Danish Building Tradition

Building regional

Half-timbered houses

The brick house

The concrete house

The tree house

The building traditions of a country often reflects the available and producible building materials of the specific region. Most of the Danish soil consists of moraine clay, which has been and still is a dominant material within the Danish building industry.

Dated as far back as the antiquity halftimbered houses have been a dominating part of original Danish building traditions. A half-timbered house is a building constructed from a narrow timber frame with stone and clay filling in the gaps. The timber frame was typically visible and especially farmhouses have been constructed in this way for many years. Thatched roofs were the traditional roofing for half-timbered houses, since reeds are a waste material, that have been available from the food industry and farming business for many years (Granshorn, 2017).

A more modern way in which to use clay is to burn it into bricks. In Denmark the use of bricks gained much ground in the end of the 19th century, since machines for bricks where invented making production both faster and more homogeneous (Gradel et. Al., 2017).

Nowadays, the Danish building industry continuously uses a huge amount of bricks. Also, many new apartment blocks in the Danish cities are constructed from prefabricated concrete elements. Concrete is a relatively cheap and effective material to work with but unfortunately, the carbon footprint of concrete is quite significant (Goos, 2018).

As an alternative to concrete constructions, more and more constructions are made of timber. Sadly, distinct legislation regarding timber constructions is absent even though the Danish industry are demanding it (Hansen, 2018).

Figure 49 Half-timbered house

Figure 50 Brick house

Figure 51 Prefabricated concrete elements

Figure 52 Wooden timber construction