Harvard?s HouseZero, an ambitious retrofit of a decades-old building, is a lab for energy-efficient design A Harvard program to retrofit a campus building and create a living laboratory for energy-efficient architecture officially opens today, aiming to develop techniques and technologies to make the built world more sustainable.
The goal of the HouseZero project, to create a building that produces more energy over its lifetime than it uses, is potentially transformative. To accomplish this, the renovated building was designed by the school?s Center for Green Building and Cities (CGBC) with strict performance targets in mind: nearly zero energy for heating and cooling, zero electric lighting during the day, operating with 100 percent natural ventilation, and producing zero carbon emissions. ?We?re shattering the belief that you need to build new buildings to be efficient,? Ali Malkawi, a professor of architectural technology who leads the CGBC program, told Curbed. ?We want to show how this can be replicated almost anywhere, and solve one of the world?s biggest energy problems, inefficient existing buildings.?

Michael Grimm
HouseZero depends on extensive daylighting and automatic ventilation to decrease heating, cooling, and lighting costs.

Michael Grimm
?We?re shattering the belief that you need to build new building to be efficient.?

The demonstration home, a retrofit of a prewar, stick-built home led by Snøh...