A building is only as good as the team behind it. In passive house, that coordination is everything.

Every building project requires a team — architect, structural engineer, mechanical engineer, contractor, subcontractors. On most projects, these disciplines work in sequence. One finishes, passes the baton, and the next picks it up. That works when performance margins are loose. It breaks down fast when they’re not.  In a passive house, the envelope, mechanical system, and ventilation strategy are deeply interdependent. Change the window spec and the heating load shifts. Change the heating load and the mechanical design changes. Change the mechanical design and duct routing changes — which can affect framing. If those disciplines aren’t communicating in real time, sharing assumptions, and working from the same model, you won’t catch those ripple effects until it’s expensive to fix them.  The best passive house projects I’ve seen share one thing: a genuinely coordinated team. Not consultants working in parallel — people who are actively checking each other’s work, flagging conflicts early, and resolving them before they’re poured into concrete.  This is true for any building. It’s non-negotiable for passive house.  Coordination isn’t overhead. On a high-performance project, it’s the product.