AIA Maine Executive Director Jeannette Schram, Lee Burnett of Local WoodWorks, and Naomi Beal, Executive Direct of Passive House Maine at the Maine Wood + Sustainability Conference. Image: AIA Maine
By Timothy Lock, AIA
As a member of the AIA Maine Board of Directors and co-chair of the AIA Maine Committee on the Environment, I feel it is extremely important to not only educate but also reinforce areas of proven excellence. In a very rural and small state, it can be hard to identify specific areas in which we are leaders within the discipline. Excitingly, our northern frontier location and its harsh environment have helped carve a niche; a niche which aligns seamlessly with the goals of AIA COTE. Maine’s architects are proven leaders in high performance, extremely low energy use buildings–essential for existence in a cold climate; much of this knowledge base and experience comes from a direct an intentional alignment with Passivehaus International, PHIUS, and most locally, a partnership with the Passive House Maine.
Several Maine architecture firms helped pioneer an understanding of Passive House principles in Maine, notably, GO Logic in Belfast (where I am Management Director), Kaplan Thompson in Portland, and Thornton Tomasetti in Portland (formerly Fore Solutions). With a small community of architects, it has not taken long for Passive House design strategies to become a common language amongst our membership. This was achieved in no small part by the activism of Passive House Maine in getting architects out in the field to experience the magical buildings in construction, and partnership between Passive House Maine and the Maine COTE.
This partnership often takes the form of co-hosting educational learning opportunities directed toward providing a broader base of knowledge on advanced building performance, systems, and construction. Most recently, the two organizations, with a third, Local WoodWorks, co-hosted the Maine Wood + Sustainability conference centered on emerging local wood technologies and their application in architectural design. With continued collaboration, both organizations seek to make the most of our disciplinary expertise and imagine a point in time when all of could consider themselves “sustainability experts”–through small, but engaged membership, and smart but open sharing of knowledge, I think this is completely achievable.