The Butler-Nissen Passive House replaced a Walker and Weeks mansion
raping, in the parlance of residential architecture, is a verb with a nasty spin. It’s the practice of buying an older house in order to obtain the land on which it sits and then replacing it with new one, often a bloated mcMansion inappropriate to its surroundings.
The noted Cleveland photographer Linda Butlerand her husband, Steven Nissen, chairman of the Cardiology Department at the Cleveland Clinic, did something very different when they bought and demolished an historic mansion in Cleveland Heights designed by Walker and Weeks, the city’s leading early 20th century architecture firm, which designed Severance Hall and the Cleveland Public Library.
Instead of thoughtlessly bulldozing the existing 9,000-square foot house, they donated many of its components, including bathroom fixtures and marble counters to Habitat for Humanity.
Then they replaced the old house with a new, 4,000-square-foot dwelling designed around “Passive House” principles to consume as little energy as possible. The Passive House movement, rooted in Europe but gaining ground in the U.S., is based on the idea of using “passive” heating from sunlight and insulating a house so well that it takes little energy to heat and cool.
The PNC SmartHome built by the Cleveland Museum of Natural History as an exhibit last year, was Northeast Ohio’s first certified Passive House.
The Butler-Nissen residence has both environmental and aesthetic merits. Designed by architect Joseph Ferut Jr. of Vermilion, with stucco facades and a roof with deep, shady overhangs, the house is recognizably contemporary, but with mild references to the Craftsman era and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie Houses.
Both stylistic leanings are appropriate to the surrounding well-to-do, tree-shaded residential enclave at the brow of the escarpment that overlooks University Circle and the downtown Cleveland skyline.
Inside, the Butler-Nissen house is noticeably quiet – thanks to its thick, well-insulated facades. It’s also bright and comfortable with a clean, simple, minimal look inspired by the 19th-century Shaker architecture Butler documented in her 1985 book, “Inner Light: A Shaker Legacy.”
The ground floor living spaces, designed with an open plan like that of a loft dwelling, are flooded with light from big, south-facing windows. Ten-foot ceilings give the living room and kitchen an exhilarating lift, and show that being an energy miser doesn’t have to mean living in spaces that feel stingy and cramped.
But what’s truly extraordinary about the project is that both Butler and Nissen, who moved into their new home in July, have come forward publicly to speak about it as the outcome of a personal effort to reduce production of greenhouses gases that contribute to climate change.
“We think it’s an important thing to do,” Butler said. “It [the house] is in part a political statement about what we think needs to be done for the sustainability of the planet we live on.”
During the summer, the house consumed roughly 7.2 kilowatt hours per day in electricity, roughly what it would take to power three traditional incandescent lightbulbs. That’s not counting the electricity produced by the photovoltaic panels on the house’s roof.
After a tussle with the Illuminating Company, Nissen succeeded in having the utility reimburse him for roughly $250 of electricity produced by the house during the summer, when the gauges on its meter were running in reverse.
Critics who lamented the demolition of the original Walker and Weeks house, including Cleveland blogger Christopher Busta-Peck, have failed to appreciate that the Butler-Nissen house is a classic example of two positive values in conflict – preservation versus sustainability.
Certainly, historic buildings can be renovated and improved in energy performance. But Butler and Nissen determined that the pre-existing house would have cost more than $1 million to upgrade. And they would have had a huge house that made no sense for a couple without children.
One could argue that they shouldn’t have bought the original house in the first place. But that begs the question about whether there’s a market for such big residences now that the average number of people in American households is shrinking. The low sales price of $260,000 for the 9,000-square foot home recognized that demographic reality.
Nissen and Butler, who lived previously in Mayfield Village wanted to downsize modestly. They’re also part of the recent migration of suburbanites back to the urban core.
After searching Cleveland Heights for open, buildable lots, they couldn’t find anything with the orientation they needed for a Passive House, which requires a large “solar aperture” without trees that would block the needed sunlight. Then they found old Walker and Weeks house, originally built in 1912 as the James H. Foster residence. It was perfect.
Certainly, it’s unfortunate to see the old house go. Yet cities change and grow over time. Preservation and innovation need to be balanced.
The bigger question raised by the Nissen-Butler house is whether the architectural requirements of Passive House design have negative implications for neighborhood design.
Passive Houses require big windows on their south facades to collect sunlight; on their north facades, they have much smaller windows, such as the vertical strip windows on the Butler-Nissen house.
Passive Houses also ideally should have simple, rectangular shapes, oriented in an east-west direction, to capture the most sunlight and contain the greatest amount of interior space inside the least amount of façade surface. Entire neighborhoods of such houses, designed to strict standards, could look very monotonous.
Sustainability advocates need to think about the urban design implications of Passive Houses on a scale larger than the individual dwelling. And cities also need to think about how to prevent wholesale demolition of entire districts of large, early 20th century mansions to make way for the smaller, energy efficient houses of the future.
At $217 a square foot – not counting extras such as high-end windows and doors imported from Germany, the Butler-Nissen house will strike some as too pricey an example to follow immediately.
But as more and more manufacturers serve the growing market for Passive Houses, prices for insulation, high-tech heating and cooling units and other components will fall. Butler and Nissen are early adopters, willing to pay a premium now to save energy later.
More and more buyers and homebuilders will follow in years to come. As they do, cities will need to grapple with all the architectural, urban design and preservation implications of the drive to leave a lighter footprint on the earth.
Excerpt from:
The Butler-Nissen “Passive House” replaced a Walker and Weeks mansion to … – Plain Dealer (blog)
