Week 3 - Passivhaus Design Blog

Passive Design

Initial Direction

The whole idea of designing a full housing estate became very overwhelming for me and I really had no idea where I should start, I thought the best thing to do would get some of my initial ideas on paper so I had some clue what direction to start looking at in terms of passive housing. I knew I wanted my houses to have a South facing living area to provide a bright, airy, communal space in which its occupants could relax and unwind during the day. I then decided that my target occupants would be mature university students or students doing a post-grad. It is a site that has easy access to the college and all of its facilities which is something most mature students cannot find unless they want to be living with young undergraduates, which can more often then not be less then ideal living conditions. My initial ideas for a floor plan was more like a home, rather then accommodation, which is where I think I went wrong. Even though I want the houses to be homely, the design of a home and of accommodation are completely different as they hold different priorities. I had shown these floor plans to my peers in my tutorial and the feedback I received only cemented the fact I have mentioned and that I needed to change my floor plan, so I went back and started over but done it properly this time.

Site Size

To briefly recap on last week, I was looking into maximizing the solar gain of the houses on my site and spoke about orientation, heat loss, active house vs. passive house design, healthy indoor environment and comfort. I wanted to first get my head around these basic principles before trying to understand how passivhaus design works from the ground up. With that in mind, before I start to look at wall types and foundations, I first want to get an understanding of how many houses I have room for on the site, how many there should be, and how many people per house in accordance with the Castletroy local area development plan.

I began by going onto Google Maps to measure the size of my site to see what I am working with. 

• The total site area I measured was 3,264.88m².

I then after a great deal of confusion figured out what exactly I was looking for in the local area development plan which was how many units per hectare is required. Below is the section of the plan I believe fits this sites description.

According to the local area development plan 50 units per hectare should be applied within 500m of the public transport corridor, and 35 units everywhere else. Even though there is a bus stop outside the proposed site, according to this map on the local area development plan it is not within the 500m public transport corridor, so 35 units per hectare should be applied. after measuring the site, it is clearly under a hectare so below is how I worked out how many units should be on the site.

In the images you can clearly see I decided that I should go with 12 houses since 11 would be the minimum and I think I would struggle to get any more then than 12 on this site. On the right was just one of my rough sketching pages of how I initially plan on dividing up the site, I am not overly happy with the design or layout so I will continue to refine, research and reimagine the houses and their layout.

To talk you through what I was trying to figure out was what size of plot per house I would have, while also having road access to each house. My thought process was find the size of the site, then divide it up to find the size of the plot per house, then from that the maximum size I can make my houses, and from that I can begin making my floor plan. This process is shown in the image on the right going from the top right to bottom then a rough sketch of my proposed house on the bottom left and its floor plan above that. Once I had the basic measurements I wanted, I drew out my floor plan on graph and tracing paper.

This is a semi-detached house, each house has a max occupancy of 4 people. The south facing living/dining area with large windows allows for maximum solar gain. Its open plan design makes the most of the available space. The entire building is 16x10m, each unit is 8x10m with an area of 59.5m² making the total area of each building 119m².

Here is an image on how I plan to lay out the upstairs/ first floor, I estimated how far in I would have to step either side due to the slant of the roof.

I will be presenting this floor plan in my lab in week 4 and receiving feedback on it from Darren, once I get some guidance on whether or not I am headed the right direction, I can then develop my idea further.