Trilobite Design

04/27/2026

Cincinnati's first certified Passive House measured 7 kBtu per square foot per year before onsite generation. Neighbors on the same Mt Airy block use seven to ten times that.

A new post on the Trilobite blog walks through how. Three principles: airtight, insulated, well ventilated. The physics of heat pumps and ERVs. Where Pretty Good House reaches excellence and where Passive House pushes further.
For homeowners considering a new build or a deep retrofit.

https://trilobitedesign.com/pretty-good-house-and-passive-house-explained/

04/24/2026

A few musings about sustainability on Earth Day.

Earth Day – Your Home Is The Lever 2026-04-222026-04-22 by Scott Hand Eighty Years of Operating Energy. The house you build will operate for eighty years, at least. The car you buy next month will be on the road for twelve. Of the choices a household makes about its environmental footprint, the bu...

04/15/2026

Sometime around the 1970s, America forgot how to build cities. We froze our neighborhoods in amber. We stopped experimenting with new housing types and vibrant infrastructure, and instead trapped ourselves in an endless loop of building the exact same things: freeways, downtown office towers, and sprawling single-family subdivisions.

If you want to understand the entire development mentality behind Trilobite Design, you will want to read Benjamin Schneider’s incredible new book, The Unfinished Metropolis: Igniting the City-Building Revolution. It is practically a thesis for our entire practice.

Schneider argues that "city-building is a lost art." He points out that the urban landscape isn't just a backdrop; it determines the kind of life you are able to live. Our current housing crisis, our dependence on cars, and our fraying communities are the direct result of clinging to these outdated 20th-century development patterns.

This is exactly why we are so relentless about pushing for systemic improvements. The need for Single-Stair mid-rises and urban infill isn't just a design trend, it is the literal toolkit we need to revive the lost art of city-building. I look out the window of the Trilobite office in Northside every day and see exactly what Schneider is talking about. This neighborhood is vibrant because it was built before we made this kind of density illegal. It's time to legalize Northside-style development citywide.

Cities are never truly "finished." They must breathe and evolve lot by lot. Schneider's book is a brilliant reminder of what happens when we stop dreaming, and a roadmap for how we can start again. Highly recommend picking this one up!

04/13/2026

The new ROAD to Housing Act is forcing large institutional investors to sell their rental subdivisions to individual homeowners within 7 years. The era of designing "apartments on the ground" is over.

At Trilobite Design, we aren't scrambling to adjust our site plans, because we never bought into the extractive corporate model. We build bespoke ecovillages and missing middle infill. Our projects are fee-simple by design from Day One.

True neighborhood vitality requires the opportunity for ownership and neighborhood character. The federal rules have finally caught up to our philosophy.

If you're planning a community and need an exit strategy that actually builds local wealth, let's talk.
https://trilobitedesign.com/the-build-to-rent-pivot-why-our-new-subdivisions-need-an-exit-strategy/

04/08/2026

What good is designing a walkable, beautiful Missing Middle neighborhood if the walk to the grocery store gets you killed?

We’ve been talking a lot about changing the math of housing in Cincinnati: legalizing Point Access Blocks, utilizing the ROAD Act, and building high-performance eco-districts. But as architects, we have to admit something: fixing the buildings isn't enough if we don't fix the streets.

I recently finished Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America by Angie Schmitt, and it is a gut-punch of a read.

Schmitt expertly breaks down how the massive spike in pedestrian deaths isn't about distracted walkers or jaywalking. It is a predictable crisis caused by systemic inequality and a built environment that prioritizes the speed of SUVs over human life. If you want a local example of what Schmitt is talking about, just look at the history of Liberty Street in OTR. We literally bulldozed the center of our most walkable neighborhood to build a 7-lane mini-highway for cars. Fixing our buildings means fixing mistakes like that.

At Trilobite Design, this is exactly why we constantly fight to abolish parking minimums and prioritize transit-oriented infill. You cannot build a human-scaled eco-district if every piece of architecture is forced to defer to the automobile.

04/06/2026

If you're tired of seeing the same block-swallowing, uninspired 5-over-1 apartment buildings popping up in every neighborhood, I have good news: The math is finally changing. 🏗️

At Trilobite Design, we know that bad architecture is rarely a lack of imagination, it's a byproduct of outdated building codes. Specifically, the "double-loaded corridor" mandate.

The new ROAD to Housing Act is finally giving us the green light to build Point Access Blocks (Single-Stair mid-rises). This is how we kill the 5-over-1 monolith and return to fine-grain, bespoke urban infill that actually fits on our historic infill Cincinnati lots.

No more dark hallways. Better floor plans. True cross-ventilation.

We break down the architectural math in our latest blog post. Let’s build better cities. 👇
https://trilobitedesign.com/the-end-of-the-5-over-1-monolith-why-the-single-stair-revolution-is-the-key-to-better-housing/

03/27/2026

Ever wonder why so many new apartment buildings look exactly the same? It’s usually because of outdated building codes, not a lack of imagination.

But things are about to get a lot more interesting! The ROAD to Housing Act is moving through DC, and it’s opening the door for the kind of "Missing Middle" housing we're talking about a lot. Things that actually makes a city feel like home.
I want to dive into why this bill is a huge win for livability and how it’s going to help us build faster and smarter.

Check out our first intro on the Trilobite blog!
https://trilobitedesign.com/the-road-to-a-better-city-why-were-nerding-out-over-the-new-housing-act/

Graphic via Michael Eliason

03/10/2026

We shouldn't measure a street's success by how fast a car can leave it.

A net-zero home on a street that requires a car for every errand isn't a victory; it's a failure of planning. Sustainable buildings and sustainable streets are the exact same project.

I wrote about the physical math of stitching Cincinnati back together in the Business Courier. I put the full blueprint on the Trilobite blog today.
https://trilobitedesign.com/stitching-the-severed-city/

02/24/2026

In Radical Cartography, William Rankin shows us a powerful truth: maps don’t just display data. How they organize colors, graphics, and structure actively manipulates our emotions and our interpretation. I love maps and also learned a lot about presentation and visuals.

Architecture has some of the same problems.

The "standard map" of residential building codes only shows one version of information. Most builders ignore the science that we know how to construct better buildings that can improve indoor air quality, use less energy, and last longer.

02/23/2026

A solar panel on a leaky house is a math failure.

Other folks talk about green building like it is a shopping list of eco-friendly products. It is actually a geometry problem. At Trilobite Design, we follow a strict order of operations.

The Envelope: Stop the air leaks. We use "Pretty Good House" and Passive House principles to build a thermal fortress. Fix the load before you fix the source.

The Geometry: Density beats sprawl. A tight urban duplex is inherently more efficient than an isolated smart-home a car-drive from everything.

The Horizon: Build it to last a century. If it rots in thirty years, it was never sustainable.

We get the physics right first. The gadgets come last.