192: Making Passive House Fun and Famous

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After he won the Inaugural Passive House Slam during the Heidelberg Passive House Conference in March this year, I sat down with Marius Şoflete to talk about how he’s inspiring people to build better places to live. Marius has a contagious enthusiasm which he’s using to make Passive House fun. It also helps to have a locally famous client

Marius Şeflete made Passive House fun and accessible with George Buhnici, one of Romania’s most famous IT YouTubers.

A Foundation in Engineering

Marius trained as a structural engineer, but his passion is now building physics. Since his involvement in Romania’s first Passive House, he’s gone on to play a key design (and sometimes building) roles in numerous more Passive House projects around Romania.

On top of his technical influence, Marius is helping to make Passive House fun and famous by educating the local industry and inspiring the masses to seek out better buildings. He’s doing this through classes, writing and a growing library of videos (mostly in his native Romanian language).

Leading the Local Industry

Marius has been involved with a lot of firsts. Towards the beginning of his journey, he was part of the Romanian’s first team to compete in the Solar Decathlon challenge in Madrid. This story reminds me of the team from First Light Studio who’s own professional career was launched by their success at a Solar Decathlon.

The Solar Decathlon is a fantastic competition pitting teams from around the globe to come up with a sustainable house. Not only do teams need to design and construct a house that also needs to be transported to the test location, competitors need to consider everything from comfort to marketing of a real house.

Romania has Earthquakes Too

Marius entered the Solar Decathlon team as a structural engineer with a key concern of seismic strength. Designing for earthquakes is one of many similarities I discovered between New Zealand and Romania. Romania is a relatively small country with much larger neighbours. Marius epitomises the Romanian ‘can-do’ attitude and I’ve no doubt he’ll be a key part of growing what is still a small local Passive House industry into a large one.

Whole House Awareness

Marius went into the Solar Decathlon thinking of himself as a specialist, but he quickly discovered that he needed to be involved with everything from fundraising to plumbing. He learnt about processing logs to timber, transport logistics, documentation, communication and much more. Marius credits this experience as the beginning of him learning ‘how to speak’.

Communicating Your Message

My linguistic deficiency in anything other than English is abundantly clear when I travel. At the Passive House Conference, it’s not uncommon to meet delegates who speak, three, four or five languages.

Marius’ communication skills go beyond language. When he talked to me about learning ‘how to speak’ was really referring to persuasion. Learning how to communicate a message and convince people to think differently is something that will set an engineer or an architect apart from the masses.

As Marius stated, we need to learn to communicate in the language of the receiver. Communication is what the listener does.

…we as specialists have to learn how to communicate with people

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Passive House

Marius came out of the Solar Decathlon project with his Masters degree, and also his first Passive House client. He became a Certified Passive House Designer via the project pathway, working on this first Passive House project over a fourteen month period.

As is often the case, one Passive House project led to another, and then another. Marius welcomed many visitors to the worksite of the first project. It seems that there’s universal interest in healthy, comfortable and energy efficient buildings. When people visited, saw and felt a Passive House being built, they wanted one for themselves.

The Touch and Feel of Passive House

When people experience a Passive House for themselves, they become convinced. This is the strength of the six-monthly international Passive House Open Days. Nice architecture makes for nice pictures in magazine and on websites. But great homes not only look good, they also feel great.

Reaching an Audience of 200,000

One of Marius’ recent clients was none other George Buhnici, one of Romania’s most famous IT video bloggers. George has nearly 800,000 subscribers to his Romanian YouTube Channel. Being into IT, he totally embraced the tech side of Passive House and he also videoed a lot of his journey of designing and building his own Passive House home. Many of these videos, some featuring Marius, have been viewed 200,000 times! There’s a lesson here for how we can reach more people to spread the word about Passive House.