The Sustainability Network presents the Green Building Tour at the NFRC Spring Committee Meeting, featuring innovative and high-performance building projects by Onion Flats. This tour is open to all in-person meeting attendees, but requires a separate registration.

Green Building Tour Covid-19 Protocols: All attendees will be required to show proof of full vaccination as defined by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and wear a mask for the duration of the presentation and tour.

Onion Flats built the City of Philadelphia's first LEED Certified Homes. Next, Onion Flats built Pennsylvania's first LEED Platinum Duplexes. Most recently, Onion Flats built the United States' first Net Zero Multi Unit apartment building.

The tour will start at the hotel with a short presentation from Howard B Steinberg, AIA, LEED AP, CPHD, Principal from Onion Flats. 

After the introduction the tour will have two stops.

The first Stop: The Battery

This project responded to the need for attainable and sustainable market-rate housing in a neighborhood now fully gentrified and increasingly more socially and economically homogenous. This project help balance inequity by creating a four story, Net-Zero Energy building, packed with 25 ‘micro-units’. This Philadelphia version of a micro-unit is a one bedroom, 500 sf. apartment starting at $1200/month and includes all utilities.

This project is designed to consume 80% less energy than a similar code building.

Second Stop: Front Flats

Front Flats is an affordable, net-zero-energy, multifamily prototype for the future of urban dwelling. Packed with innovative strategies such as a prefabricated, super-insulated and air-tight thermal envelop enabling the building to be built in half the time of a site-built project; use of a new integrated, highly efficient and compact ventilation / heating / cooling / dehumidification unit within each apartment which requires no outside condensers, and the innovative use of translucent solar panels as a skin for the building and a means of producing all of the annual energy required, while doubling as a solar shading device and tripling as a visual privacy device.

Given that buildings are responsible for 40% of all green house gas emissions, the objective of Front Flats was to create healthy and resilient housing and a replicable, zero-emissions prototype of urban dwelling for a climate responsive future.