Profile in Innovation: This article is one in a series that will highlight new and innovative technologies as well as profiling people making a mark in support of the passive house community’s efforts to decarbonize buildings.
By Lia Grainger
Although Marine Sanchez prefers to let her work speak for itself, her influence in the world of sustainable architecture and engineering is evident. Today, she is a Principal and Passive House Specialist at RDH Building Science and a Board Director of Passive House Canada. She credits her industry-leading titles to a wide range of soft and hard skills gathered over an international and varied education and career.
“I don’t have to be an expert in every field, but I do need to speak the language of every disipline,” says Sanchez. “My background is what gives me the adaptability to translate between them.”
Born and educated in France, Sanchez was raised by a midwife mother and an engineer father. She decided early that medicine wasn’t her calling (“I’m not one for blood”), but engineering — with its logic, problem-solving, and collaborative spirit — felt like home.
From early on, Sanchez recognized her interests forming what she describes as, “the triangle of engineering, architecture, and the environment.” Each side brought something essential — the technical rigor of engineering, the creativity and human-centered design of architecture, and the undeniable urgency of climate change, and it was at the centre of this triangle that she would eventually build her career.
After completing her master’s in engineering in France, Sanchez sought a deeper integration of her passions. She found what she was looking for in the UK: a second master’s degree focused on sustainable performance and design. The pairing of these two focuses was relatively new at the time, and the program wasn’t entry-level; her classmates were seasoned professionals, each bringing in-depth knowledge from architecture, engineering, or environmental science. The course itself mirrored the kind of interdisciplinary, real-world thinking and problem-solving she was looking for.
“For assignments, they give you a piece of paper and say, ‘Go for it, the sky’s the limit,’” says Sanchez.
So it was a bit of a shock when, after graduation, she began facing real-world conditions.
“You start working,” she recalls, “and you realize there’s a gigantic gap between how much energy a building is predicted to use and how much it actually uses.” This performance gap — the space between design intent and real-world results — was more than a minor hiccup. On average, new buildings in the UK were still consuming 2.5 to 3 times more energy than predicted.
The revelation left her both frustrated and driven. “We know the equations,” she says. “We’ve understood heat transfer and mechanical systems for decades. Why are we still getting it so wrong?”
It was during this period that Sanchez discovered Passive House — a rigorous, performance-based building standard developed in Germany in the early 1990s, which also prioritizes the comfort of the building’s occupants.
“It wasn’t about the certification stamp,” says Sanchez. “It was about the framework — so robust that no matter what project I was working on, the project would benefit from it to drive better outcomes.”
Her first job out of school proved to be among the most challenging of her career: working on some of the UK’s first Passive House retrofits — in heritage areas, where facades couldn’t be touched. “I didn’t know it at the time,” she laughs, “but I started with the hardest thing you can do: retrofits to Passive House standards in conservation areas.” Every wall was a thermal bridge, every hidden layer of construction a potential problem. And there was no throwing a new envelope over the whole thing and calling it a day. But Sanchez loved the challenge, and it prepared her for a future of complex, interdisciplinary problem-solving.
In an industry where energy modeling was once considered optional — and where, as a young woman in a still male-dominated space, her presence could be easily dismissed — Sanchez had to work harder to prove her worth. But she also used that challenge as fuel. “It made me better. It made me sharper. I had to be clear about what I needed from others — and how to support them in reaching their goals.”
As her reputation grew, so did the scale of her projects. She began leading teams and working on new builds instead of retrofits, and quickly found herself at the core of a group of specialists leading the Passive House standard in the UK. She was recruited in 2013 to teach the a Passivhaus Trust course before she had even finished the course herself.
And though she was clearly excelling in her field, Sanchez didn’t yet have the language to explain the value of her unique skill set. It wasn’t until speaking on a conference panel a few years later that she realized how integral her collaborative leadership had become. “Someone asked what I meant when I described myself as ‘the glue,’ and I realized — that’s the thing. That’s what sets me apart.”
That “thing” was a mix of soft and hard skills — rare in a deeply technical field. Her French engineering education gave her the technical base. Her natural curiosity, adaptability, and emphasis for problem-solving made her a trusted voice at the table. And her passion and drive to enable others made her the “glue” of any design team. This is her formula to set projects up for success.
“High-performance buildings are a team sport,” Sanchez says. “It’s not enough to do energy modeling well. You have to bring the whole team with you — clients, architects, engineers, contractors. You have to get buy-in, earn trust, and speak everyone’s language.”
In 2018, Sanchez relocated to Toronto to work with RDH Building Science, where she leads major Passive House projects and mentors the next generation of sustainability consultants. Among projects she has led are the University of Victoria and University of Toronto’s new Passive House student residences — among the earliest and largest PH student residences in North America. The University of Victoria’s large commercial kitchen represents a new typology for Passive House buildings, serving 9000 meals a day and requiring deep discipline integration to achieve best-in-class performance.
The University of Victoria’s Cheko’nien House.
Sanchez is also leading change across the border in Massachusetts, with RDH’s Boston office, where building energy codes have tightened rapidly to mandate Passive House on a large number of new-build typologies. With Sanchez at the helm of RDH’s Passive House division, the company is well-positioned to guide client, design and construction teams through these tighter energy and carbon requirements.
Sanchez is also deeply involved in policy, sitting on advisory and technical committees for the City of Toronto to support the development of impactful carbon reduction policies. Her focus remains clear: climate action through architecture and engineering, with an emphasis on affordable housing and institutional projects that impact lives at scale. And she maintains that the key to success is empathetic leadership and collaboration.
“I really enjoy what I do, and who I do it with,” she says. “It’s also not just about doing more. It’s about enabling others. We need the entire village to rise to the challenge of climate change. My job is to help everyone else rise with it.”
As she looks ahead, Sanchez is hopeful: “The Passive House standard is becoming code in more places. High-performance, low-carbon buildings are the path towards decarbonization, for both the new-build and existing building stocks. Clients are seeing it. Teams are stepping up to deliver on it. With this shift, the work gets easier — and more rewarding.”
