houses. But with the demand for a building percentage above 80% it has been difficult to structure the area and to keep the building height low; the addition of gardens and of common outdoor areas has been a challenge. Also the wish for a lovely view and direct sunlight coming into every apartment have been important parameters. The site plan is organized with building heights varying between 2 and 4 levels which is quite low although we are still maintaining every apartment to have minimum direct daylight on the entire southwest/southeast facade from 12.00 21. March to 12.00 September. This is not necessarily impressive but in comparison to how low the buildings are it becomes more difficult to assure the direct daylight in every apartment through the year. It could be argued that a building percentage of 80% is way to high for this place, in order to attract a typical single house family. In our case the 80% building percentage results in some narrow spaces between the houses with minimum 25 meters between the houses. Also the view from the houses does in some cases suffer from the high building percentage, but in general the site plan and the way the houses are tilted 45 degrees gives a lot of qualities to the individual apartments when it comes to heat gain, daylight and view, but the overall impression of the outdoor areas could be increased dramatically by lowering the building percentage slightely.
build passive houses. On the other hand the southern façade is highly glazed, which eventually could result in a glare problem between the dark northern façade and the light southern façade. Cold drop could also be a risk especially in the double high room of the 3 level apartments, although this of course is dependant of the position of the inlet of the mechanical ventilation. It could be discussed why the passive house standard for heating is set to 15 kWh/m2/year. This is a standard that is designed for housing in southern Germany where the solar gain is much higher than in Denmark. Should we just adapt this standard or should we modify it for Danish conditions. After having used the passive house criteria for a semester these regulations are not impossible to apply to a housing complex in a Danish context, but it could be argued that the architectual quality is suffering under these harsh regulations. An adaption of the regulation to the danish climate would be preferable
Reaching the goal for the passive house standard and evaluating the result. The pursuit for the passive house standard have as mentioned before been a major challenge in this project. During the process it has taken a lot of time to investigate the different design possibilities to improve the energy consumption of the design. All the way through the process we have been considered that we didn’t want to create or choose the most energy efficient design solutions just because they where energy efficient, as we wanted other aspect to influence the design as well. Still the passive house goals have played the most important role in this project for good and bad. One of the downsides about sustainable design is that it seems to create a certain type of aesthetics, where there is a huge difference between front and backside of a building. The backside or northern side of the building is closed and unfriendly although we are actually having a quite high amount of glazing on this façade compared to already
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