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Project

Pine Hall, Wheaton College

The new 45,500-square-foot building at Wheaton Collage is the first large-scale college residence hall in New England to meet the Passive House standard.

Lead Contact

Project Details

Project Partners
SGA
Owner
Wheaton College
Location
Norton, Massachusetts
Completion Date
Area
45,500 ft²
Sustainability
Targeting PHIUS+
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Pine Hall at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts. Courtesy SGA
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Pine Hall at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts. Courtesy SGA
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Pine Hall at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts. Courtesy SGA

Overview

The new 45,500-square-foot Pine Hall residence at Wheaton Collage in Massachusetts is the first large-scale college residence hall in New England to meet the Passive House standard. The L-shaped residence hall features 178 beds for students and a 2,000-square-foot common space for programs and events including gaming competitions, meetings, yoga classes and miniconferences.

We provided passive house consulting, whole building energy modeling, building envelope and structural design services to SGA for the residence hall, which was completed in 2019.

Highlights

  • The building design uses 70 percent less energy than a building built to current codes and is targeting a site Energy Use Intensity of 20 kBtu/st/yr.
  • The building is designed to meet PHIUS+ certification and perform more than 50 percent better than the ASHRAE 90.1-2013 standard.
  • To achieve these goals, the team is using highly insulated airtight construction methods, R-32 walls, R-50 roofs, high performance triple glazed windows, high performance triple glazed curtain wall, optimized exterior shading and high-efficiency heating, cooling and lighting systems.
  • The building was designed and constructed with a girder slab framing system, a steel-and-precast-concrete system prefabricated and then assembled on site.