Buildings, Volume 11, Issue 7

At the core of architecture education are the design studio classes, where students test ideas, build physical models, and propose design projects in a shared creative environment. The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 created a large disruption of this stat...

The seismic performance assessment of dry-joint masonry arches is challenging because of their unique structural characteristics. Widely used assessment methods developed for frame-type structures require the use of a material-dependent section respo...

Building energy efficiency is vital to achieve human thermal comfort with minimum energy consumption. It is a great concern in extremely hot countries such as Oman. This study aims to investigate the thermal performance of contemporary mosque buildin...

The architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry has seen a significant rise in the adoption of Building Information Modeling (BIM) in the last few years. BIM software have launched with numerous robust capabilities and features to sati...

This paper discusses the impact of advanced building techniques, in tune with selected building materials and their physical attributes, applied to complete constitutive interiors components on these components’ environmental performance and aestheti...

To study the influence of masonry infill walls on the hysteretic performance of reinforced concrete frames, a cyclic experiment was conducted for three two-story and two-span reinforced concrete frame structures, including one reinforced concrete fra...

The subject of this study is contemporary odeons in Poland, where 11 covered amphitheaters (odeons) have been built since 2005. The odeons were selected from a wider collection of 57 functioning amphitheaters. The study collected data on location, fo...

Among Korea’s household types, the demand for one-person housing, such as sharehouses, is noticeably increasing as lifestyle factors evolve. Sharehouses feature private bedrooms with communal spaces such as living rooms, kitchens, and bathrooms. This...

A longer life span, which entails a dynamic increase in the numbers of seniors, poses a wide range of global challenges, among others for engineers and architects. The said challenges include, among others, a well-organised medical care system, prope...

The procurement process is one of the most important phases in any project life cycle, particularly when it comes to selecting the right contractor for the job. Awarding the contract to the best bid proposal is a critical step to ensure the greatest...

The detailed documentation of degradation constitutes a fundamental step for weathering diagnosis and, consequently, for successful planning and implementation of conservation measures for stone heritage. Mapping the surface patterns of stone is a no...

Here, we overview the Buildings journal Special Issue dedicated to the following topic: “Novel Technologies to Enhance Energy Performance and Indoor Environmental Quality of Buildings” (https://www [...]

This paper presents the water absorption and strength properties of short carbon fiber reinforced mortar (CFRM) composite. Four CFRM composites with 1%, 2%, 3%, and 4% short pitch-based carbon fibers were produced in this study. Normal Portland cemen...

One strategy to increase energy efficiency of buildings could be the reduction of undesirable heat losses by mitigating the heat transfer mechanisms across the building envelope. The use of thermal insulation is the simplest and most straightforward...

Detecting buildings from high-resolution satellite imagery is beneficial in mapping, environmental preparation, disaster management, military planning, urban planning and research purposes. Differentiating buildings from the images is possible howeve...

The starting point of this article is the critique on socioeconomic and environmental implications of conventional construction practices around sustainability. The focus is on exploring the sustainability dynamics of the emerging “Design Global, Man...

This paper deals with the seismic vulnerability of monumental unreinforced masonry (URM) towers, the fragility of which has not yet been sufficiently studied. Thus, the present paper fills this gap by developing models to investigate the seismic resp...

To maximize the utilization of red mud in geopolymers, a red mud–metakaolin (RM-MK) geopolymer and red mud–fly ash (RM-FA) geopolymer were prepared, respectively. The effects of red mud content on the compressive strength and microstructure of the ge...

This paper provides a critical review of the degradation, durability and service life prediction (SLP) of polymeric building envelope materials (BEMs), namely, claddings, air/vapour barriers, insulations, sealants, gaskets and fenestration. The rate...

Prefabrication has been shown to be an effective way of construction in the modern-day context. Although much progress has been made in developing reinforced concrete (RC), timber and steel prefabricated elements/structures, prefabrication of masonry...

To strengthen the resilience of our built environment, a good understanding of seismic risk is required. Probabilistic performance-based assessment is able to rigorously compute seismic risk and the advent of numerical computer-based analyses has hel...

Exploring new construction materials with low environmental impact leads to innovation in buildings and also to the expansion of environmental sustainability in the construction industry. In this perspective, the thermal insulation and the sound abso...

A tuned mass rocking wall (TMRW) is a passive control device that combines the merits of a traditional tuned mass damper (TMD) and a traditional rocking wall (RW). TMRWs not only help avoid weak story failure of the host structure but can also be reg...

The objective of this paper is to investigate the effect of improving indoor air quality with indoor plants. As a methodology, two target classrooms with the same size (120.64 m²) and 32 students per room were selected. Then, 48 areca palm pots (aver...

Brutalism was an architectural trend that emerged after World War II, and in the 1960s and 1970s, it spread throughout the world. The development of brutalist architecture was greatly influenced by post-war avant-garde art. The greatest impact on bru...

Since its introduction, Building Information Modelling has evolved into a major technology in the construction industry, where information flows play a major role. However, the very presence of waste within these flows prevents the technology from re...

Architecture is an evolutionary field. Through time, it changes and adapts itself according to two things: the environment and the user, which are the touchstones of the concept of culture. Culture changes in long time intervals because of its cumula...

The stress values at the crack tip in bending reinforced concrete beams are considered. The stress state is analytically determined with an initial and propagating crack. Equations of the equilibrium of a part of the beam cut along the crack line are...

This research studied the influence of three types of open (short-straight, long-straight, semicircular) and three different shapes of closed steel fibers (triangular, rectangular, circular) with different fiber contents by volume (0, 0.5%, 1%, 1.5%,...

Residential buildings dating back to the late 19th and early 20th century constitute an important element of the urban composition of many European cities, often determining their overall spatial expression. These buildings often require revitalizati...

Single-layer reticulated shell structures are widely used, but their stability performance is not ideal. Moreover, they are sensitive to structural damage and imperfections, while the existing conventional design methods of increasing the cross-secti...

This study explores how the logic of product modularity could be useful for the design of complete residential building areas. Previous research has noted that product modularity is usually only applicable if a ‘full modularization’ approach is pursu...

Physical contact and respiratory droplet transmission have been widely regarded as the main routes of COVID-19 infection. However, mounting evidence has unveiled the risk of aerosol transmission of the virus. Whereas caution has been taken to avoid t...

Using a systematic review of literature, this study identifies the potential impact of blockchain solutions for augmenting supply chain resilience (SCR) to cybercrime. This rich literature synthesis forms the basis of a novel theoretical framework th...

The disposal volume of material for Construction and Demolition in Europe is increasing each year, that the European Union has decided to take control of the matter unifying practices and goals to achieve. This article analyses how waste management w...

The analytical prediction of the effectiveness of fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP) in the confinement of a rectangular reinforced concrete (RC) column with a high aspect ratio (wall-like) still has an uncertain solution. In this paper, a numerical inve...

Virtual reality (VR) is a computer-based technology that can be used by professionals of many different fields to simulate an environment with a high feeling of presence and immersion. Nonetheless, one main issue when designing such environments is t...

In seismic risk estimation, among the different types of fragility curves used (judgement-based, mechanical, empirical/observational, hybrid), the mechanical ones have the twofold advantage of allowing a better control over the basic parameters and o...

Infilled reinforced concrete (IRC) frames are a very common construction typology, not only in developing countries such as Pakistan but also in southern Europe and Western countries, due to their ease of construction and less technical skills requir...

District heating networks make up an important public energy service, in which leakage is the main problem affecting the safety of pipeline network operation. This paper proposes a Leakage Fault Detection (LFD) method based on the Linear Upper Confid...

With the rapid expansion of high-rise and high-density buildings in urban areas, visual privacy has become one of the major concerns affecting human environmental quality. Evaluation of residents’ visual exposure to outsiders has attracted more atten...

Energy retrofitting of existing residential buildings has a great potential to achieve a sustainable future. One important way to reach this potential is to understand homeowners’ retrofit behaviors due to their crucial roles in retrofit adoption and...

Various facade designs in modern architecture have expanded the limits of materials and construction methods. In this study, I explored and analyzed structural, decorative, media, and adaptive as representative case studies of facade expression. This...

Since the buildings and construction sector is one of the main areas responsible for energy consumption and emissions, focusing on their refurbishment and promoting actions in this direction will be helpful to achieve an EU Agenda objective of making...

Thermal bridging in the building envelope is one of the main causes of energy losses, even in high-efficiency ventilated building façades. In this study, the effects of point-thermal bridges attributed to metal fasteners on the heat transferred throu...

The manufacture of Ordinary Portland cement (OPC) generates around 8% of the global CO₂ emissions related to human activities. The last 20 years have seen considerable efforts in the research and development of methods to lower the carbon footprint a...

This study investigated seismic assessments of the Podestà Palace in Mantua (Italy). This masonry palace has a complex geometrical configuration that resulted from the addition of various units stratified over centuries. This feature makes seismic as...

The low-level application of digital tools and information systems in construction implies that many projects cannot meet modern requirements and standard of work of advanced industries. This study adopts a practical and diagnostic approach to identi...

Masonry bricks were widely used in construction of the walls in most of Chinese historical buildings. The low strength of lime–clay mortar used in existing historical brick masonry walls has usually led to poor performance such as cracking and collap...

Building information modelling (BIM) has become a common denominator for information management, efficiency, collaboration, and productivity in the construction industry. The adoption of building information modelling has been assessed to be unequal...