An insanely energy efficient high-rise is going up in New York City — and it could change the way we create buildings!

Passive House

Passive House buildings use little in the way of energy, heating, and cooling. In order to meet the standards, "You need to have every crack sealed," according to Blake Middleton, a partner at Handel Architects, which designed the building. Essentially, the Cornell building has to be completely airtight to pass muster. 

Overall, the $115 million residential building will use 60% to 70% less energy than other similarly sized buildings. It will also cost up to 5% more to develop — but that money will come back many times over in energy savings. 

Making the building airtight was a vexing problem, both from a structural and a design point of view. When architects design urban buildings — especially condos — they usually highlight sweeping views with floor to ceiling windows.

In order to make that work from an energy efficiency perspective, a passive house high-rise would need a double envelope, basically creating a building within a building. That's prohibitively expensive, so Cornell opted instead for slightly smaller windows. 

"There will be well-sized windows that take advantage of views, but they're not as big as they might be if they were catering to that [condo] market," says Arianna Sacks Rosenberg, a senior project manager at Hudson, the developer behind the high-rise. 

The airtight design, combined with a unique ventilator system that brings in fresh air from outside, means that the building doesn't need much in the way of a heating and cooling system.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-worlds-tallest-passive-house-will-be-in-new-york-city-2015-7#ixzz3fPMXnlGG