Theme 4: Passive Resilience
Passive resilience means harnessing freely available resources from the sun and wind through site-responsive design and thereby minimising the need for additional energy use. You must always use passive design strategies first, to reduce the building’s energy requirements and the need for active systems.
These passive design strategies include:
Making use of free solar resources: use of the sun’s path for free solar heat gains in winter when desirable; this can include sun spaces. Orienting and zoning spaces according to their needs; e.g. placing functions that need no sun, on the north side (in the northern hemisphere), and vice versa
Harnessing good natural daylight through appropriately sized windows and window specifications, balancing summertime overheating and glare (see also Theme 7, health and well-being)
Optimising building fabric efficiency to retain the free heat in winter-time (and keep the heat out in summer) through super-insulation, and high fabric airtightness standards.
Designing solar shading through architectural elements or vegetation to prevent summer-time overheating -i.e. prevent the heat in summer coming in. See Theme 7 (health and well-being) and Theme 1 (future and global responsibility).
‘purge ventilation’ and cooling in summer through cross ventilation and night-cooling and using thermal mass. In the heating season in cold climates, natural ventilation leads to discomfort and loss of heat; hence efficient active background ventilation systems are used such as MVHR (Mechanical Ventilation with Heat Recovery) – see Theme 5 (energy and CO2).
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