Windows, Comfort, and Resilience

This article addresses four windows-related questions which the Phius Certification staff and Technical Committee have encountered since the advent of the PHIUS+ 2015 Passive Building Standard – North America, in March 2015. These concern the requirements and recommendations for window performance in building projects seeking certification, whether a mechanical cooling system should ever be required, and whether, for large buildings whose space conditioning needs are “internal-gain dominated” as opposed to “shell-dominated”, the lower R-values required to meet the overall building performance criteria have an impact on the resilience or passive survivability.