Gunter Goes Guitar!
For many in the PHnw 6 audience, Gunter Lang was a surprise. Who opens a building performance keynote with a guitar riff and song?Someone who is passionate about passive and works hard promoting it.
If you check Gunter's website, you'll see that passion in print. Gunter and his son not perform research and write reports about passive house, but you will see a list of well over 100 presentations on passive house to audiences on every continent except Antarctica and Africa over the last 9 years.
Those of us who have enjoyed Gunter's prior presentations were not completely surprised by the guitar. I first enjoyed Gunter's skills as a presenter at the 2009 PHIUS Conference in Urbana. I'll probably never forget him thoroughly embarrassing an attractive young woman in the audience who answered his question (What you like best about passive houses?) and got a mini-lecture on the many "safe sex" benefits of well-ventilated passive houses.
In 2011, Gunter returned and gave a keynote to the Fall PHnw Conference in Seattle.
In the same trip, NAPHN arranged for Gunter to present in other cities in order to leverage his travel costs to North America over as many presentations as possible.
Another city where Gunter presented was Portland where he was the keynote for the Oregon Opportunity Network's annual affordable housing industry conference.
Gunter addressed about 100 Oregon and Southern Washington affordable housing experts which included staff from REACH Community Development Corporation and I believe also from St. Vincent de Paul of Lane County (SVDP).
Perhaps it is no surprise that OON member organization SVDP went on to build a 6-unit apartment to the Passive House Standard as part of its Stellar Apartments project to test the passive house concept. We've enjoyed reports in subsequent PHnw conferences from passive house professionals who contributed to that project: Win Swafford, Jan Fillinger, and Professor Allison Kwok. Their presentations are based in part on additional life cycle analysis research by Peter Reppe.
Gunter's contribution to REACH's passive house pioneering is even more clear. After Gunter's keynote presentation to OON in 2011, he met with REACH staff at their office as well as REACH's design, engineering, and construction team. Dee Walsh, executive director of REACH announced her commitment to REACH pioneering passive house in the U.S. at PHnw's 2012 conference in Portland.
To read the full report visit the website of Passive House Northwest