DGJ Architecture

Minimum-Impact-House is a holistic approach for the reduction of the overall-impact of residential housing by creating a new type of residential house by densifying the city centre. In the design project, a prototype mini-house has been developed to explore the potential of so far uninhabitable urban niches. A triangular site of only 29sqm was chosen to build a mini-house in size comparable to a family house of 150sqm. This strategy avoids the further use of land and the need of building of new infrastructure like streets and public buildings. The city centre is a denser environment so that the inhabitants won’t have to travel so often to work, shopping, education, or cultural events.

In a research project the prototype was compared to a typical suburban house. A life-cycle-analysis quantified the amounts of energy, material, and investment for the construction, and consumed during an estimated life-span of the buildings of 50 years. The analysis, for which software had been developed, was also used as a design-tool for optimizing the prototype-building in terms of energy-consumption, construction, and materials. For the building construction, renewable resources, mainly timber, were used which reduces the energy content and emissions.