The winners of Hammer & Hand’s third annual perFORM Building Competition are seven architectural interns from the firm DIALOG in Vancouver, B.C. Runner-up was Masoud Sharikzadeh of the University of Arizona.

The challenge for the competition, which drew 20 entries, was to design a hypothetical project, a mixed-use multi-family structure with net zero energy in Seattle’s Rainier Beach neighborhood next to the running track at Rainier Beach High and across the street from the Rainier Beach Community Center.

Now in its third year, the competition focuses on green building and was open to architectural students and architectural interns.

The goal, according to Hammer & Hand, is to help advance the energy performance training of emerging design professionals and “to demonstrate that high performance building and high design can be inherently complementary.”

Judges for the competition were Rob Peña, associate professor in the Department of Architecture at the University of Washington; Mary Johnston, founding partner of Johnston Architects; Gladys Ly-Au Young, principal at Sundberg Kennedy Ly-Au Young Architects; Robert Hutchinson, owner and principal at Robert Hutchison Architecture; Rich Mohler, associate professor at the University of Washington Department of Architecture and principal at Mohler + Ghillino Architects; Dan Whitmore, building and energy analyst at Hammer & Hand; and Cory Hawbecker, senior associate and sustainability coordinator at Holst Architecture.

With the exception of Hawbecker, all the judges are located in Seattle. Sites for the competition alternate between Seattle and Portland each year. Hammer & Hand has offices in both cities.

Hawbecker said he was impressed with the quality.

“I’m always blown away by how much effort goes into them,” he said. “It is a significant investment in time for either students or emerging professionals and Hammer & Hand has stringent rules for performance.”

The DIALOG winning entry included architectural interns David Tran, Geoff Cox, Carolyn Cuthbert, Carly Kandrack, Esteban Matheus, Neal Philipsen and Ouri Scott. Their entry, called GrowHouse, features a four-story, C-shaped building surrounding a four-story greenhouse.

The building is designed to capture solar energy through solar panel arrays on the roof, maximization of passive solar gains to heating-dominated residential spaces and collection of solar energy through the greenhouse, according to Hammer & Hand. The greenhouse is designed to produce sustainable food sources. The building system has a ground-source heat pump network, allowing for offset of heating and cooling loads to reduce overall energy consumption.

Judges praised the design for addressing the surrounding community. The building includes a rooftop common area, community day care, a shared courtyard, event space, a local produce market and a community test kitchen.

The second-place award went to Sharikzadeh for his design of two elevated three-story buildings with a sunken garden between them. Both buildings feature apartments on the three upper stories over an open ground floor.

“It’s kind of like three-story buildings on stilts,” Hawbecker said. “The ground drops, sort of like a sunken courtyard, and you can see where the grade goes down into a swale sort of thing.”

For winning the competition, the DIALOG group won $4,000; Shariksadeh received $2,000.

The two winning entries will be displayed at the Bullitt Center in Seattle.

The winners of Hammer & Hand’s 2016 perFORM Building Competition were seven architectural interns from the firm DIALOG in Vancouver, B.C. The design for the hypothetical building was for Seattle’s Rainier Beach neighborhood in Seattle. (Courtesy of DIALOG)

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The owners of Portland-based Holst Architecture were pretty pleased when the firm was featured in the “Who We’d Hire” section of London-based Monocle Magazine a couple of years ago. They’re even more pleased that Holst is featured in a coffee table book recently produced by Monocle: “The Monocle Guide to Cosy Homes.”

Monocle Magazine, according to its website, was launched in 2007 and publishes 10 times a year for an international audience of more than 80,000 readers with a focus on “global affairs, business, culture and design.”

The guide is a 400-page hardcover book that features firms from all over the world, Holst spokeswoman Xylia Buros said. Holst is featured on page 319 of the book in a full-page spread that features photos of founders Jeffrey Stuhr and John Holmes and mentions the firm’s work designing the Belmont Street Lofts, condos in the Pearl District and the Karuna House in the Yamhill Valley.

The Karuna House previously received attention in September when it received a first-place award for a single-family structure from the Passive House Institute US. Zack Semke, director of business development for builder Hammer & Hand, said the house is “the first project in the world to earn the triple crown of passive house,” which includes the PHIUS award, a��Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design��platinum rating and��Minergie-P��certification – a Swiss rating for passive house construction. The home has also received awards and acclaim from the��U.S. Department of Energy, the��National Institute of Building Sciences,��Green Builder��magazine and the American Institute of Architects’ Portland chapter.

Buros said that members of the Holst team are avid readers of Monocle and that the firm first garnered the magazine’s attention through articles by Zach Dundas of Portland Monthly magazine.

Being featured in the magazine led to inclusion in the book, she said.

“They called us an innovative U.S. firm with an understanding of aesthetic and social context,” Buros said. “Other firms (in the book) were from Spain, Australia, Singapore, Geneva, Stockholm, New Zealand, Thailand and Finland, with just two other U.S. designers included.”

The book is available at Amazon.com for about $40. Holst also has a copy of the book on display at its Southeast Eighth Avenue office. For more information on the book, visit .

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When Hammer & Hand President Sam Hagerman accepted an award for best passive home building practices from the Passive House Institute US last week, he did so on behalf of the entire project team.

The Karuna House in Newberg received first place for a single-family structure during a ceremony in Chicago. Hagerman accepted the award on behalf of Hammer & Hand, Holst Architecture, consultant Dylan Lamar and Earth Advantage.

Zack Semke, director of business development for Hammer & Hand, said the house has won other awards since its construction about a year and a half ago, and that it is the “first project in the world to earn the triple crown of passive house,” which includes the PHIUS award, a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design platinum rating and Minergie-P certification – a Swiss rating system for passive building. The home has also received awards and acclaim from the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Institute of Building Sciences, Green Builder magazine and the American Institute of Architects’ Portland chapter.

“This was a really fantastic project and we all learned a lot from it,” Semke said. “We tried to bring laser focus on actual performance combined with a broader view of sustainability but also address all other green concerns.”

Based on the Karuna House’s first year of operation, Semke said energy needs were driven to low levels from the combination of an advanced building structure and solar design.

The foundation of the house – concrete poured over a thick layer of expanded polystyrene – helps create better thermal performance, and the stud walls of certified wood were insulated with high-density cellulose made of recycled newspaper. Much of the rest of the home was built with engineered wood.

The Karuna House’s owner, Eric Lemelson, commissioned its construction, Semke said.

Semke said projects like this don’t come along often enough and that he would love to do another.

“Ultimately, certification is important; it requires you to meet the numbers,” he said. “But most important is that we’re building at that level.”

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Hammer & Hand will receive a 2015 Housing Innovation Award from the U.S. Department of Energy.

The award is in recognition of Hammer & Hand’s energy consulting and construction work on the Pumpkin Ridge Passive House in North Plains last year.

Zach Semke, Hammer & Hand’s director of business development, said this is the first time his company has received a DOE award.

The design for the Pumpkin Ridge house includes a 9.9-kW solar array, large exterior overhangs, sliding exterior panels, and 15-inch walls filled with cellulose materials, mostly newspapers.

“It’s a fusion of contemporary Northwest design with high-performance building techniques,” Semke said.

Semke contributes the recognition for the Pumpkin Ridge project in large part to an early collaboration for the project between Hammer & Hand and Scott | Edwards Architecture.

“What that process allowed was an end product where passive features and performance features are actually expressed in the architecture,” Semke said.

The DOE award will be presented at the Energy & Environmental Building Alliance’s Excellence in Building Conference in Denver on Oct. 6.

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About 200 people attended an awards ceremony for construction company Hammer & Hand’s second annual perFORM Building Design Competition this past Thursday. The event was held at the American Institute of Architect’s Center for Architecture.

Last year the competition was focused on single-family designs and had 25 entrants. This year the number of entries doubled to 50, said Zack Semke, Hammer & Hand’s director of business development.

This year the focus of the competition was to design a multifamily, mixed-use structure with net-zero energy use. Competition was open to architectural students and interns, and entries came from across the United States and Canada.

This year’s top winner was an entry by University of Cincinnati students Jon Lund, Narek Mirzaei and Luis Sabater Musa, who will share a $3,000 prize.

Runners-up, who each receive a $1,500 prize, were students from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Eduardo Gandara of California State Polytechnic University in Pomona. Members of the University of Illinois team were Sang-Oh Jo, Jung A. Hong and Do Yoon Kim.

“It was really fun and gratifying that so many people showed up and for us to partner with AIA Portland with this competition,” Semke said. Winners were not present, he added, since they’re all students and didn’t know ahead of the ceremony that they had won.

The winning University of Cincinnati entry impressed judges with “its strong urban and environmental response,” Semke said, as well as “well-considered proportions, design restraint and building energy performance to attain net zero energy use.”

Semke said he expects even more participants next year because more and more architecture schools are including the competition in their design coursework.

Locations for the competition alternates between Portland and Seattle each year, Semke said, so next year the design will be for a Seattle location. This year’s competition was the design of a fictional building for a site at the intersection of East Burnside Street and Southeast 14th Avenue.

Judges for the competition were Sam Hagerman of Hammer & Hand, architecture critic Randy Gragg of the John Yeon Center for Architecture Studies, Jim Graham of Graham Baba Architects, Cory Hawbecker of Holst Architecture, Peter Keyes of the University of Oregon’s Architecture Department, Gladys Ly-Au Young of SKL Architects and Carrie Strickland of Works Partnership Architecture and Project Cityscope.

The event also showcased an exhibit by Hammer & Hand titled “Evolution of Enclosure: the Anatomy of Building Performance.” The full-scale wall assembly shows cross sections, building science illustrations and an interactive set of animations to show how buildings can be energy producers. The exhibit will be on display at the Center for Architecture through Sept. 10.

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Hammer & Hand will host an Aug. 6 event to present awards in the Portland contractor’s annual design competition.

The event, which will be held from 6 to 8 p.m. at the American Institute of Architect’s Center for Architecture at 403 N.W. 11^th Ave., is open to the public. The event also will feature the unveiling of an exhibit exploring how high-performance buildings can tackle climate change, said Zach Semke, director of business development for Hammer & Hand.

This is the second year for Hammer & Hand’s , which is open to architecture students and interns. The awards aim to encourage and recognize building practices that achieve net zero energy consumption, Semke said

This year’s competition attracted 50 entries, twice as many as last year. The entrants represent 24 universities from across the country, as well as from Toronto, Canada.

“It was fun to see it take off,” Semke said of the contest’s second year. “There is a lot of growing interest in high-performance building and the idea that buildings can generate more energy than they consume.”

Specifically, entrants were asked to design a net-zero energy, mixed-use, four-story multifamily building on a parcel bounded by Northeast Couch and East Burnside streets and 14^th Avenue.

Top winners will share a $6,000 prize and will have their designs put on public display in Portland and Seattle.

During the Aug. 6 event, Hammer & Hand also plans to unveil, “Evolution of Enclosure: The Anatomy of Building Performance,” a exhibit featuring the materials, techniques and designs used by four architecture firms to create net-zero energy, mixed-used, multifamily buildings, Semke said.

The exhibit will consist of four full-scale wall assembly cross sections, a suite of building science illustrations, project photography and an interactive set of high performance building animations.

The exhibit draws on built projects in Portland and Seattle that were designed by Holst Architecture, Scott|Edwards Architecture, SHED Architecture & Design and the Miller Hull Partnership.

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Hammer & Hand was named Custom Builder of the Year by Earth Advantage on Tuesday in part for building the energy-efficient in the Yamhill Valley.

The announcement came as part of Earth Advantage’s annual , which honor Oregon and Southern Washington builders who meet the highest level of Earth Advantage green building standards.

Holst Architecture designed the Karuna House, which received several certifications, including Earth Advantage platinum, Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design platinum, Passive House, and Minergie-P-ECO – the most stringent level of a Swiss rating system that measures homes in terms of noise reductions and material life cycles.

Hammer & Hand, which has offices in Portland and Seattle, was one of several builders recognized Tuesday for building practices that best exemplify Earth Advantage standards. Other builders receiving Green Home Builder Awards were: Advantage Services Construction (New Earth Advantage Builder of the Year), Timberline Construction (Lowest Energy Performance Score of the Year), John Residential Group (Multifamily Builder of the Year), Noyes Development (Volume Builder of the Year), Willamette West Habitat for Humanity (Low Income Builder of the Year), Green Hammer (LEED for Homes Builder of the Year), and Marnella Homes (Hall of Fame Builder).

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