Why Should Architects Care More About Performance Than Awards?
An award tells you a house looked good on the day the judges walked through. It tells you nothing about whether it's warm in July, dry inside the walls, or cheap to run. Plenty of award-winning homes are cold, leaky and quietly growing mould behind that beautiful render. The trophy doesn't have to live there. The family does.
Architects should design for performance, not awards, because awards reward how a building photographs, not how it works for the family inside. A home that wins a prize but fails its occupants is a beautiful failure. Performance is tested with a blower door and PHPP. A trophy is an opinion.
Carland Proof Point: Our Pigeon Passive House in Yarraville, the most photographed home we've built and a Grand Designs Australia feature, is also our best performer, tested at 0.26 ACH50.
What does an architecture award actually measure?
It measures how a building looks, mostly in photographs, judged by people who will never spend a winter in it. That's not a criticism of taste. Good design matters, and a beautiful home is worth chasing. But an award is a subjective opinion formed on a walk-through and a set of glossy images. It is not a measurement.
Notice what it doesn't measure. It doesn't measure airtightness, so nobody ran a blower door before the ribbon was cut. It doesn't measure heating demand, so nobody knows what it costs to keep warm. It doesn't measure moisture risk, indoor air quality, or whether the thing will still be dry and healthy in twenty years. A home can win the lot and never once have been tested to see if it actually works.
The average Melbourne home leaks at around 19 air changes an hour (CSIRO and Australian Building Codes Board, 2016 airtightness study), and a good number of award winners are sitting right in that range because no one ever checked. If an award never measured how the house performs, what is the award actually telling the person who has to live there?
Can a beautiful home still be a terrible home to live in?
Easily, and this is the part the industry doesn't like to say out loud. A house can be stunning in a photograph and miserable in real life. Cold floors, condensation running down the glass, a heater roaring all winter, and a musty smell nobody can find the source of. Beautiful and broken are not opposites. Plenty of homes manage both.
It's a Ferrari that won't start. Gorgeous in the driveway, useless for the one thing you actually bought it to do. And the person who pays for that gap is never the architect or the judging panel, it's the family living there, every winter, in a house the World Health Organisation would file among the coldest in the developed world relative to what it's doing outside (WHO Housing and Health Guidelines). A cold, leaky home is not a style choice they signed up for. It's a performance failure dressed up in good lighting.
Design is supposed to serve the people inside the building, not the people flicking through the awards annual. So if a home looks incredible but its occupants are cold and reaching for the heater, who exactly was it designed for?
Do you actually have to choose between beauty and performance?
No, and anyone telling you it's one or the other is making excuses. This is the myth that lets a whole industry off the hook, the idea that a home has to be either a looker or a performer. It's rubbish, and our own work is the proof.
Our Pigeon Passive House in Yarraville is the most photographed, most admired home we've built. It featured on Grand Designs Australia. It's warm timber, hand-applied lime wash, a calm Mediterranean feel. And it's also our best performing home, certified Passive House Plus, tested at 0.26 ACH50, modelling a heating demand of 9.0 kWh per square metre per year, generating more renewable energy across the year than it uses. Beauty and performance were never traded against each other. They were designed in together, from the first line on the page. The Parade Passive House in Ascot Vale did the same thing inside a heritage streetscape.
A great Passive House Architect gives you both, because performance is a design problem, not a compromise on one. If someone tells you a high-performance home has to be ugly, or that a beautiful one can't perform, what are they really admitting they can't do?
Why do so many architects design for the portfolio instead of the occupant?
Because the incentives are pointed the wrong way. Awards win work. Magazine features win work. A blower door result of 0.3 does not photograph, and no one hands out a trophy for a house that's quietly comfortable and cheap to run for fifty years. So the profession drifts toward what gets rewarded, which is the image, not the outcome. That's not villainy, it's just what happens when the scoreboard measures the wrong thing.
The best Passive House Architects have already worked this out and design for measured performance as hard as they design for the eye. But the culture around them still celebrates the render over the result, and that pull is real. It's the same reason a builder chases the finish you can see and skimps on the airtightness layer you can't. Everyone optimises for what gets clapped.
I'd rather build a home that its owners quietly love in year fifteen than one that trended for a fortnight and then let them down. If the reward system only counts what a camera can see, who's designing for the decades after the photographer leaves?
What should an architect actually be designing to?
A number, set before the first sketch. Performance-based design starts with targets, the airtightness, the heating demand, the U-values, and works backwards from what the finished home has to achieve. That's what PHPP does. It's the Passive House energy model that turns Melbourne's real climate and the building's real geometry into a prediction of how the home will perform, before a wall goes up.
This is the opposite of the usual order, where the look gets locked in first and performance gets bolted on later, if there's budget left. Passive House Design flips it. Orientation, glazing, shading, the shape of the building, the continuity of the insulation, all of it gets shaped by what the house needs to do, and then made beautiful. It's also why the builder belongs in the room early, so the thing that's been drawn can actually be built airtight and thermal-bridge free. Good documentation and an early builder aren't red tape. They're how the performance survives the trip from drawing to site.
Design to a tested outcome and you get a home that's beautiful and works. Design to the awards shortlist and you're gambling with someone else's winters. Which one would you want your name on in twenty years?
How do you know if your architect designs for performance?
Ask them the questions an image can't answer. A performance-minded Passive House Architect will have the answers ready. One who designs for the portfolio will steer you back to the mood board.
Have you designed a Certified Passive House, and can I see its tested results?
Do you model in PHPP, and at what stage does that start?
What airtightness and heating demand targets do you set before concept design?
How early do you bring the builder into the process?
Can I speak to someone living in a home you designed, about how it performs in winter?
If the answers are all about how the last project looked and none about how it performed, you've learned something important. So is your architect designing a home for you to live in, or a photo for them to enter?
By Matthew Carland, certified Passive House builder and director of Carland Constructions. Five certified Passive House and EnerPHit projects in Melbourne, every one independently blower door tested.