifamily residential building located in Chillicothe, Ohio that provides safe and affordable housing for homeless U.S. veterans. Our team of multidisciplinary team of undergraduate architecture, interior design, and engineering students designed 58 one- and two-bedroom, net zero apartments that respond to high demands for housing by the veterans and their families. Through meeting both DOE Zero Energy Ready Home requirements and Passive House (PH) criteria, Freedom’s Path to Zero will be equipped to best serve those who have served us. Our project has concentrations in accessibility, universal design, durability, performance-cost balance, individual control of interior environment, and degrees of privacy (from personal to communal). The design relies on PH building principles and compartmentalization to achieve these goals. Key passive and active strategies include: optimized site orientation, a tight envelope with high R-value insulation, photovoltaic roof array, and decentralized geothermal system for conditioning air.
CONSTRUCTION AFFORDABILITY
The associated requirements coupled with those of Passive House work well together, but we discovered that fulfilling these needs would result in higher construction costs than anticipated. Our team opted for many high-quality and durable products in the desire to achieve these goals and sacrificed some aspects of affordability in the process. This is an area where further innovation will be required in the future for the zero-energy building industry. How can we economically achieve high-performance and universal accessibility for all with better economy? A goal of the team is to promote the use of locally sourcing materials to reduce embodied energy and impact on the environment. Many products we looked at for Passive House are very expensive locally, or contain too high of an embodied energy as they are imported internationally, or maybe do not perform to the anticipated level of effectiveness. Therefore, a premium was paid to provide the best local systems for all individual units, in line with compartmentalization requirements.
