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The residential tower on our Roosevelt Island campus will be the tallest building to abide by Passive House standards, which could make it the most efficient skyscraper ever, Huffington Post reports.

The tallest building on the compact 2.5-acre campus will be a 250-foot-tall dorm for 520 residents scheduled for completion in 2017, and its specs could make it the most efficient skyscraper ever built. Rather than focusing on the well-knownLEED certification, which is widely accepted worldwide, Cornell asked the designers at Handel Architects to aim much higher and embrace the Passive House standard, an extremely strict international building standard designed to cut energy consumption drastically as it creates a healthier living environment.

Invented by Germany’s Passive House Institute, the standard is usually applied to small-scale construction and has been met with approval across Europe, especially in Germany and Scandinavia, where about 25,000 certified structures have been built. To date, the tallest Passive House building is a 20-story tower in Vienna.

Read the full article on Huffington Post.