PHPP 9: a misunderstanding?

At the 2015 International Passive House Conference in Leipzig, Germany, the Passivhaus Institut presented version 9 of PHPP, which includes many new features to design passive buildings. Many articles have been written about the new primary energy method and the certification classes. In our mind, however, PHPP 9 has more important new features: we explain what they are.

Archicad 17

BIM Energy Analysis with Archicad 17

As in its previous version, Archicad 17 comes with a built-in energy evaluation tool, that allows designers to develop the building energy concept from the preliminary design phase. The line that divides architectural design and energy simulation seems to be getting thinner and thinner. On one hand, this Graphisoft approach is no doubt cutting edge. However, some large doubts remain:

VELUX Daylight Visulaizer - rendering daylight design

Daylight Design with Archicad 15 and Velux Daylight Visualizer

Keeping daylight design in mind not only allows for a more comfortable interior space, but can also give you substantial savings in energy consumption. By integrating ArchiCAD's BIM technology with Velux's Daylight Visualizer, architects can now precisely simulate daylighting in buildings as…

archicad16 integrated energy analysis tool EcoDesigner

BIM Energy Analysis with ArchiCAD 16

Graphisoft has just released the preview videos for their new ArchiCAD version 16, and we are pretty excited about it here at Emu Architects. Enrico Bonilauri has written an extensive assessment of the newly integrated energy analysis features (basically incorporating EcoDesigner) over on our Italian blog. I'll attempt to translate his thoughts into English here for our international readers: