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Topic Review
BRP for Non-Residential Buildings
According to its strategic long-term vision, Europe wants to be a climate-neutral economy by 2050 and buildings represent a sector with low-cost opportunities for high-level CO2 reduction. The main challenge is to increase the renovation rate of the existing building stock, which currently is around 1.2%/year. The ALliance for Deep RENovation (ALDREN) project developed a Holistic and reliable European Voluntary Certification Scheme to trigger deep renovation of non-residential buildings. The ALDREN approach is composed by a sum of protocols and tools with the goal of encouraging property owners to undertake renovation of existing buildings using a clear, robust, and comparable method using coherent and harmonized instruments, the so called ALDREN EPC and ALDREN Building Renovation Passport for non-residential buildings.
  • 1.7K
  • 01 Nov 2020
Topic Review Peer Reviewed
Impacts of Prefabrication in the Building Construction Industry
Interest in sustainable construction has been increasing due to recent events. The limitations of natural resources and the scale of global impacts, specifically as a result of the effects of global climate change, have consequences for the construction sector. These changes are giving rise to a need to reassess the way we face the built environment and rethink new solutions for construction systems or methods that contribute to mitigating negative consequences, among which we highlight the prefabrication method. This new scenario, characterised by the need to meet the decarbonisation goals set for 2050, as well as the effects of the spread of the pandemic crisis, emphasizes the importance of understanding the impacts that may occur in the construction industry, which are essentially understood as increases in sustainability, productivity, quality and, consequently, as reductions in deadlines, costs, and dependence on labour. Therefore, this entry seeks to study on the existing literature on prefabrication, seeking to gather relevant information on the new advances, challenges, and opportunities of this construction method whose approach has been mostly focused on partial or specific aspects for case studies, both highlighting the potential and identifying the gaps and opportunities of prefabrication in this new context. The prefabrication method brings benefits compared to the conventional method, and may be an alternative, as it has more positive global impacts on the environment, the economy, and society, and consequently on the sustainable development of construction, despite some limitations that have been reported and that should be looked into in the future.
  • 1.6K
  • 14 Nov 2023
Topic Review
Circular-economy in the Built Environment
       The circular economy in the building sector is an approach aiming at minimizing waste and emissions, as well as closing water, energy, and material loops. Under a circular built environment, landfilling is no longer an option to handle construction and demolition waste, and design for disassembly has a central role. Design for disassembly is a concept in which buildings and products are designed intentionally for material recovery, value retention, and meaningful next use.
  • 1.6K
  • 12 Oct 2020
Topic Review Peer Reviewed
Reinforced Concrete Infilled Frames
Masonry-Infilled Reinforced Concrete Frames are a very widespread structural typology all over the world for civil, strategic or productive uses. The damages due to these masonry panels can be life threatening to humans and can severely impact economic losses, as shown during past earthquakes. In fact, during a seismic event, most victims are caused by the collapse of buildings or due to nonstructural elements. The damage caused by an earthquake on nonstructural elements, i.e., those not belonging to the actual structural body of the building, is important for the purposes of a more general description of the effects and, of course, for economic estimates. In fact, after an earthquake, albeit of a low entity, it is very frequent to find even widespread damages of nonstructural elements causing major inconveniences even if the primary structure has reported minor damages. In recent years, many territories have been hit worldwide by strong seismic sequences, which caused widespread damages to the nonstructural elements and in particular to the masonry internal partitions and the masonry infill panels of the buildings in reinforced concrete, with damage to the floor and out-of-plane expulsions/collapses of single layers. Unfortunately, these critical issues have arisen not only in historic, but also in recent buildings with reinforced concrete, in many cases exhibiting inadequate seismic behavior, only partly attributable to the intrinsic vulnerability of the masonry panels against seismic actions. Such problems are due to the following aspects: lack of attention to construction details in the realization of the construction, use of poor-quality materials, and above all lack of design tools for the infill masonry walls. In 2018, regarding the design of nonstructural elements, the formulation of floor spectra has been recently introduced in Italy. This entry article wants to focus on all these aspects, describing the state of the art, the literature studies and the design problems to be solved.
  • 1.6K
  • 13 Apr 2022
Topic Review
Pavement Surface Types and Distress Assessment Indicators
Pavement or road surfaces can be categorized into four general classes, i.e., asphalt, concrete, gravel, and brick and block. Pavement condition is assessed by measuring several pavement characteristics such as roughness, surface skid resistance, pavement strength, deflection, and visual surface distresses.
  • 1.6K
  • 29 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Barriers of Circular Economy in Construction Industry
To facilitate the adoption of the circular economy (CE) in the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) sector, some authors have demonstrated the potential of recent designs that take into account the sustainable management of an asset’s end-of-life (EOL), providing an alternative to the dominant designs that end with demolition. Eighteen approaches related to prefabrication, design for change, design for deconstruction, reverse logistics, waste management and closed-loop systems were found. Researchers has assessed the barriers to those 18 approaches identified in the literature.
  • 1.6K
  • 07 Dec 2021
Topic Review Peer Reviewed
Cottage Culture in Finland: Development and Perspectives
This entry provides an understanding of the past, present, and future of the Finnish cottage culture to create an overall picture of its development trajectory and its terminology, e.g., villa, in this context denoting a second home. Convenient, ready-made solutions, easy maintenance, a high level of equipment, year-round use, location, and modern and simple architectural styles are important selection criteria for (summer) cottages that belonged only to the wealthy bourgeois class in the 19th century and have taken their present form with a major transformation in Finland since then. Additionally, municipal regulations and increased attention to ecological concerns are other important issues regarding the cottage today. Cottage inheritance has changed over the generations, and the tightening of building regulations and increased environmental awareness are key drivers of the future transformation of cottage culture. Moreover, the increasing demand for single-family and outdoor spaces created by social changes such as remote working, which has become widespread with the COVID-19 pandemic, will make the summer cottage lifestyle even more popular in Finland. It is thought that this entry will contribute to the continuance of the Finnish cottage culture, which is essential for the vitality of countryside municipalities, local development, national culture, and the well-being of Finnish people. 
  • 1.5K
  • 14 Apr 2022
Topic Review
Technologies in Adaptive Dynamic Building Envelopes
Adaptive Dynamic Building Envelope (ADBE) is the term used to describe envelope systems that increase the adaptability of the building skin toward changing ambient conditions, resulting in better energy efficiency and thermal comfort. ADBEs exploit the benefits of passive and active technologies that manage the energy and mass transfer between building and outdoor environment. There is a range of technologies that an ADBE can incorporate to enhance a building’s energy performance. According to their usage, they can be sorted into four categories, i.e., technologies for energy harvesting, technologies affecting heat transfer, technologies for air conditioning, and technologies for storage systems. ADBEs vary from one another based on their level of active-passiveness, and user controllability. The first characteristic is the level of how active or passive the technologies used in the final ADBE product perform. The second characteristic is the level of occupant interaction with the envelope, meaning if the user has the ability to operate some functions on the ADBE manually, or through the usage of building energy management systems.
  • 1.5K
  • 28 Mar 2022
Topic Review
Building Design for Preventing COVID-19 Pandemic
Sustainable design methods aim to obtain architectural solutions that assure the coexistence and welfare of human beings, inorganic structures, and living things that constitute ecosystems. The novel coronavirus emergence, inadequate vaccines against the present severe acute respiratory syndrome-coronavirus-(SARS-CoV-2), and increases in microbial resistance have made it essential to review the preventative approaches used during pre-antibiotic periods. Apart from low carbon emissions and energy, sustainable architecture for facilities, building designs, and digital modeling should incorporate design approaches to confront the impacts of communicable infections. This review aims to determine how architectural design can protect people and employees from harm; it models viewpoints to highlight the architects’ roles in combating coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and designing guidelines as a biomedical system for policymakers. The goals include exploring the hospital architecture evolution and the connection between architectural space and communicable infections and recommending design and digital modeling strategies to improve infection prevention and controls. Based on a wide-ranging literature review, it was found that design methods have often played important roles in the prevention and control of infectious diseases and could be a solution for combating the wide spread of the novel coronavirus or coronavirus variants or delta. 
  • 1.4K
  • 24 May 2022
Topic Review
Sustainable development of infrastructure projects
This entry responds to the United Nations’ 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). In 2015, the international community responded to the sustainable development challenge with their report Transforming Our World: The 2030 agenda for sustainable development . The SDGs are the United Nations’ blueprint, with 193 nations signatories, to address the global challenges, such as poverty, inequality, climate change, environmental degradation, prosperity, peace and justice. The concept of sustainable development acquired its most cohesive definition in the United Nations’ 1987 Brundtland Commission report, which described it as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” . Using the “triple bottom line” , Ochieng, Price and Moore took the definition further by placing it in the context of global construction projects and describing it as the balance of economic, social and environmental aspects. In their book, they identify a number of systemic issues, “hard and soft” in nature, that provide new challenges for global construction projects in relation to sustainable development.
  • 1.4K
  • 26 Oct 2020
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