Roland Karthaus (Letters March 1) makes some very good points on redefining sustainability. However, I think he misses the point when claiming “The Passivhaus debate is relevant here: super-sealed buildings don’t sit well with flexibility.”
In fact Passivhaus buildings provide high performance, robust and quality-assured building fabric that will last the lifetime of the building, which means it is highly flexible in the long term.
Alterations to Passivhaus buildings thus have a robust starting point, rather than the expensive complex struggles with poor-performing fabric that can be seen in all the recent retrofit work.
We should also not ignore the associated high energy costs and related health implications of poor-performing fabric.
While I agree that focusing on “carbon reductions” is myopic, focusing on energy performance is quite the opposite. Energy use underpins everything we do, not just in the construction sector, but in the whole of society.
With the challenges of increasing energy scarcity and cost, not to mention climate change, upon us, reducing energy use is the first and foremost effort we should make to enable all other aspects of sustainability to be addressed.
Passivhaus buildings address this issue very successfully not just in principle but in measured performance.
Elrond Burrell
Architype
Hereford
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