Living along the highway

Abstract

Recent researches indicate that in the Netherlands a trend is to be noticed in people moving to cities, which are denser areas, due to the fact that these provide easy access to facilities and mobility. Areas along highways provide the necessary space for expansion, but as these areas are highly polluted by noise and air pollution, a careful planning and designing of the architecture in those areas is needed. In general, the most obvious way of dealing with buildings along highways and railways is by means of sound barriers. Lately there are diverging developments of a transition to an integrated architecture which provides a different angle to deal with the issues along highly polluted areas.These development not only provide solutions for the pollution, but at the same time contribute to the social, spacial and architectural values of the to be developed areas.The paper is an investigative research on two main topics in relation to architecture, noise pollution and air pollution and shows that the noise and air pollution can be reduced at different scale levels, namely from urban scale up to a detailed scale.This project provides the necessary technical information to firstly understand the workings of noise and air pollution and secondly provides an angle for an architectural design.