How Passive House Design Is Reaching New Heights

Millennium Partners Principal Kathleen MacNeil.

Passive House design emerged in Germany in the 1990s as a way to reduce energy consumption and improve air quality. Since then, its use has evolved from single-family homes to institutional buildings to multifamily and commercial structures.

Those standards have never been employed, however, to the length or the height that MP Boston, the local affiliate of Millennium Partners, is applying them. Winthrop Center, a mixed-use tower in Downton Boston with 812,000 square feet of office space, will be the largest passive house office building in the world.

Winthrop Center in Boston. Image courtesy of Millennium Partners

Welcome back to “Sustainability Street,” CPE’s podcast on the intersection of commercial estate and the world we live in. In this episode, Executive Editor Therese Fitzgerald interviews Millennium Partners Principal Kathleen MacNeil to learn about the science and the marketing behind this groundbreaking project.

Here’s a sample of the topics the episode covers:

• The Winthrop Center vision (2:18)
• The building’s efficiency metrics (8:52)
• Challenges of building in New England (10:41)
• The economics of Passive House (12:47)
• Passive House and wellness (14:12)