Lowering energy consumption is one of the most important challenges modern world. Since construction sector accounts for 40% total worldwide, Parliament European Union has developed a Directive, according to which all newly designed and thermally upgraded buildings should meet requirements almost zero demand (nZEBs) from 1 January 2021. At same time, in Poland, but also many other countries wor...

With energy resource scarcity and energy crisis in the world, energy efficiency has become a subject of great importance. In warm and humid climates as well as cold and mountainous ones, annual energy consumption is too high to achieve desirable living conditions in built environments, and hence energy efficiency measures and practices in such buildings is of utmost priority. Given the direct r...

This paper analyzes utilization of renewable energy systems and efficient building envelopes in the semi-arid climate. The proposed model evaluates renewable energy systems solutions as well as economic- and energy-efficient construction materials for the net zero-energy buildings (NZEB) in semi-arid climates. The objective of this paper is to optimize total energy cost and environmental impact...

The usage of social theories in the human-built environment caused to enhance life quality. It may consist of human needs in residential areas. Sometimes, building codes can help to exist accepted life space, but the building codes do not have basic theory such as actual open space in residential plots. The study was an attempt to represent a new approach in urban land subdivision and the relat...

This paper will describe the ongoing research work which is aimed at producing a cost forecasting and planning model most representative of the building in Malaysia. Due to the limitation of data and time, the model is targeted for a particular type of building. Its techniques can however be expanded to other types of buildings. Data was collected from the two-storey residential building projec...

In recent years, there has been a frequent occurrence of extremely cold conditions which has had a serious impact on the life of residents of buildings in various locations around the world. However, there have only been a very limited number of studies on the effects of residential area building layout on the winter wind environments, which led to a lack of quantitative guidance for residentia...

Landscape changes associated with urbanization can lead to many serious ecological and environmental problems. Quantifying the vertical structure of the urban landscape and its change is important to understand its social and ecological impacts, but previous studies mainly focus on urban horizontal expansion and its impacts on land cover/land use change. This papers focuses on the residential l...

The recent ASHRAE project, “Updating the ASHRAE/ ACCA Residential Heating and Cooling Load Calculation Procedures and Data” (RP-1199), developed two new residential loads calculation procedures: residential heat balance (RHB), a detailed heat balance method that requires computer implementation, and residential load factor (RLF), a simplified procedure that is hand tractable and suitable for sp...

t his study investigates the factors affecting the demand for new residential buildings in urban areas of iran during 1976-2010. the demand function for new residential buildings in urban areas was estimated and then the existence of a long-run relationship among variables of this function was studied using the bounds testing of the autoregressive distributed lag co-integration procedure. the t...