Burlington, VT – The U.S. Department of Energy’s Building Envelope Campaign (BEC) recently recognized the Laurentide Apartments project team for its approach to innovative design and improvements to the building enclosure, resulting in significant reductions in energy consumption. The complex, located in Burlington, consists of 76 units with an air tightness level 66% tighter than Passive House requirements, 0.017 CFM50/sf.
The BEC aims to help building owners and managers create more energy-efficient buildings by improving the performance of building envelopes in both new and existing buildings. The Novel 40 award recognizes new buildings that demonstrate building envelope performance improvement of 40% over code, due to incorporation of emerging high-performance envelope technologies. In aggregate, the improvement in building envelope performance for the Laurentide Apartments project was over 50%, earning the team a Novel 40 award.
In addition, the team was the first recognized with an Energy Equity award because of the community served, including providing housing opportunities for lower income earners and those coming out of homelessness. The significant improvements in energy consumption should help those that pay a disproportionate amount of their income to meeting energy needs.
Salas O’Brien’s team of building envelope specialists worked with Evernorth, a nonprofit organization serving the low and moderate income people of Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont with affordable housing and community investments, as well as Duncan Wisniewski Architecture and construction manager HP Cummings.
