During the period between 1860 and 1940, Downtown Cairo witnessed a major building boom that gave birth to a unique architecture combining European styles with local influences and materials. The architectural product of that era will never be equalled and we need to increase the public awareness to these historic buildings that may be less than a hundred years old. The purpose of this project ...

In the United States, the predominant land use goal has been to extract and maximize profit from the land in the near term. Sustainability and its underlying concept of stewardship of the built environment run counter to this extraction-based philosophy. Beyond sustainability, the recognition of the value of existing buildings has resulted in a growing interest in historic preservation. Sustain...

More than 90% of historic buildings have traditional clay tiles as roof covering exposed to solar radiation, largely impacting buildings’ thermal-energy performance and urban climate, since most of historic buildings are located in dense urban contexts. In this view, the optimization of these traditional elements could represent a key research issue, with the purpose of building energy retrofit...

The New Zealand Society for Earthquake Engineering recommends a qualitative procedure for assessing the earthquake risk of buildings. This procedure has become a requirement by both local authorities and building owners with the results holding more weight than was perhaps originally intended. While the procedure is valid for the majority of building types, many historic buildings will fall int...

In the United States, the predominant land use goal has been to extract and maximize profit from the land in the near term. Sustainability and its underlying concept of stewardship of the built environment run counter to this extraction-based philosophy. Beyond sustainability, the recognition of the value of existing buildings has resulted in a growing interest in historic preservation. Sustain...

Acoustical archeology aims to study previous acoustical stages in buildings or rooms or to recover old rooms, environments or buildings that has been lost. This part of the acoustic science also tries to analyze the historic acoustic evolution of emblematic buildings of our Cultural Heritage. The main aim of this paper is to make a virtual acoustic rehabilitation of a ruined church, according t...

Cultural heritages and historical buildings are vulnerable against severe threats from fire. Since the 1970s, ten fire-spread events involving historic buildings have occurred in Taiwan, affecting a total of 132 nearby buildings. Developed under the influence of traditional Taiwanese culture, historic buildings in Taiwan are often built using non-fire resistant brick-wood structure and located ...