Motivated by a desire to discover how buildings operate in practice and inspired by the pioneering PROBE Studies (post-occupancy review of buildings and their engineering) the author has spent the last decade investigating both the design and the users’ perceptions of (mainly) sustainable buildings. This has involved visiting some 60 commercial or institutional buildings worldwide, interviewing...

Residential buildings consume significant amounts of energy and produce large amount of emissions and waste. However, there is a substantial potential for energy savings in this sector which needs to be evaluated over the life cycle of residential buildings. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology has been employed to study the primary energy uses and associated environmental impacts of differe...

A probabilistic model to estimate the seismic risk of buildings is evaluated. For this purpose a specific methodology is proposed. The developed methodology allows explicitly consider important uncertainties that are present in the main elements, that are used to estimate the seismic risk of buildings. One of these elements is the seismic vulnerability of each building, which is mainly represen...

BACKGROUND The indoor built environment has the potential to influence levels of physical activity. However, the extent to which architectural design in commercial buildings can influence the percentage of people choosing to use the stairs versus elevators is unknown. The purpose of this study was to determine if buildings with centrally located, accessible, and aesthetically pleasing staircase...

In this study, a hierarchical method for segmenting buildings in a digital surface model (DSM), which is used in a novel framework for 3D reconstruction, is proposed. Most 3D reconstructions of buildings are model-based. However, the limitations of these methods are overreliance on completeness of the offline-constructed models of buildings, and the completeness is not easily guaranteed since i...

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...

in the current engineering practices, buildings are commonly designed for an effective lifetime of 50 years. this lifetime can increase the cost of buildings with short lifetimes and can reduce the safety level of buildings with large lifetimes. in this paper, a “service-life factor” has been defined. applying this factor into the nominal values of live, earthquake, wind, and snow loads, the ef...

This paper provides an overview of the theory of Bruhat-Tits buildings. Besides, we explain how Bruhat-Tits buildings can be realized inside Berkovich spaces. In this way, Berkovich analytic geometry can be used to compactify buildings. We discuss in detail the example of the special linear group. Moreover, we give an intrinsic description of Bruhat-Tits buildings in the framework of non-Archim...

Energy consumption is a very important topic these days especially regarding air conditioning in residential buildings, since this takes the biggest amount of energy in buildings total consumption, residential buildings constitute the biggest percentage of energy consumption in Bahrain. This research reflects on the effects of shading percentage in different solar orientations on the energy con...

Over half of the total electricity consumption is used in buildings. Air-conditioning and electric lighting are the two main resources of electricity consumption in high rise buildings. One way to reduce electricity consumption would be to limit heat gain into buildings, therefore reduce the demand for air-conditioning during hot summer months especially in hot regions. On the other hand natura...