Passive House & Fire Resilience (PHN)
Growing wildfire devastation demands better-protected buildings – better protected by building design and better design of their surrounding landscape. Yet, after fire events, like in Los Angeles, there is a need to rebuild quickly. Just build it back, the thinking goes, but we can do better. Let’s build forward with fire-safe strategies integrated with Passive House building design to drive down our dependence on fossil fuels, protect people’s health, and adapt to the ever-growing threats of extreme weather. Join us as we investigate integrated approaches with Passive House, how they’ve been implemented following other wildfires, and the possibilities they demonstrate for building forward.
About the Presenters:
Birgitte Messerschmidt is Director, Research, National Fire Protection Association. She is responsible for NFPA’s Research Strategy, Research on fire problems and other safety issues, Data collection efforts to maintain NFPA’s fire incident and fire service databases, and the NFPA Research library. She has a M. Sc. In Civil Engineering from the Technical University of Denmark and has spent her entire career working on fire safety issues. Making our built environment more resilient to fire through a better understanding the impact of construction products and methods, testing procedures, and policy has been a career-long passion. She has been involved in testing and research as well as standardization and advocacy. She has published and presented numerous papers on fire safety issues.
Andrew Michler has focused on high-performance building design and materiality since 1993. He has written and researched extensively on new architecture and is the author of the book Hyperlocalization of Architecture, released in 2015. He is a co-founder of Passive House Rocky Mountains, a founding board member of The Passive House Network, and was chair of the Northern Colorado Renewable Energy Society. He completed the first International Certified Passive House in Colorado in 2016, which has won several awards and has been prominent in international design media. His experience designing Passive House throughout the Colorado Rockies has focused on wildfire hardening techniques merged with Passive House methodologies.
CEU Credits: In Progress
Learning Objectives:
- Outline the growing threat wildfires pose to the built environment and how business-as-usual approaches fail to protect property and people.
- Describe the importance of fire safety design considerations relating to the building construction and its surrounding landscape.
- Identify passive design solutions to support fire protection and resilience.
- Describe fire-resilient strategies that can be strengthened by applying efforts to surrounding neighborhoods, towns, and cities.
