The super-efficient passive building frontier

The author looks ahead to the next century and suggests that what this century has been preparing us for is not just a linear view of progress, but a cyclic view of progress in which we rediscover much forgotten wisdom. He predicts that in the next century of mechanical design pressures capital and energy costs, environmental performance, and operability will rapidly shift designs from active to passive, from formulaic to uniquely optimized, and from complex to simple. He suggests that integrated whole-building design yield superior comfort with about three to thirty times less energy and often with lower capital costs, but that this poses fundamental challenges to professional education and practice and to compensation structure. As an example he describes a house that has been built in Davis, California using some of the novel design principles mentioned. It was done as part of the Pacific Gas and Electric ACT/sup 2/ experiment.