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Passivhaus Meets Open House

Before Merri-bek City Council set the brief for Glenroy Community Hub, only residential and commercial buildings had achieved the Passivhaus standard in Australia. Never had it been applied on a public building, let alone such a large one. “Traditional Passivhaus buildings are very controllable environments,” says Leona McLaggan, WSP associate and project sustainability lead. “You want to simplify the structure as much as possible, limit the entrances and exits, minimize glazing. And that was completely at odds with the vision for this building.” 

Location

  • Melbourne, Australia

Architect

  • DesignInc

Project Value

  • AUD $30.1m

Project Status

  • Complete

“It is a beautiful feeling,” says hub coordinator Judy Spokes at Merri-bek City Council. “The inspiration of nature was foundational in the design, and it all combines to create this sense of serenity and calm. It operates on an unconscious level for most of our visitors, but everyone loves being here.” 

This appeal is essential to its mission: Glenroy Community Hub is part of a targeted strategy for improving the social determinants of health in this Melbourne suburb. Before it opened in early 2022, Glenroy’s library, kindergarten and maternal and child health clinic were all in desperate need of refurbishment, and families had to travel elsewhere to find quality child care. The new hub consolidates these services in a single building, alongside new opportunities for recreation and lifelong learning. Spokes hopes that when new parents stop by for routine health checks, they will stick around to find out what else the hub has to offer, and then keep coming back – whether that’s for Storytime in the indoor-outdoor library, some creative expression in the jam room, recording studio or makerspace, or to chill out in the soon-to-open social enterprise café or sensory garden. 

“It’s about providing cradle-to-grave support for a community that was changing and growing, where there are pockets of disadvantage and a lot of demographic change with new arrivals coming from all over the world,” she says. “We want to create healthier, better educated, more confident citizens over a generation, and we knew that if we could make that investment in children’s health and learning at a very early stage, we could change the trajectory of their lives.” 

Less obvious to visitors is that this intimately local facility is designed to two of the toughest international sustainability benchmarks: the Passivhaus energy efficiency standard, and the Living Building Challenge certifications for regenerative design and Zero Energy. This is a first for any public building in Australia: Merri-bek council wanted a world-leading facility that would demonstrate its commitment to action on climate change, and serve as an inspiration to others. 

But Passivhaus is about isolating the internal environment from the outside; the Living Building Challenge emphasizes beauty, biophilia and connection to nature. WSP and the rest of the design team faced a challenge: how to reconcile these approaches in a community building that’s designed to be as open and welcoming as possible?

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The team’s solution was to design the hub as separate but connected structures, devising paths and air locks to prevent conditioned air from escaping. The building envelope was refined so that it could be made airtight and to reduce thermal bridges as cost-effectively as possible. More than 200 robust details were developed in close collaboration with the contractor. Long, north-facing clerestory windows allow daylight to stream in, with none of the associated heat gain, and all of the services are concealed in the walls, so as not to distract from the stand-out timber beams.
 

Valuing Our Heritage, Decarbonizing Our Future

Glenroy Community Hub is not an entirely new building. It incorporates a heritage structure – one of the classrooms from a primary school that previously stood on the site. This has been transformed into a space for the local youth, with a jam room, recording studio, makerspace and games hub. But as it was originally constructed in the 1930s, it was poorly insulated and very far from airtight. 

The team explored ways to bring it within the Passivhaus envelope, but ultimately the decision was taken to exclude parts of it. Instead, a new lining was constructed within the existing structure to provide insulation and acoustic separation, so that it functions as a building within a building. “We still did everything we could to apply the Passivhaus principles, to enhance the thermal envelope to reduce draughts and improve acoustics and energy efficiency,” explains Brenda Kingston, WSP’s project director for sustainability. “We de-risked the certification without throwing it out completely.”

 

Achieving Net-Positive Energy in Theory, and in Practice

Having used Passivhaus to reduce the building’s energy demand, Glenroy Community Hub was in good shape to achieve another of its aims: the Living Building Challenge’s Zero-Energy and Petal certifications. This requires that it meet 105% of its energy needs through renewable generation on-site – in fact, a 256kW solar array will generate the equivalent of 125%, including charging for electric vehicles. Everything in the building runs on electricity, even the kitchen in the childcare center – unusual in a country that has traditionally favored gas for cooking.

energy by Solar PV and Storage
125%
Solar array
256kW
public building in Australia to achieve Passivhaus certification 
1st

As the building entered its second year of operation, WSP’s engineers have returned for an extensive 12-month tuning and energy tracking period. “It’s very exciting to go back and validate our assumptions and make sure that’s it all performing the way it should,” says McLaggan. “This level of tuning is almost never done on public buildings, but the city council is very forward-thinking.”

Glenroy Community Hub has achieved Living Building Challenge ‘readiness’ in three Petals: Energy, Beauty and Equity. This latest achievement is testament to Merri-bek City Council’s vision of creating a best practice community building, inspired by nature.
 

Keeping Cool in a Crisis

Glenroy Community Hub has a super-flexible HVAC system that can ramp up and down to meet both the stringent minimal-energy standard of Passivhaus, and the demands of future climate extremes. Under normal conditions, it acts as a low-energy heat-exchanging ventilation system, with reed switches installed at external openings to automatically shut it off when a door is left open. 

But it can also deliver substantial amounts of cooling when required: the hub is designated as a center of refuge in times of heat stress, so it must be able to accommodate several hundred people on the very hottest days and to keep them all safe and comfortable. The building’s highly insulated, thermally efficient envelope helps too, by keeping the cool in and the heat out. 

Meanwhile, 64kWh of batteries mounted on the outside walls can store enough energy to power emergency systems for a week.

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We have the social agenda and the environmental agenda, and it’s all wrapped up in a beautiful building that is designed to be as sustainable for the planet as it is healthy for people.

Other challenges that we have overcome