North House

North House was designed for the 2009 Solar Decathlon at the National Mall in Washington, D.C. It is a new and innovative green housing model that produces more energy than it consumes and makes sustainable living attractive and rewarding. Our combination of passive and active solar design, integrated energy production, customized components and mobile interactive technologies, produces an attractive high performance home that sets a new standard for solar design in Canada’s northern climate.

Canada is a country with extreme climatic conditions that pose significant challenges to the traditional approaches to passive solar design. The North House is designed with a passively and mechanically conditioned interior that is wrapped by a highly insulated, layered envelope that modulates the house’s response to various climates, solar and shading conditions. The interior consists of a ‘densepack’ of service on the north side of the house, opening to a generous and flexible living space that is fully glazed with a specially developed high-performance glazing system. This flexible framework allows North House to be customized for different living needs, to be adapted to multiple regions across the country and to take advantage of new technologies and developments in envelope and solar technologies.