archives: Dennis Wedlick Architect

Another celebraton for all the people involved in the Hudson Passive Project! Dennis Wedlick and company accepted the BOY Award from Interior Design Magazine for the Best Green Project of the year. As Dennis wrote, ”This is truly an outstanding achievement, especially because our little Claverack House was up against a number of prestigious projects from around the world and this proves that going green can be beautiful.” Dennis thanked all the people who made this house award winning. For KR+H it was a wonderful collaboration, and there is a sustainable appreciation for the Hudson Passive Project and the people who embraced it. Congratulations to All!

Alan Barlis, Annie Block (Interior Design), Dennis Wedlick, Brian Marsh, Elaine Santos, and Joe Olson at ID's BOY Awards Party

The Hudson Passive Project has landed on the pages of Interior Design Magazine.  You can view the online story by clicking this link: INTERIOR DESIGN.  It includes a great slide show of images by Peter Aaron/ESTO Photographics.  Congratulations Dennis Wedlick Architect!  And congratulations to all the contributors of the Hudson Passive Project.  See our blog posts of December 4, 2010, to read more about The Hudson Passive Project.

The Project's Frame Raising Party

A small house is under construction near Hudson, New York, that is the tangible outcome of some very big ideas.  Designed by Dennis Wedlick, this house presents solutions to the economic and environmental problems that have left the housing industry as crippled as a Hummer out of gas.

The Hudson Passive project achieves three ambitious goals, all accomplished through art and craft.  First, and perhaps most importantly, this is a green house that will require little or no energy to keep its inhabitants comfortable and its larger environment unharmed. The project also offers a prototype for the development of housing where value is measured not by square footage or its investment potential, but by its contribution to the quality of life for individuals and communities.  The third goal, embedded in the first two, is to make high quality design and workmanship defining features of new home construction.

When Dennis asked KR+H to become involved in this project he included a broadsheet he had written about the house and the ideas behind it.  This manifesto reminded me of the energy and ambition of the early modernists; the way the promotion of their ideas was as powerful and startling as their built work.  I opened it up thinking that I had never worked on a house that came with a mission statement.  It was splashed across two pages like a banner headline in a tabloid:  IT’S NOT THE TECHNOLOGY; IT’S THE ARCHITECTURE.  This takes the modernist notion that “a house is a machine for living in” and flips it on its head.  The Hudson Passive Project is a prototype built on the conviction that sustainable housing must be self-sufficient, impeccably crafted, and above all capable of supporting and even enriching human experience.  This last feature is critically important; houses will last for hundreds of years only if generations of users love them.

The Hudson Passive house achieves its energy independence in a simple and ancient way; solar orientation, insulation, and a snug envelope.  The only equipment required is an air exchange device that allows air to refresh without altering the interior temperature.  It takes quality craftsmanship to build a house that seals up as tight as a submarine.  The quality of the Hudson Passive house will not stop at the shell.  It will be present in every component – from the parts that the homeowner interacts with daily, like the kitchen and bathrooms, to the parts that disappear when they function perfectly, like the systems that keep the house warm in the winter and cool in the summer.  The quality workmanship required to achieve the performance standards of a passive house brings numerous benefits.  Quality work is durable and stays out of the waste stream.  It also inspires respect and motivates maintenance when generations of users respond to something well made by taking care of it.

Quality design is perhaps the most important but usually the most absent component of mass-produced housing.  The Hudson Passive Project recognizes that a house must provide far more than energy performance to be valuable to its owners and their larger community.  A house that conserves material and energy resources without scrimping on quality details and workmanship needs to be much smaller than the developer housing that has proliferated like an invasive species over the last 20 years.  Until recently, Americans’ taste for ever larger homes has been on an upward trajectory while their appreciation for quality design and workmanship has all but disappeared.

This is the inevitable outcome of a market where houses are viewed as investments valued primarily by size and location.  Even though quality workmanship brings the highest long-term value, it has fallen out of the equation for consumers raised on cheap, throw-away products and resale value houses. Even while architects and planners were deriding ‘McMansions’ as the apotheosis of waste and bad taste, developers were spewing them out like SUVs off the assembly line.

Now, big houses and big cars have become dinosaurs in a suddenly changed environment.  The Hudson Passive house is an adaptive response to an environment where fossil fuels are expensive, harmful, and finite, and where homes are fortunately becoming places valued more for living than investing.

The Hudson Passive Project represents a refinement of green housing endeavors by making quality architecture an equal partner with energy conservation and sustainability.  The technology to produce a net-zero energy house has been with us a long time.  It is the architecture that will determine whether this new kind of home is sufficiently inspiring to succeed in the marketplace.  Americans have been chastened by the bursting of the housing bubble and are getting the message about building green.  It may be that the Hudson Passive Project has appeared at just the right time.