Building condition assessment has become more and more important in the last years because it is essential at any time of buildings life. An assessment is absolutely necessary, for instance, in building takeovers to know what one is going to buy or it can be used to measure global service contracts success; similarly, to be aware of the building actual condition is important when planning maintenance. Condition assessment process results, in this research, are given by an efficiency index, made of an index assessing anomalies and two assessing degradation, pertaining to the whole building. Although the building assessment is obtained through a global index, which is computed from indexes assessing each building component degradation and anomalies so a deep knowledge of building condition is assured. In order to compute the degradation index, building components service life is compared to a Reference Service Life database. The two possible cases, either the service life of the component is smaller than the RSL or it is bigger, generate two different indexes here called D+ and D-. In order to compute the anomalies index building components anomalies are compared to a defined set of anomalies, which are categorized by typology, gravity of the damage and extension, and an index, here called A, measuring numbers and extensions of existing anomalies is created. Once building components have been assessed the information about their degradation (D+ and D-) and anomalies (A) of each component are grouped in building components families and then the three indexes of each family are grouped in indexes for the whole building. This index may be used in conjunction with another one assessing the building technical documents quality to reach a final index describing the whole building; both of them are supposed to be integrated in the building logbook. In this paper two case studies are presented in order to show how the building efficiency index works, how the intermediate results may be useful and to prove the effectiveness of the methodology.
This paper aims at identifying the socio-cultural factors that are behind users’ preferences in new residential developments in Egypt. It addresses an important social and economic problem related to the large amount of investment in these developments. An exploratory study was conducted to investigate why most users make substantial changes in the design and finishes, resulting in a huge waste of resources. The reasons behind users choices and preferences in housing design in these developments are outlined and a comparative analysis between high-income class users and lower income class in other housing projects is performed in order to identify a trend based on cultural ideals. The hypothesis of the research states that ‘Each socio-economic class has common requirements that form a trend in preferences of house components’. A brief description of the housing problem in Egypt is presented along with the different solutions that the government in cooperation with the private sector sought. A description of the current income class categories of the society is reviewed in terms of origin and sociological ideals and cultural transformations. A field survey is conducted where characteristics and uses of different internal layout of house components in residential projects around Cairo area are discussed and identified in order to identify users preferences. Research results on lower income class groups showed that users prefer to maintain the same basic trend in the use of the household components in spite of their limited resources, in a similar way as upper income groups; which challenges the hypothesis posed by the research.
In early 2011, Assimpredil ANCE (Association of construction firms and related industries in the provinces of Milan, Lodi, Monza and Brianza), together with the Muicipality of Milan, the Milano Chamber of Architects, IN/ARCH Lombardia and FederlegnoArredo, organized a competition to form a directory for high-performance, low-cost housing buildings proposals. Aim of the competition was to promote architectural quality, research and innovation in the housing sector by offering practical examples of high-performance, low-cost housing designs that fulfill the specific requirements. Participants were invited to submit designs on two themes: a 12 floors tower building and a 5 floors horizontal building, both intended with a GFA of about 5,000 sqm. The proposal were asked to deal with: • Prefabricated and/or traditional construction system with high performance standards. • Attention to the building’s life cycle and its operating and management costs from the perspective of environmental sensitivity. • Control and containment of costs and construction times with the contractor guaranteeing completion. • Optimal usability and design flexibility. • Optimization of energy efficiency and acoustic performance, low CO2 emissions, minimization of indoor and outdoor pollution. • Milanese architectural identity given a contemporary sensibility. • Aggregability and flexibility of the apartments’ building solutions. • Use of innovative components. After the selection made by the technical jury, 125 projects were admitted to the directory. A book has been published containing all projects told through images, technical drawings and a dashboard that summarizes, for each project, the technical performance and the assessment made by the qualitative jury. Editing the book, we had the opportunity to analyse in detail all projects, their structural characteristics, their performance and their architectural features. This paper aims to relate the results of this analysis, reporting, through a series of comparative studies, the state of the art of the Italian residential construction sector, its strengths and its weaknesses, the typological design strategies put in place and the available technologies.
The building sector, accounting for about 40% of the energy consumption of the EU, provides a great potential for cost-effective energy savings. The recent recast of the Directive in 2010 calls for more concrete actions and further harmonisation of the approaches in the Member States to realise the full potential for energy savings in buildings. It contains a new article about the need to increase the number of buildings which go beyond current national requirements, and to draw up national plans for increasing the number of nearly zero-energy buildings (NZEB) with the final target that by 2020 all new buildings shall be nearly-zero energy. Nearly zero-energy buildings are buildings with a very high energy performance, where the remaining low energy demand can be supplied to a significant extent by renewable energy. However, no agreed definition of nearly zero-energy buildings is available yet. In this paper, the proposed requirement system for nearly zero-energy buildings in Hungary is presented. The effect of the new requirements on the building envelope and the building service system is analysed. A fundamentally new approach in building design will be necessary treating functional, constructional, aesthetical and energetic aspects on the same level. Measures for reducing the energy demand are analysed and the reduction in energy use is calculated. Instead of choosing a few typical buildings, the energy demand analysis is done on a large building sample of detached houses. The building sample is described by a combination of geometric parameters, the realistic ranges of which were determined based on statistics, functional and architectural considerations. The ‘global costs’ or life cycle costs of the design options are evaluated taking into account the investment costs, the costs of maintenance/replacement and the energy costs as well.
In former times, the public residential sector was interested by the most important experimentations on housing issues. Today, it can still be considered a research field for new forms of urban sustainable development and housing challenges. The increasingly recurrent use of architectural competitions, together with the openness towards a wider range of users in the European social housing program, determined the establishment of solutions capable of answering to the current needs and of adapting to change. New research lines, starting from the analysis of the social transformations, propose a reinterpretation of the residential space responding to the present needs and anticipating the future ones. This approach contrasts with the traditional one, incapable of interpreting the contemporary social complexity. According to this approach, the building, once subject to rapid obsolescence, could become a long lasting good, accompanying the evolution of the desires and the lifestyles of the inhabitants throughout the time. The adaptable building can be considered a valuable answer to the request for a house that accompanies the evolution of the inhabitants. This intent can be achieved through different strategies, referring to the dwelling scale or involving the housing complex as a whole. An architecture open to adaptability, able to anticipate and accommodate the desires and the needs of its occupants, is at the base of the new challenge for a sustainable growth.
According to the cognitive approach, the paper develops the analysis of the design process in architecture and reflects on the cognitive processes applied to space and design, in order to identify the role that creativity place in the process. The paper analyses also the variations and the restrains, which feeds creativity during the development of the architectural project. The paper wants to demonstrate the fundamental importance of memories in developing planning process and creativity expressed in it. The explored contribution of cognitive science supports this thesis. Even the writings of architects as well as critical writings on architecture lead us in the same direction. By means of an experiment we demonstrates how the same planning request activates in the expert agent particular links and not others. These links start a specific, special and adventurous trip in memories and in study references. They may be technical, personal references, more or less revealed, more or less aware, not randomly generated by a planning question, which is potentially fortuitous and substantially unknown.
Within the main strategies of the Modern Movement, a thing that insistently appears is the so-called ‘planning in section’: housing rooms enclosed in vertically-displaced story buildings. Resorting to Wells Coates’ words, the traditional flat apartment has evolved into other models, with distinct single-story not flat solutions. Such strategy brought multiple advantages, from higher space efficiency, by reducing the collective flow of people, to the minimization of noise level transmission from between adjacent rooms. The most classic model is likely that of Unité d’Habitation de Marseille (1947), by Le Corbusier, but before and after that, several models were built, a lot of them in America and Latin America, boasting geometries even more intricate and complex. It is not hard to find models that, when observing their section, denote high complexity. Inside, the rooms often appear displaced in multiple levels, with variations of one height, one-and-a-half height, double height ceiling, of several duplex, triplex floors, etc. Sometimes, words lack to name the large number of types of apartments that may be hidden behind such homogeneous image. This seems to have a certain parallelism to what is happening today. If, throughout the Modern Movement, the façades were built as perfect prisms, now it seems that there is some insistency in getting away from this concept by exposing diversity. The current façades often like to show the abundance of ‘random compositions’ or ‘enriching heterogeneity’ in a system in which the internal complexity plays an important role as indicator of plurality. Multiplicity and complexity proudly boast themselves and are also composition resources.
