Energy Rating is a crucial consideration in modern building design, affirmed by the new EC Directive on the energy performance of buildings. Energy represents a high percentage of the running costs of a building, and has a significant impact on the comfort of the occupants. This book represents detailed information on energy rating of residential buildings, covering: * Theoretical and experimental energy rating techniques: reviewing the state of the art and offering guidance on the in situ identification of the UA and gA values of buildings. * New experimental protocols to evaluate energy performance: detailing a flexible new approach based on actual energy consumption. Data are collected using the Billed Energy Protocol (BEP) and Monitored Energy Protocol (MEP) * Energy Normalization techniques: describing established methods plus a new Climate Severity Index, which offers significant benefits to the user. Also included in this book are audit forms and a CD-ROM for applying the new rating methodology. The software, prepared in Excel, is easy to use, can be widely applied using both deterministic and experimental methods, and can be adapted to national peculiarities and energy policy criteria. Energy Performance of Residential Buildings offers full and clear treatment of the key issues and will be an invaluable source of information for energy experts, building engineers, architects, physicists, project managers and local authorities. The book stems from the EC-funded SAVE project entitled EUROCLASS. Participating institutes included: * University of Athens, Greece * Belgium Building Research Institute, Belgium * University of Seville, Spain * Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden

Imagine living in a city where people could move freely and buildings could be replaced at minimal cost. Reality cannot be further from such. Despite this imperfect world in which we live, urban planning has become integral and critical especially in the face of rapid urbanization in many developing and developed countries. This book introduces the axiomatic/experimental approach to urban planning and addresses the criticism of the lack of a theoretical foundation in urban planning. With the rise of the complexity movement, the book is timely in its depiction of cities as complex systems and explains why planning from within is useful in the face of urban complexity. It also includes policy implications for the Chinese cities in the context of axiomatic/experimental planning theory.

This book focuses on solar energy conversion systems that can be implemented in the built environment, at building or at community level. The quest for developing a sustainable built environment asks for specific solutions to provide clean energy based on renewable sources, and solar energy is considered one of the cleanest available energy on Earth. The specific issues raised by the implementation location are discussed, including the climatic profile distorted by the buildings, the available surface on the buildings for implementation, etc. This book also discusses the seasonal and diurnal variability of the solar energy resource in parallel with the variability of the electrical and thermal energy demand in the built environment (particularly focusing on the residential buildings). Solutions are proposed to match these variabilities, including the development of energy mixes with other renewables (e.g. geothermal or biomass, for thermal energy production). Specific solutions, including case studies of systems implemented on buildings all over the world, are presented and analyzed for electrical and for thermal energy production and the main differences in the systems design are outlined. The conversion efficiency (thus the output) and the main causes of energy losses are considered in both cases. The architectural constraints are additionally considered and novel solar energy convertors with different shapes and colors are presented and discussed. The durability of the solar energy conversion systems is analyzed considering the specific issues that occur when these systems are implemented in the built environment; based on practical examples, general conclusions are formulated and specific aspects are discussed in relation to experimental results and literature data. With renewables implemented in the built environment likely to expand in the near future, this book represents welcome and timely material for all professionals and researchers that are aiming to provide efficient and feasible solutions for the sustainable built environment.

Following a rapid increase in the use of air conditioning in buildings of all types, the energy demand for powering such devices has become a significant cause for concern. Passive cooling is increasingly being thought of as the best alternative to air conditioning. This book offers the latest knowledge and techniques on passive cooling, enabling building professionals to understand the state of the art and employ relevant new strategies. With separate chapters on comfort, urban microclimate, solar control, ventilation, ground cooling and evaporative and radiative cooling, this authoritative text will also be invaluable for architects, engineers and students working on building physics and low-energy design. Advances in Passive Cooling is part of the BEST series, edited by Mat Santamouris. The aim of the series is to present the most current, high quality theoretical and application oriented material in the field of solar energy and energy efficient buildings. Leading international experts cover the strategies and technologies that form the basis of high-performance, sustainable buildings, crucial to enhancing our built and urban environment.

This book offers a comprehensive overview of the use of bamboo in building industry. It systematically demonstrates bamboo's utility in terms of its properties, describing the material properties of typical industrial bamboo products, and discussing their performance evaluation and optimization as building components and in the creation of building envelopes. The book also includes examples of the high-value utilization of bamboo forest resources. Further, it examines how building performance may be affected by conditions such as climate. Including insights from material science, construction design, building physics and building climatology, the book also provides data obtained from technology and market status investigation, laboratory test and the computer simulation.This book appeals to scientists and professionals, as it introduces and tests various bamboo products, demonstrating the advantages and disadvantages for each one. The book is also a valuable resource for civil engineers and students interested in this unique plant material and its application in the building industry.

This title was first published in 2003. Seven years after Habitat II culminated with the Istanbul agreement on Sustainable Urban Development, this book brings together many of the world's leading experts from the fields of architecture, urban planning, economics, sociology, politics, environment and geography to assess the successes and failures in fulfilling the objectives decided upon at this historic meeting. Illustrated with a wide range of case studies, this volume is divided into three main sections; firstly examining the challenges, secondly, the approaches, and finally, the practices. The book represents a critical appraisal not only of the issues related to urban development but also of the modalities to face these issues from real examples, these in return can be used as starting points to construct new 'real utopias' or at least, to future 'best practices'.

Pemba: Spontaneous Living Spaces looks at self-built dwellings and settlements in the case study city of Pemba in the Cabo Delgado region of Mozambique. Self-built houses born from need, in haste and with limited economical resources are often considered to be temporary structures but frequently become an integral part of the urban fabric, representative of a local culture of living. The study is part of the Spontaneous Living Spaces research project, and through a variety of documentation tools, it investigates the evolution of the architectural and urban elements that characterize self-built dwellings in Pemba. The evolution of the spontaneous living culture creates new forms of living in the city connected to local cultural expressions and the environment. These are placed in relation to the traditional and contemporary living cultures, settlement trends and the natural environment. Covering a history of housing in Mozambique and unpacking four settlement types in Pemba, this book is written for academics, professionals and researchers in architecture and planning with a particular interest in African architecture and urbanism.

It is well known that children are naturally drawn to an engaging and fun environment for them to play, learn, and grow. This book showcases more than 30 creative, immersive, and interactive spaces from around the globe, where designers focus on spectacular interior and architectural designs that help to encourage the child's creativity and development, tap into their potential, inspire play and social interaction, involve nature, minimise distractions, and promote optimised learning opportunities. Presented throughout with stunning full-colour photography, detailed drawings and diagrams, and important up-to-date perspectives on current and emerging trends for optimal childhood development and safety standards when designing spaces for children, Contemporary Creative Spaces for Children is a must-have title for all interior designers, architects, child educators, and owners and operators who are interested in effectively shaping designs of children's spaces that focus on the health and wellbeing of the child.

Modern biotechnologies give us unprecedented control of the fundamental building blocks of life. For designers, across a range of disciplines, emerging fields such as synthetic biology offer the promise of new sustainable materials and structures which may be grown, are self-assembling, self-healing and adaptable to change. While there is a thriving speculative discourse on the future of design in the age of biotechnology, there are few realized design applications. This book, the first in the Bio Design series, acts as a bridge between design speculation and scientific reality and between contemporary design thinking, in areas such as architecture, product design and fashion design, and the traditional engineering approaches which currently dominate biotechnologies. Filled with real examples, Living Construction reveals how living cells construct and transform materials through methods of fabrication and assembly at multiple scales and how designers can utilize these processes.

This anthology of selected works outlines three critical instigators of architecture, all tied directly to the tectonic makeup of our built environment - place, material, and assembly. These catalysts provide the organizational framework for a collection of essays discussing their significant influence on the processes of architectural design and construction. With content from a diverse collection of notable architects, historians, and scholars, this book serves as a theoretical structure for understanding the tectonic potential of architecture. Each chapter is thematically driven, consisting of a pair of essays preceded by an introduction highlighting the fundamental issues at hand and comparing and contrasting the points of view presented. Situate, Manipulate, Fabricate offers an opportunity to explore the essential topics that affect the design and construction, as well as the experiential qualities, of our built environment.

Niche Tactics aligns architecture's relationship with site with its ecological analogue: the relationship between an organism and its environment. Bracketed between texts on giraffe morphology, ecological perception, ugliness, and hopeful monsters, architectural case studies investigate historical moments when relationships between architecture and site were productively intertwined, from the anomalous city designs of Francesco de Marchi in the sixteenth century to Le Corbusier's near eradication of context in his Plan Voisin in the twentieth century to the more recent contextualist movements. Extensively illustrated with 140 drawings and photographs, Niche Tactics considers how attention to site might create a generative language for architecture today.

By reading this book, you will develop the skills to perceive a space and its contents "in light," and be able to devise a layout of luminaires that will provide that lit appearance.

Written by renowned lighting expert Christopher (Kit) Cuttle, the book:

• explains the difference between vision and perception, which is the distinction between providing lighting to make things visible, and providing it to influence the appearance of everything that is visible;
• demonstrates how lighting patterns generated by three-dimensional objects interacting with directional lighting are strongly influential upon how the visual perception process enables us to recognize object attributes, such as lightness, colourfulness, texture and gloss;
• reveals how a designer who understands the role of these lighting patterns in the perceptual process may employ them either to reveal, or to subdue, or to enhance the appearance of selected object attributes by creating appropriate spatial distributions of light;
• carefully explains calculational techniques and provides easy-to-use spreadsheets, so that layouts of lamps and luminaires are derived that can be relied upon to achieve the required illumination distributions.

Practical lighting design involves devising three-dimensional light fields that create luminous hierarchies related to the visual significance of each element within a scene. By providing you with everything you need to develop a design concept - from the understanding of how lighting influences human perceptions of surroundings, through to engineering efficient and effective lighting solutions Kit Cuttle instills in his readers a new-found confidence in lighting design. "

Achieving Building Comfort by Natural Means explores examples of green building designs and methods that are currently being used around the world to achieve human comfort in buildings. The operation of buildings accounts for more than 40% of total energy use and is a major source of carbon emissions. It is imperative that this consumption be substantially decreased and that energy needed for building comfort is obtained from renewable and environmentally friendly sources. This book brings together a global group of contributors who look at factors such as location, climate, building materials, energy management, ventilation, thermal environmental conditions, shading, lighting, acoustics, and more that are critical for achieving buildings that are more sustainable. Thermal comfort and climatic potential of ventilative cooling in Italian climates is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

No other building type captures the imagination like the skyscraper. Here, Eric Hoeweler presents convincing evidence that the future of tall buildings is as secure today as it was over one hundred years ago. Described and accompanied by striking full-colour photography are over fifty new constructions that punctuate the skylines of the major cities around the world. Incisive essays delve into cutting-edge skyscraper design and building, as well as offering a brief history of the skyscraper, the evolution of the `green' or sustainable skyscraper, their symbolism and design, and the meteoric rise of the skyscraper in Asia. A special section is devoted to the designs for Ground Zero, including never-before-published drawings and plans. Far from being a dying form, the skyscraper continues to exert a huge influence on the international landscape, and a continued reinvention of the form awaits us in the next decade.

The notion of ecology has become central to contemporary design discourse. This reflects contemporary concerns for our planet and a new understanding of the primary entanglement of the human species with the rest of the world. The use of the term 'ecology' with design tends to refer to how to integrate ecologies into design and cities and be understood in a biologically-scientific and technical sense. In practice, this scientific-technical knowledge tends to be only loosely employed. The notion of ecology is also often used metaphorically in relation to the social use of space and cities. This book argues that what it calls the 'biological' and 'social' senses of ecology are both important and require distinctly different types of knowledge and practice. It proposes that science needs to be taken much more seriously in 'biological ecologies', and that 'social ecologies' can now be understood non-metaphorically as assemblages. Furthermore, this book argues that design practice itself can be understood much more rigorously, productively and relevantly if understood ecologically. The plural term 'ecologies design' refers to these three types of ecological design. This book is unique in bringing these three perspectives on ecological design together in one place. It is significant in proposing that a strong sense of ecologies design practice will only follow from the interconnection of these three types of practice. Ecologies Design brings together leading international experts and relevant case studies in the form of edited research essays, case studies and project work. It provides an overarching critique of current ecologically-oriented approaches and offers evidence and exploration of emerging and effective methods, techniques and concepts. It will be of great interest to academics, professionals and students in the built environment disciplines.

Advances in Building Energy Research (ABER) offers state-of-the-art information on the environmental science and performance of buildings, linking new technologies and methodologies with the latest research on systems, simulations and standards. As stringently reviewed as a journal but with the breadth of a book, this annual volume brings together invited contributions from the foremost international experts on energy efficiency and environmental quality of buildings. Spanning a broad range of technical subjects, this is a 'must have' reference on global developments in the field, suitable for architects and building engineers, environmental engineers, industry professionals, students, teachers and researchers in building science, technical libraries and laboratories. Volume 3 covers: - Energy, Carbon and Cost Performance of Building Stocks - Solar Chimneys in Buildings - Optimization and Economics of Solar Cooling Systems - Artificial Neural Networks and Genetic Algorithms in Energy Applications in Buildings - Decision Support Methodologies on the Energy Efficiency and Energy Management in Buildings - Progress in Numerical Modelling for Urban Thermal Environment Studies - Post Occupancy Evaluation (POE): An Inevitable Step Toward Sustainability - Guidelines to Avoid Mould Growth in Buildings - Thermal Impact of Strategic Landscaping in Cities - Urban Heat Island and its Impact on Building Energy Consumption - Green Roofs in Buildings: Thermal and Environmental Behaviour - Building Earth-Contact Heat Transfer

The contribution of buildings to climate change is widely acknowledged. This book investigates how building regulatory systems are addressing the current and future effects of climate change, and how these systems can be improved. After presenting a comprehensive overview of how the current building regulatory system developed, some of the inadequacies are identified. The largest part of the book examines the potential for innovative policy solutions to address the real world problem of mitigating and adapting buildings to climate change. This publication contributes significantly to our understanding of the complexities of long-term energy efficiency in buildings. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Building Research & Information journal.

Deflections tend to have more significance in modern structures, especially those that are either taller, longer or have wider spans than earlier designs. It is also necessary to provide desirable distributions of internal forces in order to achieve effective, efficient and elegant structures. This book presents four structural concepts relating to deflections and internal forces in structures. It demonstrates a number of routes and physical measures together with their implementation for creating desirable distributions of internal forces and for designing structures against deflection. Hand calculation examples, with and without using the implementation measures, are provided to quantify the effectiveness and efficiency of the structural concepts. Practical examples, including several well-known structures, are considered qualitatively to illustrate the practical implementation of the structural concepts and show their structural rationale. The book is especially suitable for advanced undergraduate and graduate students studying civil engineering or architecture and should enhance the holistic comprehension of structural engineers and architects. Features Develops the concepts from their principles through to their implementation Provides worked examples in pairs and analyses real structures Especially suits final year undergraduates and graduate students in structural engineering Author Bio Dr. Tianjian Ji, CEng, FIStructE, FHEA, is Reader in Structural Engineering at the University of Manchester, UK. He received the Award for Excellence in Structural Engineering Education from the Institution of Structural Engineers, UK, in 2014 and the Teaching Excellence Award from the University of Manchester in 2016. He is the primary author of Understanding and Using Structural Concepts, 2nd edition, also published by Taylor & Francis.

The Design and Construction of Pitched Roofing is the definitive guide to obtaining successful results in pitched roofing construction. Written by a team of experts from the NFRC and the RTA, the representative groups in industry for roofing construction. This guide is fully in line with the latest best site practice, innovations and British and European Standards, to ensure readers are receiving the most up-to-date and accurate information available in the field. Based on actual teaching practice, the book is highly illustrated throughout to increase accessibility of the text for the reader in its exploration of the practical aspects of roofing. It also includes an extensive glossary of roofing terms for ease of reference. This first edition contains material detailing recent innovations in roofing, in the areas of roof components and envelope performance requirements. It brings together a comprehensive collection of the design, materials specification, and workmanship requirements to construct a successful pitched roof. Including: Up to date design, product and workmanship standards Current best site practice Advances in Health and Safety Current typical scope of works for a Roofing Contractor Broad knowledge of the overall building envelope performance. Specifically, the increasing insulation and air tightness requirements. Students following Diploma (Foundation, Intermediate and Advanced level) and apprenticeship routes, will find this book to be an invaluable reference source of information which will accompany them throughout their studies. Building professionals concerned with the design, detailing and specification of roofing will also find this book to be an essential reference.

This book discusses urban microclimate and heat-related risks in urban areas, brought on by the combination of global climate change effects and local modification of climate determined by extensive urbanization such as the 'Urban heat island' phenomenon. This matter is relevant to almost all urbanized areas in the world, where the increase of urban population and air temperature is expected to endanger both the overall health of the population and the energy supply for the functioning of urban systems. The book details the inter-relationship between urban morphology, microclimate and building energy performance and presents a multidisciplinary approach that brings together Urban Climatology, Engineering and Architectural knowledge to support the development of reliable models and tools for research and practice. This book is a useful tool for architects and building energy modelers, urban planners and geographers who need a practical guide to realize basic urban microclimate simulation for use in both academic research and planning practice.

A History of Design Institutes in China examines the intricate relationship between design institutes, the state, and, in later periods, the market economy through a carefully situated discussion of significant theoretical and historical issues including socialist utopia, collective and individual design, structural transformation, and architectural exportation, amongst others. It shows how, over the past six decades, China's design institutes have served the state's strategy for socialist construction and urbanisation to create socioeconomic and cultural value. Through first-hand research, authors Xue and Ding reveal how the tensions between pragmatism, creativity, collaboration, and resistance have played a crucial role in defining architectural production. Appealing to academics, researchers, and graduate students, this book provides a much-needed contribution to the discourse on architectural history, building practices, and policymaking in contemporary China.

A remarkable classic work on traditional Japanese architecture, and how the style and features can serve as a model for contemporary residential buildings. With incredible detail (as well as numerous architectural plans and drawings), author and architect Heino Engel describes everything from room functions and the flexibility of partitions to the influence of human anatomy on Japanese units of measure. Rather than exploring why the traditional Japanese house is built the way it is, Engel delves into the practical information: what the Japanese house is and how it is built. This book is not simply a description of the features of the Japanese house, but "an invitation to probe the possibilities of utilizing this architectural achievement of the Japanese...in modern living and building," according to the author, who further believes that the unique details of the Japanese house are better suited as a pattern for contemporary housing than any other form of residential structure. With a new foreword by architect and professor Mira Locher, Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, this updated hardcover edition brings this popular work to modern readers--in hopes that they may find ideas to adopt into their own home.

This book highlights current research and developments in the area of Structural Engineering and Construction Management, which are important disciplines in Civil Engineering. It covers the following topics and categories of Structural Engineering. The main chapters/sections of the proceedings are Structural and Solid Mechanics, Construction Materials, Systems and Management, Loading Effects, Construction Safety, Architecture & Architectural Engineering, Coastal Engineering, Foundation engineering, Materials, Sustainability. The content of this book provides necessary knowledge for construction management practices, new tools and technologies on local and global levels in civil engineering which can mitigate the negative effects of built environment.