ABSTRACT
Harold Hay, Peter Van Dresser, Douglas Balcomb and other pioneers of passive solar design from the 1960s and ’70s brilliantly laid the groundwork for the state-of-the-art building designs that can wean us from fossil fuels and help mitigate climate change in the decades ahead.
Despite excitement within the environmental community back then and now, passive solar design has not entered the mainstream of building design in North America. In part, this may be because passive solar design relies on commodity components rather than proprietary components that could realize monetary gains for manufacturers. But a more likely reason for the failure of passive solar design to go mainstream is that the motivation has been largely altruistic – doing the right thing. A more direct motivation is needed.
This chapter makes the case that an interest in keeping people safe and protecting them from the impacts of climate change can be a greater motivation for designing and building the type of systems that Hay and his fellow visionaries invented. As the country (and world) experiences more frequent storms and other disturbances that cause power outages, there is likely to be a demand for metrics of passive survivability and a methodology for predicting whether a building will, indeed, maintain habitable temperatures should it lose power for an extended period of time. This chapter points at key elements that the Resilient Design Institute and the Resilience Working Group of the U.S. Green Building Council have been working on to define “thermal habitability” since 2012.
