Imperium Passive House Apartments

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71 Main Street is a 64-unit, purpose-built rental apartment building containing one and two-bedroom residential units. It is an all-concrete building, featuring a mix of precast and cast-in-place structural elements and precast concrete sandwich panel exterior walls. The precast concrete sandwich panels posed challenges to designing an enclosure suitable to Passive House certification as they limit the amount of insulation allowable and require structural anchors that penetrate the insulation, creating a vast amount of thermal bridging. By working closely with the precast manufacturer in early design stages, this project was able to maximize the wall assembly R-value by using phenolic foam insulation between the concrete layers and by increasing the thickness of one concrete wythe to fully embed the anchors in concrete and fully support balconies, eliminating thermal bridging.