Kelly: (00:06 )
welcome to buildings and beyond

Robb: (00:09 )
the podcast that explores how we can create a more sustainable built environment

Kelly: (00:13 )
by focusing on efficiency, accessibility and health.

Robb: (00:18 )
I’m Rob Aldrich

Kelly: (00:19 )
and I’m Kelly Westby.

Robb: (00:21 )
This week I talked with Brad Mahoney who is the director of sustainable development at MP Boston and we talked about Winthrop center, which is a very large building under construction right in downtown Boston, 691 foot tower. The top 30 stories are residential, 420 apartments, and then below that are 20 stories of office space, 750,000 square feet of office space. And if everything goes as planned, this’ll be the largest passive house certified office building in the world, as far as we know, we talk mostly big picture: why they’re doing what they’re doing, a little bit of how they’re doing what they’re doing. If you want to learn more details and if you can make it to New York City at the end of June, consider coming to the n a p h n conference.

Robb: (01:15 )
That’s the North American passive house network conference. Dylan Martello from SWA will be presenting on some of the details of the curtain wall system and there’s a lot that goes into it, especially for such a big building. I’m looking forward to the conference. I’ll be talking in a session about heat pumps- getting more from air source heat pumps. Lois and Kelly will be talking about the importance of commissioning in high performance buildings. Lots of industry experts really focused on high performance buildings and especially low carbon buildings. So if you can make it June 27th to 28th at Metropolitan Pavilion in New York City. And if you want a discount code, we have one of those for you. If you want 10% off for the regular conference admission rate, use the code naphn19*SWA for 10% off. All this is on our show notes. So you can go there and you can click on it and you can copy the discount code. The conference website is naphnconference.com. Hope to see you there, and here’s my talk with Brad Mahoney.

Robb: (02:30 )
So the whole building will be certified to LEED?

Brad: (02:34 )
Correct.

Robb: (02:35 )
But the office and the residential sections are kind of being tackled in a different way?

Brad: (02:41 )
They are.

Robb: (02:42 )
And it’s the office section that will be passive house and LEED platinum?

Brad: (02:51 )
Yeah, that’s correct, Robb. It’s exciting. This will be the largest passive house office project in the world. Certainly the largest here in the northeast. And the other thing is we’ve gone through our passive house journey, and we found that there are these inherent synergies that passive house has with other components of the ecosystem that we’re creating here at Winthrop. So we’re certifying the office space to WELL gold. We’re really trying to help create and define the workplace of the future.

Robb: (03:30 )
To a lot of people it may seem curious as why you split it up. I mean, why go for passive house only on the office section? Is this your first foray into passive house?

Brad: (03:50 )
Yes. This, this is our first passive house venture. And to answer that, I think you really have to look at the market, right? Companies are looking to attract and retain top talent, right? You read about it everywhere and that’s kind of where this conversation starts. So we’re creating a healthy, high performance environment, that’s founded in passive house, right? And we think this project will be where companies want to be. You will have to be at Winthrop Center. There’ll be over 4,000 women and men working in this building every day, and it’s that appeal. The other piece is, you know, if you look at the office component per person, it’s where you can most directly impact carbon reduction, the amount of energy per person, right? So first off, the residential- 400 units, 4,000 employees in and out of this building every day.

Robb: (05:13 )
So there’s many more people using the office sections and there’s a bigger opportunity for energy savings, for comfort, for health. Now and when you’re thinking about the passive house concept, is this something that kind of you championed or did you see a need in the marketplace for efficient, healthy office space? How did you get to be looking at passive house here?

Brad: (05:48 )
So it really did start at the onset of the project when we started this. How do we make this project truly next generation, right? So when you look at passive house, wh