Buildings, Volume 5, Issue 1

Along with many Pacific Rim cities in Australia and North America, Auckland, New Zealand has enacted an urban growth management strategy premised on two concepts: “liveability” and a “quality compact city”. The effective implementation of this strate...

Building information modelling (BIM) provides architectural 3D visualization and a standardized way to share and exchange building information. Recently, there has been an increasing interest in using BIM, not only for design and construction, but al...

This paper discusses the design of a zero energy home in Panama. The standards for zero site energy as well as other performance factors are used as the basis for the analysis. A description of the construction type, energy use, active and renewable...

Design review aims to improve the quality of urban settings, principally by seeking to influence the design of individual buildings positively during the planning approval stages of development. Design review systems were first set up in New Zealand...

There is a disconnection between commercial architecture and environmental thinking, where green features can be included as part of a strategy for gaining approvals and marketing projects, but those features are not reviewed after completion and occ...

The need for defect reporting is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore at handover of new residential buildings. A general review in defect studies has consistently shown that newly built properties can be found to have a significant number of de...

The editors of Buildings would like to express their sincere gratitude to the following reviewers for assessing manuscripts in 2014:[...]

The world is on the eve of major changes in the way energy and material are used, and the building and construction sector is at the forefront. One of the revolutionary changes is that for 0-energy houses and buildings. Many countries already have so...