Passivhaus presentation on podcast

AIRAH has released a new episode of the podcast AIRAH on Air, which features a presentation from Clare Parry, M.AIRAH, at the Institute’s Building Physics Forum in 2019.

Parry, from Grün Consulting, presented a detailed case study of Australia’s first scale Passivhaus building: Gillies Hall at Monash University’s Peninsula Campus in Frankston, Melbourne.

Gillies Hall is a 150-room project that was constructed in 2018 as student accommodation. It met the exacting Passivhaus standard using cross-laminated timber (CLT), and earned its consultant team the 2019 AIRAH Award for Excellence in Sustainability.

In an interview with Ecolibrium last year, Parry said although the Passivhaus standard did not demand any particular means or material for construction, the choice of CLT on this project made the path to certification somewhat easier.

“The structural and thermal lines are distinct, and timber leads to more thermally efficient methods of assembly than, say, a steel structure,” she said.

Parry said in the podcast that the project started by analysing some fundamental elements.

“With any passivehaus project, but particularly that one, it was starting from scratch and saying ‘what are the basic objectives?’, and fundamentally ‘how do we get there?’”, she said.

Monash University has ambitious plans to be powered exclusively by renewable power by 2030. Gillies Hall is a step towards the Net Zero initiative.

More information about the AIRAH’s podcasts is available here. You can listen to Episode 16 on Spotify or Apple.