Jörg Rügemer

Professional | Park City

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The Barn Haus in Holladay

The Barn Haus is a 3,800 square foot, research-driven site net-zero target home. It shows that resilient, sustainable architecture can be realized at high quality within market-rate budgets, accomplished through a holistic, integrated team process that explored means of passive-to active house strategies, architectural minimalism, and focusing on the Genius Loci at 4,700 ft elevation. Overseeing Salt Lake Valley, the building is nestled into a south-facing slope at the bottom of the Rocky Mountains, offering tremendous views and perfect solar exposure. The site became a key driver for the design, including all characteristics of existing topography, landscape and view orientations, framing the layers of traditional image composition: foreground (immediate mountain landscape), middle ground (City) and background (far valley views). Daylight and passive solar heat gain potential was another important driver for careful building orientation and the vigilant placement of openings in the building’s envelope. More pragmatic aspects, such as minimizing cut-and fill, with the design working with the site constraints rather than against it, building access, and all aspects of a passive-to active high performance defined the framework in which the building was further developed. The former horse pasture site allowed for an abstract formal - spatial interpretation of Utah’s traditional barn outbuildings, creating a new Utah Contemporegional architectural style that reflects a strong sense of place. Based on traditional barn elements, the building’s architectural aesthetic carefully blends with a minimal to modern architecture approach. Besides utilizing non-combustible, durable exterior materials as an important step towards building resilience in times of prolonged droughts and extreme temperatures that lead to increased forest fires in the American Southwest, the Barn Haus is designed to 77% efficiency over Utah’s required code standard and before the installation of photovoltaic. A 6.4 kW photovoltaic system offsets most of the building’s operational energy.