Philadelphia’s Onion Flats is constructing low-cost buildings that use design, mechanical equipment and residents’ behaviour to slash fossil fuel consumption.
4 min
The shiny, onyx-coloured building appears alien in its drab, postindustrial Philadelphia neighbourhood—the love child of a “D-volt battery and the Death Star,” as one local architecture critic put it, admiringly.
Called Front Flats, the four-story building is wrapped on all sides and roof by 492 translucent, double-sided solar panels. The building is airtight and extraordinarily energy-efficient, its developers say.
By driving down consumption and producing electricity from its solar panels, Front Flats is designed to generate its own power. But this isn’t a corporate headquarters where executives can spend lavishly on a showcase edifice. It is 28 apartments, built on a budget for renters who make below the area’s median income. One-bedroom apartments rent for under $1,400, less than the $1,750 average for the neighbourhood, according to rental-listings website Zumper.
Onion Flats, the Philadelphia-based architecture-and-building firm behind Front Flats, is at the forefront of designing low-cost buildings that use design, mechanical equipment and residents’ behaviour to slash fossil fuel consumption.
“As an architect, if I’m not designing buildings that contribute no carbon to the environment then I’m being totally irresponsible,” says Tim McDonald, 56, a principal in Onion Flats. “I might as well be designing buildings that sit on marshmallows.”
Buildings contribute 38% of global greenhouse-gas emissions, including heating, cooling and construction materials, according to the International Energy Agency. The building industry is growing more interested in low-carbon construction, but few architects or contractors have experience with it. Many believe it significantly raises costs. Onion Flats wants to demonstrate that it can be done affordably and at scale, prodding others to follow and policymakers to enact energy-efficient building codes.
Mark Lyles, a project manager at the New Buildings Institute, a nonprofit based in Portland, Ore., that promotes low-carbon construction, says the work by Onion Flats is noteworthy because it ties together on-site renewable energy generation with “deep efficiency.”
Mr McDonald and his partners, he says, are “always asking where can I reduce energy consumption. A lot of his projects are bellwethers for where things are going.”
Onion Flats is one of several firms trying to build very energy-efficient housing. In Manhattan’s East Harlem neighbourhood, a 709-unit affordable housing development called Sendero Verde is under construction; it is intended to be among the most energy-efficient multifamily buildings in the world. In Portland, Ore., a 10-story, 127-apartment retirement community is slated to start construction this spring, and is expected to use up to 60% less energy than a typical multiunit building.
Onion Flats is a family affair. Two of Mr McDonald’s brothers, Patrick and Johnny, are also principals, as is Howard Steinberg, a friend since seventh grade in suburban Philadelphia.
Front Flats is its most ambitious attempt at a “net zero” building—a structure that throughout a year generates as much energy as it consumes. The solar skin—which is 60cm away from the windows and exterior—generates electricity, keeps the building cool in the summer by blocking the sun, and provides privacy to tenants. “You can’t see into people’s apartments, but they can see you,” Mr McDonald says.
The building, which opened in January 2020, doesn’t have a natural gas line and uses electricity for heat and hot water. From January through June, it generated more electricity than it needed and sold the excess onto the local power grid, Mr McDonald says. In July, August and September, it drew more kilowatt-hours than it generated. Overall, it is still ahead, Mr McDonald says, but since the pandemic slowed leasing and the building wasn’t fully occupied until the fall, the true test of whether the building is net zero will come this year with apartments full of people charging their mobile phones and playing on game consoles.
The firm has built several residential buildings in Philadelphia over the years and plans to keep going. The principals have learned that actual energy consumption is often greater than what the models predict. The culprit is “plug load”; people plug in bigger televisions and more electricity gobbling devices than expected.
About a mile south of Front Flats, Onion Flats built another apartment building called the Battery which attempts to tackle this problem. LEDs on the outside of the Battery are connected to particular apartments, although which light connects to which isn’t obvious to passersby or residents. When an apartment is using less electricity than its share of what is being generated, it glows green; otherwise, it glows red. The system, after encountering a software problem, is expected to go online this year.
After building its first government-subsidized, ultra energy-efficient townhouse for low-income residents in 2012, Onion Flats lobbied the Pennsylvania Housing Finance Authority, a state agency that distributes federal low-income tax credits, to consider an energy efficiency standard known as “passive house” construction when determining which builders were awarded the coveted credits. “We said ‘If we can do this, why can’t other developers’?” says Mr McDonald. After one meeting, the state agreed to give developers extra consideration for using a passive house design, beginning in 2015. (Onion Flats didn’t use the credit for Front Flats.)
The passive house projects didn’t cost much more to build than traditional apartment buildings—despite costing considerably less to heat and cool, according to an analysis of construction costs for residential projects over the past five years that the authority performed at the request of The Wall Street Journal.
“Not only is that encouraging, but the end result should be lower utility costs for the life of these passive house apartment buildings,” Robin Wiessmann, executive director of the agency, said in a statement. Tenants at Front Flats pay US$40 a month for utilities. Fifteen states are copying Pennsylvania’s approach and have begun using incentives to encourage more super-efficient apartment buildings.
Mr McDonald says he hopes that buildings that generate their own electricity will become commonplace.
“People don’t say, ‘I want to be known as an architect that has bathrooms in all our buildings.’ No, that’s just a given,” he says. “Being green, being sustainable, being carbon-neutral, should just be what it means to be a good architect.”
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Kit Braden, an executive at French beauty empire L’Occitane, has spent every winter for the past 13 years at the stone vacation home.
2 min
A historic Barbados estate with a 300-year-old villa and 11 acres overlooking the Caribbean Sea is now for sale with a guide price of $22.5 million.
The seller is Kit Braden, chairman of the U.K. branch of French beauty empire L’Occitane Group, whose family has spent every winter for the last 13 years at the island property, known as Fustic Estate.
“It’s very much a family house,” Braden said. “We love having a lot of people there. It’s a collection point to keep everyone together.”
The main villa dates to 1712, though it’s been reimagined and expanded substantially over the years.
It spans 13,000 square feet and features seven en suite bedrooms across three wings, as well as expansive verandas, stone courtyards and rows of louvered doors in gay Caribbean pastels.
In the 1970s, when the home was owned by Charles Graves—brother of British poet Robert Graves—it was reimagined by stage designer Oliver Messel, one of the foremost theater designers of the last century. Messel expanded the home, added a lagoon pool with a natural waterfall and other theatrical features, according to Braden.
“The whole place is a little bit magical,” he said.
The home sits about 350 feet above the water, and surrounded by lush gardens that slope towards the water.
“We look down through our garden—which is about 12 acres of tropical gardens and palm trees and wonderful old mahogany trees—onto the Caribbean,” Braden said.
He and his wife first saw the property on New Year’s Eve 2013, during a quick trip from where they were staying in Grenada.
The couple spent an hour walking the perimeter, some of it still untouched jungle, in the pouring rain.
“By the time we got back, I had fallen in love with it,” Braden said.
His wife, however, wasn’t so sure. But in Braden’s telling, a second visit in sunnier weather with two of their children brought her around.
“She had to be talked into that it was a jolly good idea; now she absolutely loves it,” he said.
When they bought the property, the edge that runs along the waterfront was a jungle, so they cleared the ridge and transformed it into gardens.
They also bought an additional sea-level parcel with two beach cottages, giving the property direct access to the water and the town below via a five-minute walk.
The property also has a 15-person staff, a reflecting pond, an outdoor pavilion suitable for yoga and a commercial grade kitchen that can serve more than 100 guests, according to a brochure from Knight Frank, which posted the listing in March. They did not provide further comment.
For Braden, the property is special because of its natural beauty, its proximity to the town of Saint Lucy and its history—which dates way way back to when the island of Barbados was first formed via tectonic activity.
“It was basically tectonic plates that collided about a million years ago so the seabed is the top of the hill,” Braden said. “We’re on coral rock.”
As a result, Fustic Estate includes an extensive network of caves that were likely used by the Arawaks, a Venezuelan fishing tribe that followed the fish to these islands about a thousand years ago.
“If the fish were good they’d camp here,” Braden said. “There’s evidence that they stayed there in those caves, they lived there in good winters.”
Now it’s someone else’s turn to live on the land shared by Arawaks, the plantation owners of 1712, Charles Graves and the Braden brood.
