79 King Street Senior Housing
Status: Under-construction 2023
Location: Northampton
Size: 111,000 ft2, 70 units
Developer: Live Give Play and Spiritos Properties
Architect: BKSK Architects
“By partnering with Spiritos, the team gained decades of experience working on ground-up development projects in the Northeast. Moreover, Spiritos has been working on projects that utilize mass timber construction since at least 2012 and has been a vocal proponent of Passive House design since being introduced to the standard by Stas Zakrzewski of ZH Architects almost a decade ago. He believes that working with both mass timber and Passive House design is a way to address both sides of the carbon equation; the former addresses embodied carbon, while the latter addresses operational carbon. “That's the way I believe people should be building buildings,” he says.
According to Fox, Passive House also figured into the equation because of the incentives offered through the state program Mass Save, which offers developers who obtain Passive House certification a $3,000 subsidy per unit. “We figured, if the state is that behind it, and we can get that subsidy even if it costs us more, look at how much energy we're saving for our tenants and ourselves,” Fox says. “It's the right thing to do.”"
