Sustainable buildings in the tropical areas are becoming a major issue today. As a result of industrialization, an increase in energy consumption will occur. This report focuses on presenting basic principles ,of sustainable design and the way they are implemented in the Brazilian market. As the building sector in the country is booming, most economic quarters have engaged in policies that look for better environmental practices in terms of process and products. Considerations include the choice of the site, external arrangements, optimum use of energy, choice of materials, ensuring a long life for buildings, ease of maintenance and stabilisation of building waste among others. Many projects to reduce energy consumption are under way with quite some success. In order to analyze the bio-climatic principles of creating a healthy built environment in Brazil, and to outline the fact that sustainability is beginning to gain popularity here, case studies on social housing and ambitious projects are taken into account. Copyright © 2011 IAHS.
Environmental forces are the elements or factors that affect the building. Consequently, the building has to be responsive to them in order to control its environmental concept. This paper emphasizes on the impact of using innovative compatible materials in building envelope in order to control the environmental forces, which their systems need to use innovative compatible materials. The environmental forces that will be emphasized on them in this paper are those strategies that are related to and dependent on using innovative compatible materials. These forces are: Thermal force, and Lighting force. Innovative compatible materials can be classified from the technically side to two categories, the first is the conventional environmentally compatible materials and the second is innovative environmentally compatible materials. This paper will address the impact of using Innovative Compatible Materials that comprise the building envelope, and explore innovative qualities, trends, and characteristics. These Innovative Materials include: the conventional environmentally compatible materials and the innovative environmentally compatible materials. This research also will describe only two examples of the innovative materials: smart materials – nano-materials by the description of inputs and outputs of using these materials and assessment of its available environmental applications. In this paper two selected examples for innovative environmentally compatible materials: Smart materials and nano-materials. These examples generally are not environmental but they have some types and applications that is compatible with environment, and those are the examples which will be explained widely in this study. Copyright © 2011 IAHS.
The objective of this paper is to propose a construction method that will provide for the smallest possible impact in the environment during the structure’s life cycle, always taking into account the effectiveness of the system adopted. The first step of this method is to identify the most significant environmental impacts to establish measurements that will help achieve the goals. Then, the results are evaluated throughout the construction of the project. Finally, the effectiveness is verified by measuring the outcome of the implementation in comparison to the objectives set at the beginning of the project. A methodology cannot be implemented based on its predominance in other developments, but rather in analyzing the system’s benefits in relation to its surroundings and the particular characteristics of the project. The method is accompanied with an example of the application to enclosures in an existing building. Copyright © 2011 IAHS.
The design and documentation of large infrastructures have to respond, in an integrated way, to an increasing number of constraints and inter-connected variables. The complexity of those projects prevents them from being approached in a linear or hierarchical fashion, as every parameter has to be balanced in order to reach an optimum result. This paper summarizes our approach to the management of four complexities in three different projects through the use of constraints and specific processes built around the development of customized design tools. These tools focus in the interoperability and compatibility of information across the different disciplines engaged in the definition and construction of the project, paying special attention to geometric, structural and energetic issues. Copyright © 2011 IAHS.
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.
Better environmental practices in terms of processes and products are becoming a major issue. Construction technologies focused on the production of social housing can contribute to reduce the housing demand. This paper focuses on identifying construction processes based on concepts of sustainability and their influence on technological, economic, social, and environmental aspects of social housing construction. Used mostly in suburbs and rural areas for single family dwellings, elements of the building envelope such as walls and roofs made of rammed earth are analyzed. The objective of this paper is to contribute to new technological and sustainable approaches based on the use of soil, also considering appropriate technologies in social sustainability. Copyright © 2011 IAHS.
