The Critical Design Process: Experiences from some of the first Passive Houses in Denmark

The “Comfort Houses” is one the most ambitious building project in passive single-family houses in Denmark until today. Ten houses have been designed and built by different consortiums. Besides fulfilling the German passive house standard the goal was to build the houses within Danish traditions of architecture and construction. The objective of the research presented in this paper is to compare the different design processes behind the making of passive houses in a Danish context. The processes are evaluated as regards to the “Integrated Design Process” and the “Traditional Design Process”. Analysing the data it shows that the majority of the consortiums have worked in an integrated manner, however there are still room for improvement. Additionally, the paper discusses the challenges of implementing the Integrated Design Process in practise and suggests ways of overcoming some of the barriers and thereby providing suggestions for future work with low energy houses.