Talk title: "Apartment Buildings: New Dissections, Interventions and Connections"
Chris Benedict is a New York City architect known for her pioneering work on Passive House and deep energy retrofit multifamily housing, with a career-long focus on affordable, high-performance apartment buildings. In this talk from the Westford Symposium, she walks through a New York City apartment building project in close detail: chasing continuous insulation and air sealing through amenity floors, mechanical closets, and skewed, non-symmetrical floor plans, and rethinking how domestic hot water is delivered at scale without running into Legionella risk. She then pivots to a wider "net zero water" challenge, questioning why sewage and clean water are combined in the first place, and shares a constructed-wetland and vacuum-toilet system that composts waste on site and returns nutrients to nearby farms.