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Sam is sorely missed.
PHIUS co-founder and Executive Director Katrin Klingenberg reflects on the one-and-only Sam Hagerman.
It was 2008 when PHIUS launched the CPHC® training in Urbana, Illinois—it was so successful that we took it on the road in 2009. First stop was Boston in the East, then a West Coast swing through San Francisco, Portland and Seattle.
Back then, we delivered all training in-person. All students attended three segments with a few weeks in between each—it required a serious commitment. Though the passive movement was nascent, a cadre of forward-thinkers filled all our dates and locations. One of them was Sam Hagerman.
I was fortunate to meet Sam during the second segment of our West Coast swing.
The Integrated Design Lab in Seattle had graciously agreed to host the training. The class room was full except a seat in row two in the middle. Sam was fashionably late and made an entrance, stopped the class in its tracks, scootched past people on the right, charmingly smiling and cracking a joke, all eyes on him, including mine.
Sam could command a room.
He wore a casual plaid jacket, casual to a point of laissez faire, he had pizzazz, a combination of vitality and elan that stuck with me. I wasn’t sure he had staying power to last through serious calculations and building science but he did. This, in spite of having to step out frequently to make calls; he clearly had a bustling business.
I learned later at a class social event that Sam was a builder from Portland, owner and founder of Hammer and Hand. Eventually Sam offered me a ride, and we stopped at the grocery store getting a bottle of wine and a giant bag of cherries.
These are my most valuable memories of Sam, first impressions count and I remember every second of it. It was a good one.
Soon thereafter we held the Third Annual North American Passive House Conference in Urbana, when we founded and launched the Passive House Alliance. I asked Sam if he was interested in chairing it. He clearly had construction, business and political acumen, people skills and plenty valuable connections up the food chain. He graciously accepted the invitation and the rest is history.
Sam Hagerman became the driving force and the bedrock, took us all patiently by the hand, mentored us and me in countless phone calls, advice on industry politics, and strategy. Sam was determined to make passive building mainstream, and to save the planet. We were on a mission together.
Sam had an endearing frontier kind of charisma, combined with big-city business acumen. Most of all, he loved people and his friends and they loved him. He was wont to generously throw parties for them at a nearby restaurant. He brought everyone together and was just a hell of a lot of fun to be around.
He also saw talent and attracted talent. At the training in Seattle he met Skylar Swinford and took him under his wing at Hammer and Hand. What Skylar and countless others learned was that working together with Sam always also meant being friends, having fun and exploring.
I was lucky enough to experience him and Zack Semke, two peas in a pod at the time, on our trip to Innsbruck for the international Passive House Conference in 2011. We ran into them coincidentally on a mountain hike, sat in the sunshine at a small restaurant up there with Graham Irwin and Mike Kernagis…good times! (I hope you’ll view Zack’s tribute to Sam.)
He weathered some early storms within the passive house community as the chair of a rambunctious bunch, including some personal attacks, but nothing seemed to faze him. He kept his eyes on the prize nonchalantly and brushed off slights and difficulties like they were nothing. And in the big picture they weren’t; another valuable lesson learned for all of us.
Under his leadership his firm went on to build one of the very first PHIUS certified passive houses: a ground-breaking positive energy project in the Northwest called Karuna House. The project was way ahead of its time, in a stunningly beautiful setting and the name deeply meaningful. Karuna in Sanskrit means compassion and self-compassion, it is part of the spiritual path of Buddhism. This is how I will remember Sam…the Karuna House spirit.
Life is fragile. He had demons as well, as all artists and deeply thinking and feeling people do, those who are not afraid of living and taking risks. And he was not. And he met his limits eventually, just way too early.
He was a celebrity in his own right, out there, building bridges where he could, creating, playing music (the sax), bringing joy. He was having it his own way. Always.
Sam, you will be so missed, the community is no longer the same without you.
A star has fallen.
Make a wish.
