During European prehistory, hilltop enclosures made from polydisperse particle-and-block stone walling were exposed to temperatures sufficient to partially melt the constituent stonework, leading to the preservation of glassy walls called 'vitrified forts'. During vitrification, the granular wall rocks partially melt, sinter viscously and densify, reducing inter-particle porosity. This process ...

Spatial indexing is a well researched field that benefited computer science with many outstanding results. Our effort in this paper can be seen as revisiting some outstanding contributions to spatial indexing, questioning some paradigms, and designing an access method with globally improved performance characteristics. In particular, we argue that dynamic R-tree construction is a typical cluste...

A building may have three types of flexibility: a) service flexibility is important to the building's users, b) modifiability interests especially the owner, and 3) long-term adaptability is a key factor especially in the stratification of the urban structure and the cultural environment. A new indicator, the Flexibility Degree, was developed as part of this study to measure building modifiabil...

Projects in the building industry are extremely dynamic, driven by external conditions, modified user requirements and frequently changing business partners. Therefore, common principles should be established throughout the construction industry, which flexibly support the management of construction project information and processes. This paper presents an example of dynamic cross-enterprise pr...

Green home rating has emerged as an important agenda to practice the principles of sustainability. In Malaysia, the establishment of the ‘Green Building Index – Residential New Construction’ (GBI-RNC) has brought this agenda closer to the stakeholders of the local green building industry. GBI-RNC focuses on the evaluation of the environmental impacts posed by houses rather than assessing the Tr...

Rammed earth is a sustainable material with low embodied energy. However, its development as a building material requires a better evaluation of its moisture-thermal buffering abilities and its mechanical behavior. Both of these properties are known to strongly depend on the amount of water contained in wall pores and its evolution. Thus the aim of this paper is to present a procedure to measur...