Maddy Kennedy-Parrott works at the intersection of building enclosure and energy performance. With an undergraduate degree in civil engineering and a master’s in building science from BCIT, she is a technical leader, mentor, member of RDH’s DEI Committee, and, among other things, a green thumb.
What about building science speaks to you?
I just like buildings. So many of us wanted to be architects as kids and then realized we didn’t have the artistic skills. I like building science because it feels like our job is keeping a building alive. Architects design something beautiful, but our type of engineering helps shape the design into something that ages well. What I like most about building science is the resilience of the building. Energy efficiency is a huge part of that for me, making sure a building doesn’t just suit the people who use it, but also its surroundings and the planet.
How do you explain what you do to people in your everyday life?
I say, “I’m a building science engineer.” If that piques their interest, I’ll say, “I work with buildings to make sure they’re healthy. I keep the inside in, the outside out, and make sure we’re not being energy hogs while we do it.”
Who is someone that has shaped your career?
I really admired the late Monte Paulsen, the Passive House King here in Vancouver. Before I joined RDH, I used to go to his Passive House talks and was obsessed with everything he did. I took every class he offered. When I joined RDH, I got to work with him for a short time and we became real friends.
He was different from everybody else because he humanized the work that we do. Engineers can get lost in our shared love of math and spreadsheets, but at the end of the day, we’re trying to help people. It’s easy for engineers to go full robot, but that’s not what makes people trust us or want to work with us. He always drove home how and why we should strive to connect with people through our work.
When did energy and climate become more of a focus for you?
I loved learning about LEED and green buildings in university and did my LEED Green Associate in my third year. Then I worked at a high-performance window company and learned about Passive House, and from there I learned energy modeling and about the “performance gap” in LEED buildings, then through work learned airtightness testing, picking up over time all the key whole-building principles that go into a high-performance and sustainable building. I consider climate change to be the single biggest threat to our shared future, and I strive to at minimum do no further harm in my daily work.
What would you say people misunderstand about your job?
Because I work on the energy side of buildings, some people might think I just do energy models. Because I work with building enclosures, others might think I look at membranes all day. They’d both be right, but I think where I shine is in my understanding of the two combined. I speak the language of both enclosures and energy, and I work on projects where those two scopes overlap. I can look at a project and think about how decisions across disciplines interact with each other, where they could benefit from economies of scale, or where they could have negative impacts that we wouldn’t normally catch until later if we were working in silos.
What’s your favorite thing about your job?
I love deep energy retrofits and social housing projects, because both of those things feel like small contributions to making the world a better place. I have particularly loved working through social housing projects that go from investigation all the way through to full retrofits, with energy studies, funding applications, retrofit planning, and tenant management in between. I also love Passive House, but don’t feel like you need to fully certify every building to benefit from Passive House thinking. We don’t need to choose between certification and code minimum, there’s a lot of room in between, and that’s where we can make incremental but meaningful improvements.
Outside of work, what are you currently into or spending time on?
Gardening! I have a big garden, and I love growing flowers. I transformed my front “lawn” into a cut flower garden for myself. I’m growing cauliflower, beets, green onions, dahlias, kiwis, onions, cabbage, edamame, cornflowers, nasturtium, strawflower, herbs galore, strawberries, amaranth, sunflowers, snapdragons, marigolds, China asters, sweet peas, lavender, tomatoes, corn, a bazillion pumpkins, borage, calendula, daisies, zinnia, and this list is still missing half of the things I’m growing. I get carried away at the seed packet display, and then lean into chaos gardening.
