Conference Agenda

The renovation of existing buildings is one of the priorities of western countries and needs to be promoted to increase the current low renovation rate, estimated to be of 0.6% per year in the European and Swiss contexts. In parallel, the implementation of building-integrated photovoltaic (BIPV) elements during the renovation process can provide a crucial response to achieve the 2050 targets in terms of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and energy savings. In this context, architects, designers and engineers have a key role in achieving these objectives, mainly because they are responsible for the design decisions during the development of the projects, especially during the early-design phase when the most influential decisions are taken. Through a real-case study built in 1968, this research shows how certain design-decisions in renovation processes can affect or compromise the final performance of the building from a global life-cycle and multi-criteria approach. Life-Cycle Analysis (LCA) and Cost (LCC) results show the importance of not losing the opportunity to go beyond current practices when a building needs to be renovated and highlight the necessity to take into consideration BIPV strategies to guarantee both economic and environmental targets.

In 2013 the International Energy Agency addressed the building sector the compelling importance for changing the mode of energy and climate control1.. In seeking the contribution to this issue, this research frames the moral and the vocabulary of functionalism architecture, that values a simple flat square façade, has reached the limit for this quest and made tests to formulate an alternative ground where new set of rules and technology might appear. This research seeks answers in three-dimensionally formed façades that create shades. This research is showing the result of tests of new façade geometry. The model is is a conlusion of a search path to find façade with osmosis effects of lights: more surface area that allow penetration of ‘cool’ daylight. With the system new building will benefit roughly twice as much as use of daylight in comparison to any other existing system. The façade system is considered as a mean to soften harsh climate such as desert. It is expected to create soft northern Europe like light condition.

This research aims to provide an insight into the existing research and practices on vernacular architecture, serving as a basis for further research on vernacular architecture in China and the relevant design research both locally and internationally. It also attempts to identify approaches that can improve the overall sustainability of vernacular architecture from a retrospective perspective, using emerging technologies in contemporary architecture. It looks at the concept of vernacular architecture in contemporary contexts and provide methods for further sustainable practices.

The past decades of focus on sustainability and the decrease of energy consumption in the built environment has led to higher demand for integrated design and implementation of technical scientific knowledge in the design process. This paper aims to investigate the state of the art for the implementation of technical knowledge in architectural offices in the Nordic countries and the degree to which integrated design is performed. This paper reflects a larger survey-based study among architectural offices in Scandinavia that have a focus on sustainability. The paper underlines the diversity of each architectural office through a work profile developed based on the surveys. Although the offices’ workflows differ, microclimate comfort, daylight, and energy performance tend to be well-integrated topics in building design processes today. However, life cycle costing and life cycle assessment are new topics in the building industry and are still not included in design processes in practice. There is a discrepancy between how important architects evaluate certain kinds of information and how they include it. Much information is still based on ‘experience’ and ‘intuition’ rather than derived from the inclusion of technical scientific methods.

This paper presents five design prototypes for cool urban water environments developed in the ‘Really cooling water bodies in cities’ (REALCOOL) project. The REALCOOL prototypes address an urgent need: urban water bodies, such as ponds or canals, are often assumed to cool down their surroundings during days with heat stress, whereas recent research shows that this is not always the case and that urban water bodies may actually have warming effects too. There are, however, indications that shading, vaporising water, and proper ventilation can keep water bodies and their surroundings cooler. Yet, it is necessary to explore how these strategies can be optimally combined and how the resulting design guidelines can be communicated to design professionals. The REALCOOL prototypes communicate the spatial layout and biometeorological effects of such combinations and assist design decisions dealing with urban water environments. The micrometeorological simulations with Envi-met showed that the prototypes led to local reductions on daytime PET from 1 °C to 7 °C, upon introducing shade. Water mist and fountains were also cooling solutions. The important role of ventilation was confirmed. The paper discusses and concludes about the use of the prototypes as tools for urban design practice.

During an architectonical competition for a new neighbourhood in Frankfurt/Main, Germany microscale urban climate modelling was carried out to help decision makers to choose the best climate adopted design for implementation. Based on an urban climatic map with ventilation modelling all designs were proofed by the microscale model ENVI-met. The evaluation was done with the thermal index PET, as here ventilation and radiation processes could be judged. All results show a clear change in climate. For the winner design it was possible to reduce the local heat load and creating air paths for surrounding neighbourhoods.

ABSTRACT: Climate scientists warn that “time is running out to prevent global environmental collapse” [1]. Global CO2 emissions increased again in 2017, after three years of stagnation. This was the conclusion drawn from two studies that confirmed the forecasts of experts who recently participated in the Bonn Climate Summit (COP 23). [2] It is therefore increasingly urgent to cut emissions and thereby avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change. Only then will it be possible to achieve the objective of not exceeding an increase in average global temperature of 2ºC that had been established at the Paris Climate Summit. Here, we report on a case study of energy rehabilitation involving a publicly-owned residential building constructed in Barcelona in the 1960s and a plan to convert it into an Nearly Zero Energy Building (NZEB): “EU Directive on the Energy Performance of Buildings" (2010/31/EU). [3].

KEYWORDS: Nearly Zero Energy Building (NZEB), Passive house principles, Energy modelling software.

The urban village is a unique phenomenon in China that thousands of former rural villages have been rapidly urbanized along with the surrounding built environment. The government, developers, and urban planners positioned these urban enclaves as to have terrible environmental quality and support wholesale demolition during urban renewal. Given the absence of environmental knowledge of urban villages and the evaluation of environmental impacts after reconstruction, this research examined urban heat island (UHI) and outdoor ventilation of two reconstructed urban villages in inner-city Shenzhen. Significant UHI during the day and night in the two reconstructed urban villages and strong wind conditions of some edge spaces were captured. Sky view factor, greenery planning, and the porosity of ambient environment provide directions to address the above-identified environmental problems.

The City of Buenos Aires lies on a regular grid of square blocks, following the traditional ‘Law of Indies’. Due to large immigration waves from Europe during the 20th century, the city went through a very rapid densification process leading to constant changes in the building regulations to meet housing needs. Therefore, the city is currently composed by a mix of buildings responding to all different regulations, resulting in a very irregular urban landscape. By contrast, the current building regulation proposes an extremely regular model, by limiting buildable heights according to zoning and plot dimensions. This paper is a simulation-based study that explores the environmental performance of the ‘irregular’ actual built form and the ‘regular’ model following current building regulations. The method consists of three main steps: firstly, the city’s urban layout is studied, identifying the most common block orientation. Secondly, analytic studies are carried out to evaluate the performance of typical ‘regular’ and ‘irregular’ blocks. Lastly, a redesign for the current urban block is proposed, engaging in reducing energy consumption per block and focusing specially on outdoor variety and comfort. This results in an effective ‘generic’ morphologic model, to be applied in the growth of low and mid-density blocks.

The current paper presents the activities carried out by a Working Group (WG2) within the frame of the COST Action CA16114 ‘RESTORE: Rethinking Sustainability Towards a Regenerative Economy’. The content is divided into two parts: a brief overview of the ongoing work within RESTORE, and a detailed analysis of the tasks performed in the Working Group tackling the Regenerative Design Process (RSD). With the term “Restorative Design”, is identified the activities of design, construction and building operation to regenerate the local natural systems to a healthy state and supporting their capability for self-organization and regeneration. The objective is thus to improve the built environment restorative quality, considering current and future climatic scenarios, focusing on the revision of the energy demand, and on the outdoor human comfort The paper presents a series of urban methods and design cases studies that engages in newer, continuous and healthy, relationship with the unique ‘place’ of intervention in light of climate adaptation. The envisaged results direct a change on the path of “to perceive” “to adapt” and “to develop” the urban environment and to define recommendations for science based interdisciplinary design processes.

Urban brownfield regeneration projects are complex operations that are not automatically sustainable. To facilitate the integration of sustainability issues in these projects, a recent research project led to the creation of an operational monitoring tool tested on case studies. Following this, we undertook interactions with the stakeholders of the case studies to confront the potential of the tool with the future end user’s point of view and the reality of the practice. This paper presents the method and results of these interactions. Essentially, it has been recognized that the tool could provide a valuable decision-making support throughout the transformation of urban brownfields into new sustainable neighborhoods. The inclusion of a monitoring tool into the management of these projects appears not only feasible, but realistic and desired.

The design of residential area is a complex urban design process involving multiple dimensions and shaping the physical form of the cities. The question of how the form meets the needs of all other dimensions while satisfying environmental performance requirements is discussed in this paper from the methodological point of view. A Factors System (FS) is built to organize the factors in different dimensions of the complex urban system to discover, demonstrate and describe the relevance between the formal & spatial factors and other ones. Based on the FS, the Width/Height ratio is found as an operational factor to relate the space characteristic with the environmental performance and also with economic, social, visual factors. Also a real case, a residential area in Nanjing City, China is chosen to verify the feasibility of the system and the operability of the Width/Height factor.

The urban sustainability assessment is the key to evaluate environmental, social and economic issues at various levels. This paper aims to devise and evaluate a set of sustainability indicators to assess the impacts of urban development on Indian hill settlements. New Tehri Township in Uttarakhand is taken as a case study for the analysis, that was planned to resettle the residents of settlements affected by Tehri dam. Qualitative content analysis (QCA) method have been employed in the study to select the sustainability indicators for proposing a sustainability framework and performing spatial analysis using a GIS-based tool. Previous scholarly literature has shown that a set of indicators are very useful for developing qualitative and quantitative variables of urban environments. The analysis has shown that topography, the climate of the place, appropriate urban layout, transportation and connectivity, extent of open spaces and adequate solar exposure play a major role in promoting sustainable development and ensuring a better quality of life in a hill settlement. Also, a conceptual sustainability assessment framework provides an indexing model to the planners and designers to be used as a decision support tool in curbing the negative consequences of development in environmentally sensitive hill areas.

Climate change is disrupting our planet’s natural cycles and the steep socio-economic growth together with rapid urbanisation are increasing the uncertainty of its effects. During the last decades, frequency and impact of flash floods and droughts in Mediterranean and Middle-East regions has substantially increased and will continue to rise due to these new variations. Buildings and local architecture in these areas must be adapted to avoid future damages. However, disaster prevention will not be truly effective until the ‘human factor’ is considered, based on actual evidence. Better research into how communities are affected by disasters and how they re-act with new architectural solutions is urgently needed.

In 2007, one Spanish town was tragically affected by the Girona River flash-floods and its population and buildings were severely disrupted. This case study was chosen as the main testing ground within this research, whose main aims were: a) to identify environmental retrofit strategies to increase resilience and adaptation to flooding, while improving comfort and living conditions; and, b) to present the proposed strategies to the affected local population. The project revealed insights in the increased level of acceptance and understanding of innovative solutions by local inhabitants when greater communication and participation is achieved.

This paper investigated the effectiveness of high solar reflectance paints in three building types—houses, medium rise residential buildings, and factories—in the tropical climate of Bangkok, Thailand. It was found that high reflective paint, when applied to the walls and/or roofs of buildings, could reduce electricity used in air conditioning systems up to 21.6-49.8% for a house, 7.6-15.8% for a medium rise residential building, and 7.6-61.7% for a factory. Results also showed that the total solar reflectance or TSR property had a higher impact on reducing energy demand than the thermal emittance property of the paints. When the heat resistance property of construction materials increases, the effectiveness of high reflective paint decreases.

Setting Zero Net Energy Performance goals for large building stocks such as University Campuses can have a great effect on mitigating climate change impact, especially in locations such as Hawai’i, where resources and energy are limited. This paper describes the content and the methods used to develop the Building Design and Performance Standards for the University of Hawaii at Manoa (UHM BDPS). They help achieve this goal and other building performance and energy use related State mandates while responding to the climate and environmental priorities of the region of Hawaii. The UHM BDPS are based on a location-specific set of sustainable goals extracted from current industry standard documents along with the results of extensive performance simulations. They address the project phases and teams involved, and include pre-design information to develop procurement documentation, design strategies and requirements for building performance, water conservation, and other principles of sustainable operational models. These Standards also address the building operation phase and describe the framework to provide real-time information to document the progress in achieving the ZNE and other progressive campus sustainability goals overtime, in addition to identifying operation and maintenance issues.

The YKK 80 building located in central Tokyo aims to realise better energy saving and thermal comfort compared to a conventional radiant cooling system by utilising a slight airflow to improve comfort criteria and relaxation. This paper presents the actual performance of an advanced radiant cooling system based on a mock-up experimental study and on-site investigations into the occupied building. As a result of investigations, the actual performance of the system is verified.

The YKK 80 building was awarded first place in the ASHRAE Technology Award 2017 and was certificated as LEED CS Platinum in 2016.

The ideology of Passivhaus is clear. It is a building standard associated with a really well insulated and airtight building that saves energy – in both hot and cold climates. There is evidence from that shows how important this approach to building is in achieving carbon reduction targets. Passivhaus is a credible way for large scale energy reduction in the built environment and has gained in popularity with policy makers tasked with meeting the internationally agreed climate change targets. The reality of living in a Passivhaus is not so clear. There is evidence of some Passivhaus projects using much more energy than the design models anticipate. There is also emerging evidence of the difficulties some people face in living in a Passivhaus. Issues of air quality, systems control problems, inadequate technical knowledge and skills. While the overall picture is positive there are clearly issues to be overcome in the delivery of a promising carbon reduction strategy for the built environment. This research explores the limitation of the PHPP software in addressing the lived experience of Passivhaus. The emerging issues with some PH projects suggest a better understanding of the interactions between people and the building is required.

Despite the recent pursuit towards Zero Energy Buildings (ZEB), their global adaptation is far from complete, mostly in cooling dominated climates which are still poorly prepared for their integration. This paper reports on a research project aiming to build a road map for the local adaptation of the ZEB concept in Israel. The methodology of this research was based on a statistical top-down feasibility analysis which explored the possibility of 10 different urban typologies to achieve zero energy balance using the Load Match Index as the performance metric. Results demonstrated large potential variations between residential and office uses as well as between different typologies to deliver zero energy balance in the Israeli context. Findings helped generate detailed criteria and four different models for Zero Energy Buildings in Israel towards new policy.

With the upgrading of education mode and the architecture discipline development in the informatization context, modern architecture education has gradually shifted from top-down elitism education to bottom-up humanism education, the contradiction between the traditional enclosed space and the growing demand of the Architecture Department Building's environment is the key to the development of architecture education. For cities in cold region, the quality of the architecture education space is threatened by severe cold climate. In the informatization context, optimizing spatial environments is facing severe challenges. Based on the theory of interaction demand and bioclimatology, this paper takes the School of Architecture of Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT) as an example, proposes regeneration strategies and conducts CFD simulation to verify the effectiveness of the design which provides reference to the traditional Architecture Department Building's redevelopment in the cold region.

To explore a comprehension of daylight knowledge and its impact on visual perception, two surveys have been carried out in 2016-2018 among architecture students (so far 500 responders involved). This paper presents findings from the second survey which was conducted in six European countries. Based on the earlier outcomes obtained from the first questionnaire, the revised survey’s goal was to analyse in more detail a link between a perception of daylit spaces perceived by the students and by the experts. The ultimate goal was to verify daylight knowledge’s impact upon the visual perception.

As a result of such large investigation, three clear trend lines can be distinguished: i) the mood seems to be related to the perceived comfort rather than the sun/sky condition; ii) the judgments expressed by the experts and the non-experts are congruent (confirming the outcome of the earlier study); iii) the lack of knowledge about daylight metrics and regulations was noticeable as well as the difficulties with an implementation of daylight analysis outcomes into the design process. The outcomes highlight a necessity of introducing a comprehensive daylight education into the architectural programmes.

The building sector amounts to about 40% of the world’s total energy consumption. In tropical countries like India naturally ventilated or mixed mode ventilated buildings would contribute in the reduction of energy consumption used for cooling the buildings. It is necessary for the architecture schools to educate the students on understanding the principles of natural ventilation and applications of various strategies in the design decisions. This paper summarizes the development of a water table apparatus for testing architectural design for natural ventilation, validation of its results, and its utilization in the classroom as a design evaluation tool for architecture students. The water table was constructed, and its performance was validated and simple metrics for evaluating natural ventilation performance were developed at CEPT University. A refined water table was constructed later to be used for classroom instruction at the C.A.R.E School of Architecture. The workshop there provided hands-on experience to test various design parameters, qualitative and quantitative analysis in design projects. The paper demonstrates the ease with which students are able to visualize and understand the effectiveness of natural ventilation and make the necessary design modifications.

There are pressures to showcase adoption of green buildings in universities for several reasons, including, demonstrating leadership, aligning with sustainability vision of the university and “walking the talk”. New generation learning and teaching spaces are moving away from the model of didactic teaching and learning towards two-way

teaching and learning models. While university buildings are incorporating such new teaching and learning models into their buildings, there is little or no evidence that green teaching spaces are actually supporting student learning outcomes. In comparison, the literature is rich with post occupancy and thermal comfort studies undertaken in green

office spaces. This paper presents a case study of a green building in a Victorian university in Australia. The building was considered to be an example of Australian excellence and has received a number of awards. Using one classroom in the building, the researchers monitored the temperature, relative humidity, and CO2 levels in this classroom during

a two week peak period of a summer intensive program. The findings suggest that this particular classroom did not always provide comfortable conditions for teaching and learning. More research is required to draw definitive conclusions.

It has been argued that buildings have evolved and adapted well in their response to social and economic context but have increasingly become indifferent towards local climate, completely relying on energy-consuming add-on systems to provide for occupant comfort. It doesn’t help either that contemporary energy standards encourage a similar idea of first thermally isolating the occupied spaces from the environment and, only then, employing efficient active systems for space conditioning. This paper illustrates a course structure where students and faculty collectively explored and discovered the potential of an integrated configuration of envelope and energy systems that positively interacts with exterior environment and enhances indoor comfort conditions with minimal energy use. The focus of this paper is to present how a critical approach of understanding climatic design principles can be developed through reverse synthesis of exemplary built examples. With a focus on occupant comfort and energy use, the students explored the potential for environmental response to different climates using a deconstructed version of a known existing building as inspiration to reference new designs.

ABSTRACT: Carlo Scarpa is skillful in using components and materials to create, moderate and enhance the light required for exhibiting the sculptures. The aim of this research is to explore his daylighting strategies and try to understand the interplay of light and space in the sculpture gallery of the Castelvecchio. This study started with background research, on-site studies then followed by parametric analysis. Overall, the findings suggest that Scarpa has wisely used key light and side light in the problematic space, creating a fascinating lighting environment.

KEYWORDS: daylighting, exhibition design, modelling, spatial creation

It is widely acknowledged that buildings contribute a considerable proportion of global GHG emissions in both their construction and use, making them a key contributor to global climate change. This reality is still absent in architectural education in much of sub-Saharan Africa, where a business-as-usual approach still predominates. Contemplating the responsibility of architects, landscape architects, urban designers and urban planners have in curbing GHG emissions, this paper reflects on how architectural education could respond to the challenges posed, placing architecture students and educators front-and-centre in this challenge, through their actions and outputs. The paper presents on-going dialogue surrounding the need to address climate change as an integral part of architectural discourse, looking at the attendant opportunities and challenges that arise from this process, and what we can learn from this discourse.

This paper presents preliminary research outcomes from applying EEG Mind Wave Mapping methodology for investigating the impacts of learning environment on students' concentration and learning performance under different lighting conditions. During the learning process, whether students remain attentive generally influences their learning efficacy. Literature shows that classroom lighting may be important for pupils' academic performance. However, most of the time, lighting could not be adequately controlled due to the given building envelope design and the spatial layout. The present study explores the influence of different lighting conditions in a conditioned room on architectural students' mind wave when they were engaging in a learning task. Lighting scenarios included naturally lit, artificially lit and hybrid mode set in this room were experimented and the test scores of the learning tasks under these scenarios were compared against mind wave mapping results . The preliminary findings from this study showed that students’ performance in a natural daylit and hybrid lit room shows higher concentration than that in the artificially lit room, as a result, the use of natural light in the learning environment is more desirable and this can have significant benefit for reducing energy demands from artificial lighting in educational spaces.

Urban climatology (UC) is fundamentally interdisciplinary as it draws upon the expertise of several distinct fields including: atmospheric sciences, architecture, engineering, geography and urban planning & design [1]. For a student of UC, integrating the contributions of each to an understanding of urban climate is a challenge; each has a focus on different spatial and time scales and uses different terminology to describe the relevant features/processes from their perspectives. As a result, what represents a solution in one field can create a problem for those working in another. For example, building air conditioning that is used to offset uncomfortably hot outdoor temperatures adds waste energy to the outdoors, contributing to warming and creating an energy demand feedback loop. In this paper, we describe the London Urban Climate Walk and how it is used to explore urban microclimates and teach the principles of urban climatology. The walk treats the participants as a mobile ‘weather stations’ and links their sensory faculties to climate processes. The paper will present the results of atmospheric measurements taken along the route and of interviews with participants.

This paper reviews sixteen residential schemes that represent the range of urban typologies encountered around London, UK. Fieldwork and detailed analytical studies conducted on each scheme provided insights on environmental performance and the connections between type, architectural design and performance. The study demonstrates the potential for passive design to lead to free-running buildings that do not require conventional space heating while also highlighting an increasing problem with overheating that is affecting smaller, highly insulated dwellings of recent construction.

This paper presents a prototype classroom-field interactive teaching and research tool, named Interactive Satellite Solar Lab (ISSL) that transcends the physical boundary of conventional classrooms and expands the venue of teaching and learning to out-of-doors. Tethered wirelessly to the classroom, the satellite lab empowers students to examine real-time performance of solar systems in real world settings. While experiments are conducted in remote settings by a team of students, their experiments and collected data are communicated instantly to the classroom instructor and students. The visual images and collected data from field experiments are simulcast in the classroom where the instructor and other students are viewing them. The data gathered from the field are transmitted to the instructor’s and students’ PCs or cellular phones. Activities of onsite experiments can be recorded and projected in the classroom. The field team and the classroom students are able to assess field conditions, make decisions, and perform experiments together. The ISSL was developed by a multidisciplinary team of faculty and students in an effort to transform the environmental dimension of architectural education, and to explore and promote a next generation pedagogic paradigm for science and engineering.

The goal of this study is to investigate the academic efforts to apply Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) in architectural design. CFD refers to a computational method for predicting the movement of fluid. Since airflow is an important issue in architecture, CFD can be a helpful tool in architectural design. Specifically, the benefit of using CFD can be maximized if it can be used from the beginning of the design process. However, the complexity of CFD has been a barrier to be utilized in the early stages of design. Although the development of new software made CFD more accessible for architectural designers, it caused another problem of blind users who cannot interpret the simulation results. With a qualitative and interview-based research method, this study explores the current position of CFD in architectural design education. Former instructors and students of two CFD courses offered at two design-oriented architecture programs in the US participated in the interviews. Through the interviews, this study questions the future direction of CFD for architectural design education.

For the complex smart systems of the future, you need highly educated engineers to design systems which not only carry out their needed functionality but also are low power, which in turn benefits all people. Learning hardware modelling with a hardware modelling language like VHDL is an extensive undertaking, which involves practice by solving many assignments independently. Providing an adequate learning experience is a difficult task due to large classes and different types of learners. This paper presents the VHDL E-Learning System, an automated assessment system to give students tasks and automated feedback and therefore provides students the possibility to increasingly build up their proficiency in designing digital systems.