Buildings, Volume 7, Issue 4

This article presents the results of a study dealing with the utilization of sludge water from a concrete plant as a partial replacement for mixing water in the production of cement composites. The replacement of mixing water with sludge water from a...

The change in the actual use of buildings by its occupants is receiving more and more attention. Over the lifecycle of a building the occupants and therefore the demands towards the buildings often change a lot. To match these altering conditions, pa...

Beam-column joints represent very important elements of reinforced concrete (RC) structures. In fact, beams and columns, at the boundary, generate internal forces acting on concrete core and on reinforcement bars with a very high gradient. To fully u...

In construction delay claims, force majeure is normally recognized as an excusable risk that entitles contractors only to time extensions, but neither of the contracting parties is entitled to monetary compensation to recover delay damages. However,...

There is a growing interest among healthcare managers and designers in moving towards a ‘patient-centred’ design of health and care facilities by integrating patient perceptions and expectations of the physical environment where care takes place. Inc...

This paper examines the dynamic behaviour of timber framed buildings under wind and dynamic loads, focusing on the role of connections being experimentally tested. The main aim of this manuscript is to analyze the in-service dynamic behaviour of a se...

Access to affordable housing has been a long-standing issue for households in most cities. This paper reports on a study of house rent prices in Port Moresby, factors influencing them, and affordability of the prices. Data was obtained from houses th...

The concept of resilience in urban design and decision-making is principally focused on change instead of resistance over an adaptive process. For cities, this concept in a broader scale means how to withstand unforeseen events that will fundamentall...

The construction sector is a key driver of economic growth in New Zealand; however, its productivity is still considered to be low. Prior research has suggested that information and communication technology (ICT) can help enhance efficiency and produ...

In the current paper, the effect on Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) of two commercial acrylic-based paints were compared: one (Paint A) for indoor applications, the other (Paint B) for indoor/outdoor applications. Both were applied on an inert and on a real...

The Hedonic Pricing Method is one of the principal assessment methods for evaluating services and resources not normally exchanged on the market. However, the method is often unable to account for the great variety of qualities in an urban context an...

Nowadays, daylighting systems and shading devices are controlled automatically to achieve their optimum benefits. For more comprehensive accuracy, parametric control was recently used to manage complex parameters with more accuracy. Such a system was...

The ability of local assessors to accurately estimate land values separately from structure values is important when considering a split tax. When the value of land is estimated with less variation, there is greater equity. We examine land ratios in...

Successful design and construction processes aiming towards nearly zero energy building (nZEB) standards are a challenge for the whole construction industry in Europe. Realizing nZEB buildings requires innovative design processes, and technologies ba...

The experience of the recent earthquakes in Italy caused a shocking impact in terms of loss of human life and damage in buildings. In particular, when it comes to ancient constructions, their cultural and historical value overlaps with the economic a...

The purpose of this paper is to explore the current state of data commercialisation and external distribution in the Finnish real estate and construction (REC) sector. We focus on how companies could more effectively benefit from digitalisation, with...

At the end of November 2016, the European Commission tabled the Clean Energy for All Europeans package, which represents a large set of proposals for several key directives related to energy. The package included proposed revisions to the Energy Perf...

The decision-making process regarding heating supply system options in a district perspective is extremely challenging. This paper aims to present a new method to support urban energy decisions in real-time processes, which was developed in the conte...

The question of how best to tackle the problem of energy inefficient older housing in the UK is considerable, and is further complicated by the question of tenure. Social landlords are working to update and improve their properties, which make up aro...

Several scientific articles discuss non-technical barriers and policy instruments related to energy efficient building renovation. However, they are seldom systematically categorized and hardly ever related to Russian context even if Russian housing...

In recent years, new forms of enhancement of public real-estate assets have been developed in Italy. These are based on initiatives promoted by a citizenry eager to pursue their cultural, creative, and entrepreneurial activities in unused assets. The...

While the Italian standard UNI 11235:2015 establishes minimum performance criteria, the thermal resistance of the growing medium of green roofs is not included in national regulations. Instead, thermal transmittance limits for roofs are obtained by r...

Housing affordability problems have become more serious over the course of the last few decades and are now also affecting the middle-class, despite the fall in prices on the housing market. This study proposes a methodology to assess threshold-incom...

This contribution focuses on the Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) as an important tool to ensure sustainable development and reach a high level of environmental protection. More specifically, this paper provides an evaluation method based on...

The concept of social vulnerability is widely studied in literature in order to identify particularly socially fragile sectors of the population. For this purpose, several studies have adopted indexes to measure the economic and social conditions of...

This study explores the extent to which rich Dutch households live green, in the form of green surrounding homes directly and nearby public green. The authors interpret this ‘greenness’ as a signal of how green the wider population wishes to live in...

Evidence of a fabric performance gap has underlined the need for measurements of in situ building performance. Steady state co-heating tests have been used since the 1980s to measure whole building heat transfer coefficients, but are often cited as i...

The work presented is the result of an ongoing European H2020 project entitled DR-BOB Demand Response in Blocks of Buildings (DR-BOB) that seeks to integrate existing technologies to create a scalable solution for Demand Response (DR) in blocks of bu...

In this paper, we present a design and optical simulation of a daylighting system using a novel design of linear Fresnel lens, which is constructed based on the conservation of optical path length and edge ray theorem. The linear Fresnel lens can ach...

The aim of our present study was to assess and compare the thermo-physical and energy behaviour of different integrated building façades, using a multi-physics simulation approach. Advanced integrated façades composed of opaque modules, one of them w...

Foreign citizens are a more and more significant part of the population of Italian cities and society (8% of the country’s total population), and they contribute to changes in the cultural, social, and economic structure of the country. Our aim was t...

Kuala Lumpur, as a major capital city, has undergone a drastic transformation in the past ten years. Many heritage buildings have been sacrificed for urban renewal projects. Those located in the touristic heritage zones within Kuala Lumpur were being...

An increasing demand for energy-efficient buildings has led to an increasing focus on predicted energy performance once a building is in use. Many studies have identified a performance gap between predicted energy use and actual measured energy use o...

Due to the demands for energy saving and environmental conservation, the development of sustainable zero-carbon buildings has become an inevitable trend. Building Integrated Photovoltaics (BIPV) is a promising technology capable of producing clean el...

Moderate magnitude seismic events have occurred during the last decade in non-seismic areas and have highlighted that many existing buildings do not sufficiently resist these types of events. The objective of this work is to illustrate that most buil...

Energy performance of buildings has attracted much attention among building physicists and engineers worldwide. The effects of building heating; ventilation; and air conditioning (HVAC) systems’ design upgrade on the building energy performance are t...

This paper focuses on an integrated multi-methodological evaluation process; it aimed at supporting public administrators in developing alternative strategies for intervention in urban planning and urban regeneration processes that focus on abandoned...

The use of lighting simulation tools has been growing over the past years which has improved lighting analysis. While computer simulations have proven to be a viable tool for analyzing lighting in physical environments, they have difficulty in assess...