By Signe Kierkegaard Cain

“We keep hearing that buildings are responsible for 40 % of all energy consumption, but that’s not true! Buildings don’t consume energy by themselves, it’s our need for comfort that is responsible”, said Henrik Sørensen at the Active House symposium. He added that designing a building should be an integrative process, where the user is really involved: “Let’s take an example where a group of children are playing on the floor. Rather than saying that we are looking for a floor heating system, our starting point should be that we need to make a floor that feels warm. To create active houses we have to use this kind of storytelling and ask questions like: What will life in this building be like in ten years?”

The integrative design process also requires that the architect realizes he can’t do everything on his own, said Henrik Sørensen, himself an engineer: “Architects need to be conductors and not think they need to play all the instruments themselves”. He stressed that it is crucial to be upfront about the distribution of tasks from the beginning of the design process. Philomena M. Bluyssen also contributed to the debate on the issue of new collaborations: “Even though people want to, it is often very difficult for them to work together in new ways”, she said.

Collaborating across professions definitely seems to be one of the key aspects of the current and future building process and a prerequisite for Active Houses. According to the Active House symposium panel another key word in the building design of tomorrow is flexibility. David H. Cook said: “When designing a lab, we followed scientists and students for months to really understand in depth how their new lab was to be used. One thing that we realized was that we could design a building, where the temperature was as high as 35 degrees Celsius in some parts, because they weren’t being used. That is one type of flexibility that can assist us in creating buildings that use less energy for cooling for example”, he said and also mentioned that buildings should be designed for another type of flexibility: “Buildings should be able to be used for many different purposes such as living, offices etc. over a life cycle of for example 60 years. There has to be a certain degree of flexibility, so that we don’t have to tear down a building and build a new one whenever the needs change”.