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Collegiate Ice Box Challenge Yields Positive Results
The Pratt Institute and Passive House for Everyone (PHFE) unveiled the results of the first-ever U.S. Collegiate Designed and Built rendition of the International Passive House Ice Box Challenge last week.
According to the emailed announcement, the results at the reveal event emphasized the benefits of Passive House principles, as well as improvements in New York building codes.
About the Challenge
At the end of last month, building materials firm, Sto Corp., announced that it had teamed up with the PHFE for the first-ever U.S. Collegiate Designed and Built rendition of the International Passive House Ice Box Challenge.
The Ice Box Challenge was created to demonstrate the five Passive House standards and how they can mitigate the global climate crisis. The challenge launched on May 1 in the Pratt Institute’s Rose Garden.
The Ice Box Challenge is described as an interactive public installation and contest demonstrating Passive House’s advantages. One box will reportedly be constructed by architecture students to local building regulations, while the other will meet the international Passive House Standard, a highly energy-efficient building performance standard.
Each box is then filled with an equal amount of ice at the beginning of the experiment, and at the end of the week the amount of ice left in each box will be measured, with the level of ice remaining used to demonstrate how well each ice box passively kept out the heat.
Pratt Institute visiting professor and PHFE founder In Cho is overseeing the challenge as part of her curriculum. According to Sto’s emailed release at the time, the students were the first to feature a modular construction technique, which will allow the two ice box structures to be deconstructed and reassembled on other campuses for future Challenges.
Dan Canova, Construction Design Manager at Sto Corp., also reportedly provided hands-on training on Sto’s energy efficient system solutions. His instruction was described as “essential” to this challenge as air and water-resistive barrier Sto Gold Coat will be applied to the Passive House structure.
Additionally, Sto contributed to the Passive House movement with a wide range of systems designed to minimize energy consumption.
Other advocate sponsors included Rockwool, 475 High-Performance Building Supply, Klearwall, Square Indigo and Passive House For Everyone, further supported by the International Passive House Association, Passive House Network, NYC DOE Office of Sustainability, Building Action Coalition, Zehnder, Cascadia Clip and Knightwall.
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After sitting for one week, Sto reports that the 1,144-pound block of ice in the Passive House standard box still weighed 900 pounds. |
Challenge Results
On May 8, a reveal event was hosted at the Rose Garden on Pratt’s main campus to weight the ice remaining in the boxes.
After sitting for one week, Sto reports that the 1,144-pound block of ice in the Passive House standard box still weighed 900 pounds. Alternatively, the box constructed according to the New York building codes was “still very much intact” at 737 pounds.
As a result, the remaining ice weight in the Passive House structure was reportedly 20% higher than the New York building code structure. Cho said in her remarks at the event that she had hoped that the two structures would perform “on par” with one another.
“Sto’s mission statement is Building with Conscience. Today’s event represents this concept of being conscious of our future, sustainability, and change in building codes. I am confident that this next generation of architects will ensure it happens,” said Canova at the event.
Sto adds that the New York code has improved since the last Ice Box Challenge, conducted in Times Square in 2018. At that point in time, the Passive House box remained at 756 pounds, or 42% of its original size, whereas the standard building code box weight only 126 pounds, or 7% of its original size.
