The aim of this paper is to present the multidisciplinary design process developed for a research on recent residential buildings in Northern Italy. The novelty of the, approach is the concrete application on case studies of holistic analysis process. The multidisciplinary team, composed by-urban planners, architectural designers, and experts in energy-efficiency techniques, has examined two buildings preventively designed under the Biocasa protocol© of a cooperative company active in Northern Italy. The aim of the project was to identify an integrated procedure to increase the environmental quality (specifically in term of energy efficiency) of these houses. The research was articulated in three levels: 1. Urban, 2. Architectural, 3. Technological. The plan was to investigate alternative designs for the buildings proposed by the cooperative developer, driving the design towards the realization of climate-sensitive buildings: minimizing the negative effects on the climate using the smallest amount of resources and energy and, at the same time, making maximum use of the positive effects, such as the sun, to create a ‘healthy’ interaction between indoor and outdoor climate conditions in buildings. The alternative outcomes have been compared with the original ones in order to understand and to measure the positive and negative effects, using the tools: CENED (steady-state) and TRNSYS for the estimation of energy consumption and ECOTECT for daylight analyses. The parameters considered for the alternative projects belong to different fields: environmental at urban scale (wind, solar exposure, orientation, climate condition), architectural (shapes, internal layout, building types), constructive (insulation, shadows, openings, etc.), and systems (HVAC, renewable energy sources). The multidisciplinary nature of the research emphasizes the importance of the process, which integrates different disciplinary approaches, to carry out a sustainable house and to transform the generic concept of sustainability into a measurable element with some comparable pointers. Copyright © 2011 IAHS.
