Two case studies that prove Passive House belongs in affordable housing: Sendero Verde & 425 Grand Concourse

Passive House is often talked about in the context of high-end, single-family homes or flagship sustainability projects. But two recent New York developments — Sendero Verde in East Harlem and 425 Grand Concourse in the Bronx — make a practical, hard-to-ignore case that the Passive House approach is exceptionally well suited to affordable housing. Below I summarize each project and then pull out the lessons that matter to developers, housing authorities, and policymakers.

Quick project snapshots

Sendero Verde (East Harlem)
A fully affordable, mixed-use complex designed to Passive House standards, Sendero Verde is being delivered in phases and is described by the design team and city agencies as the largest Passive House residential development in the world, delivering roughly 700+ affordable units and a range of community spaces. Its design explicitly pairs high-performance envelope strategies with generous shared open space and community services. Handel Architects

Sendero Verde by Handel Architects

425 Grand Concourse (Mott Haven, Bronx)
A 24–26 story mixed-use, mixed-income tower designed to PHIUS/Passive House performance, 425 Grand Concourse includes hundreds of affordable units alongside retail, medical, and community uses. The project was pursued in part as a demonstration that tall, dense affordable housing can meet Passive House/PHIUS performance and the project team reports very large energy reductions compared with conventional construction (the team cites performance reductions in the range that Passive House projects typically hit). The building uses a tight envelope, energy-recovery ventilation, heat-pump HVAC strategies and other integrated systems to lower energy demand and improve indoor comfort. Dattner Architects

425 Grand Concourse by Dattner Architects

What these two projects show about Passive House + affordable housing

1) Big energy savings translate to real rent/operating benefits

Both projects prioritize a super-insulated, airtight envelope and balanced mechanical ventilation. That means dramatically lower heating and cooling loads — which translates directly to lower utility bills for residents and lower ongoing operating costs for owners/PHAs. For developments where either tenants pay utilities or owners operate under tight budgets, saving 30–70% of energy (depending on climate and systems) is not abstract — it’s cash that can be reinvested into services, maintenance, or keeping rents affordable. NYSERDA

2) Better comfort and health — measurable and immediate

Passive House’s required ventilation strategy (ERV/HRV with filtration and continuous fresh air) improves indoor air quality and reduces drafts, cold surfaces, and temperature swings. For low-income households — who disproportionately include people with respiratory vulnerabilities or limited means to control their micro-environment — those health and comfort wins matter. Both Sendero Verde and 425 Grand Concourse emphasized IAQ and occupant comfort as explicit project goals alongside energy savings. NYHC

3) Resilience and system simplicity reduce long-term risk

High-performance envelopes reduce the amount of active heating/cooling equipment required; internal gains in dense multi-family buildings often mean less extreme heating demand. That helps buildings stay habitable longer during outages and reduces dependency on complicated, failure-prone systems. In affordable housing, reducing maintenance burden and single-point mechanical risks can lower lifecycle costs and avoid tenant disruptions. 425 Grand Concourse in particular was designed with resilience strategies and system simplicity in mind. NYSERDA

4) Passive House is scalable — from mid-rise to tall, mixed-use buildings

A common myth is that Passive House only “works” for small, detached houses. Sendero Verde and 425 Grand Concourse disprove that: the strategies are applicable at scale. The careful detailing, panelization possibilities, and predictable energy models make Passive House a replicable approach for large affordable projects, especially when design teams integrate the standard early in procurement and budgeting. Handel Architects

5) Policy and procurement can make or break adoption

Both projects grew out of city calls for proposals and programs that prioritized sustainability and affordability. That’s not a coincidence: when municipal RFPs explicitly reward verified performance or require Passive House/PHIUS targets, developers take the technical and budgetary steps needed to deliver. These projects are useful demonstrations for policymakers that incentives + clear performance targets yield bankable, replicable outcomes. NYC Government

Trade-offs and realities (so the praise is practical, not pie-in-the-sky)

• Upfront cost discipline matters. Passive House can increase initial construction costs if the design team treats the envelope and mechanical approach as add-ons. But when teams design to the standard from the start (and seek economies of scale, prefab elements, or integrated procurement), lifecycle cost savings and lower operating budgets usually justify the premium. Projects like Sendero Verde built the performance requirement into procurement, which helps control costs. Handel Architects

• Skilled teams are essential. Achieving airtightness, thermal continuity, and balanced ventilation on large buildings requires contractors and trades comfortable with high-performance detailing. Training and early QA/QC on site are necessary investments.

• Monitoring and commissioning pay off. Long-term energy claims only hold if systems are commissioned and occupants are supported (tenant education, simple controls). Both projects highlight thorough commissioning and system integration as critical steps.

Bottom line — why cities should lean in

Sendero Verde and 425 Grand Concourse are more than architectural wins; they’re proof that Passive House principles deliver measurable benefits for affordable housing: lower utility burden, healthier indoor environments, more resilient buildings, and a scalable path to low-carbon housing stock. For cities that need to deliver housing at scale while meeting climate goals and protecting low-income residents from energy cost shocks, these projects provide compelling, evidence-backed models to follow. If the goal is housing that’s economical to operate, healthier to live in, and future-proofed against climate risk — Passive House belongs in the toolkit.

TWO SCULPTURES BY ANTHONY CARO

Article written by Michael Fried on Kasmin Galy Show for Art Forum, 1969

DEEP BODY BLUE, THE SMALLER of the two pieces Anthony Caro’s recent show at the Kasmin Galy, is open as wide-spread arms and then as a door is open. The two contrasting elements that In along the ground, a length of tubing and a flat sheet standing on its long edge, gather the be older into a far more compelling embrace than could be achieved by literally embracing him—the way, for example, one is embraced by Bernini’s colonnades in front of St. Peter’s—while the two uprights are experienced as a kind of abstract door on the other side of which two similarly contrasting elements converge, touch, and go their ways. Like several recent sculptures by Caro, Deep Body Blue explores possibilities for sculpture in various concepts and experiences which one would think belonged today only to architecture: e.g., those of being led up to something, of entering it, perhaps by going through something else, of being inside something, of looking out from within . . . Not that Caro’s work is architectural in look or essence. But it shares with architecture preoccupation with the fact, or with the implications of the fact, that men have bodies and live in a physical world. This preoccupation finds a natural, and inescapably literal, home in architecture. The same preoccupation no longer finds a natural home in painting and sculpture; it is the nearly impossible task of artists like Caro to put it there; and this can only be done by rendering it anti-literal or (what I mean by) abstract. The heart of Caro’s genius is that he is able to make radically abstract sculpture out of concepts and experiences which seem—which but for his making are and would remain—inescapably literal and therefore irremediably theatrical; and by so doing he redeems the time if anyone does. Not only is the radical abstractness of Caro’s art not a denial of our bodies and the world: it is the only way in which they can be saved for high art in our time, in which they can be made present to us other than as theater.

In the course of his enterprise Caro makes discoveries as sudden and imperative as any in modern philosophy. For example, it is essential to our experiencing the two uprights in Deep Body Blue as a kind of door that they stand in the same plane. It doesn’t matter that they are no more than four feet high, that they lack any sort of lintel, that we are not tempted or even able to pass between them: the fact that they stand several feet apart in the same plane is enough to make us experience them as an abstract door (and a large, or wide, one at that). By the same token, if they are moved even very slightly out of alignment their “doorness” disintegrates and the sculpture as a whole begins to fall apart, to become arbitrary and therefore meaningless as art. This aspect of Caro’s achievement may be described in several ways. One can say that he discovered what constitutes an abstract door; or that he discovered the essence of a door; or that he discovered the conventions—corresponding to deep needs—which make something a door. Caro did not consciously set out to discover anything of the kind. On the contrary, it is because Deep Body Blue began in a preoccupation with particular modes of being in the world that its very success as sculpture came to depend on the making of the above discovery in, or by, the piece itself. It is as though with Caro sculpture itself has become committed to a new kind of cognitive enterprise: not because its generating impulse has become philosophical, but because the newly explicit need to defeat theater in all its manifestations has meant that the ambition to make sculpture out of a primordial involvement with modes of being in the world can now be realized only if anti-literal—that is, radically abstract—terms for that involvement can be found. (At the risk of seeming to overload a point, I will add that the cognitive enterprise in question is related, in different ways, both to European phenomenology and to the later philosophy of Wittgenstein. It isn’t only modernist art that has found it necessary to defeat theater.)

The larger sculpture, Prairie, consists of four long poles of aluminum tubing suspended parallel to one another about eleven inches above a sheet of corrugated metal—more exactly, a flat sheet with four channel like depressions in it—which runs north south to the poles’s east-west and is itself suspended about twenty-one inches above the ground. If we approach Prairie from either end of that sheet, the physical means by which these suspensions are accomplished are not apparent; but as we move around the sculpture it becomes clear that the sheet is held up by two sharply-bent pieces of metal plate, one on each side, which spring out and down from the underside of the sheet until they touch the ground, whereupon they angle upward and outward until they reach the height of the poles, which they support also. Two of the poles are supported at only one point, about twenty inches from the end; a third is supported about twenty inches from both ends, that is, by both of the bent, upward-springing metal plates; while a fourth is not supported by these at all but is held up by a large, upright rectangle of metal which stands somewhat apart from the rest of the sculpture and in fact is not physically connected to it in any way. But grasping exactly how Prairie works as a feat of engineering does not in the least undermine or even compete with one’s initial impression that the metal poles and corrugated sheet are suspended, as if in the absence of gravity, at different levels above the ground. Indeed, the ground itself is seen, not as that upon which everything else stands and from which everything else rises, but rather as the last, or lowest, of the three levels which, as abstract conception, Prairie comprises. (In this sense Prairie defines the ground, not as that which ultimately supports everything else, but as that which does not itself require support. It makes this fact about the ground both phenomenologically surprising and sculpturally significant.)

Article by Michael Fried, Art Forum 1969