Project Description
The 11th & Republican Passive House Apartments project responds to pressing questions facing our city: How to provide housing that is affordable to Seattleites being priced out of the market? How to create new architecture while honoring the built legacy of our neighborhoods? How to create buildings that help Seattle achieve its Climate Action Plan, rather than hinder it? The intent of 11th & Republican is to provide a model response to these questions, demonstrating the value of high performance multifamily buildings to the city and its neighborhoods. The building’s design celebrates both its Passive House building energy conservation (by expressing its generous envelope thickness and passive solar shading) as well as its on-site renewable energy generation (by visibly showcasing its rooftop solar array in harmony with the building’s primary volume). The project preserves an historic home on site, retrofits it to the ambitious Passive House standard, and melds it with a new four-story Passive House structure. The combined building will become one of Seattle’s first market-rate multifamily apartment buildings to achieve Passive House certification, and represents an important R&D project for the industry as a whole – one that the project team will document and share thoroughly. The project’s rooftop array, in addition to enabling the building to reach for Net Zero Energy status, will serve as a visible reminder to passersby of the efficacy of on-site renewable energy to power buildings.