Sorry, seems to be the common name in many countries, not just in France and Italy and I do not know any specific translation.
In more broad terms a modern home is composted of:
- a compact design to minimize surface dispersion of heat, a sphere would be ideal but obviously it's not much practical so we tend to the "cube" instead;
- aligned to the north-south axe to maximize the Sun intake in winter, so with more or less large windows to capt as much as possible with something to cover them and most of the exteriors in Summer when heating is not needed. This part obviously vary depending on the latitude; at arctic/antarctic I doubt we want to cover the Sun more than the minimum to sleep in summer, at equatorial latitudes I imaging heating in the winter is not much needed so large windows are just a choice there and Sun shields are the more shielding possible all of the year, in any case though the design still hold;
- with big insulation, as much as is reasonable, thermal simulation at hand, witch obviously the maximum thickness at boot too cold and too hot climate and the opposite in the most mild climate, again still the same design;
- air-tightness to keep the most separated possible the inside and the outside, but obviously it we do not exchange air we die inside... So airtight ok, but with a mean to exchange air keeping heat/humidity separated as much as possible. Still the same design, with some extras: in coldest climate we need pre-heating the incoming air, eventually get via a Canadian well (essentially a tube, around Ø200mm, laid out underground at a various depth and length to use the ground temperature to mitigate the incoming air), eventually with a classic resistive heating or a combination of both, and the same Canadian well not with a heating but a pre-cooling systems for most hot climate. Same principle and mostly the same tools all over the world;
- the way to exchange air is just pushing outside the internal air, sucking inside the exterior keeping the same pressure inside and outside, possibly regulating the humidity as well. This could be done passively or actively depending on the climate but the general principle is the same and the aeraulic (pipes) network is the same as well, we have some "different" solutions using multiple devices on perimetral walls, some grabbing air, some pushing, with some internal heat exchanger but they are not much effective and costly, used in general only to retrofit this system on pre-existing buildings where creating a pipe network is not much doable;
- the rest is direct air cooling, minisplit or centralized, the heat-pump principle is the same, only much bigger then the small one of the ventilation, and instead of exchanging air they make interior and exterior air turn in the interior and exterior unites without exchange, at a much bigger rate (let's say a home ventilation could be 300m³/h, while an aircon is at least 3000).
- the winter heating tend to be low inertia, low temperature, liquid to liquid or air (exterior) to liquid (interior) heat pump, the similar compressor of all the overs, but home side you get a long pipe under the flooring, rarely with some wall elements near the floor, where mildly hot water slowly flow releasing heat inside, while outside it's or a similar pipe underground, spread or deep in the soil, or an air-unit like the aircon.
The goal of all the above is achieving the largest scale possible to lower the price of anything an the ability to guarantee an electrical absorption from the grid low enough to been able to aliment homes for potentially all humans given our generation capacity, this means normally around 1kW per home in mild climate, 4-6-8kW maximum in "extreme" climate. Another measure is the theoretical amount of energy the home need per internal walkable surface per year used as a generic "rating guideline".
That's my best to avoid naming specific machines or acronyms, I hope it's clearer now.
Thanks for all the info! It's not necessary to avoid acronyms or initialisms, just the first time it is used put what it is short for in parenthesis. For example, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), then you can use the FBI in the rest of the text.
VMC stands for controlled mechanical ventilation in French.