Renovation of Proteus Eretes: Towards nearly zero energy building with high indoor comfort

One of the major risks to our planet today is climate change, which is a problem that worries people all over the world. There is a rise in global temperature levels and greenhouse gas emissions. The building industry has a huge share in this aspect. The current built environment accounts for almost 40% of energy consumption and 36% of CO2...

Influence of Automated Façades on Occupants: A Review

Several studies performing building simulations showed that the automated control of façades can provide higher levels of indoor environmental quality and lower energy demand in buildings, in comparison to manually controlled scenarios. However, in several case studies with human volunteers, automated controls were found to be disruptive or...

Design, construction and validation of MATELab: A novel outdoor chamber for investigating occupant-facade interaction

Testing of novel facade technologies with human volunteers is essential for improving occupant interaction with novel dynamic facade systems and to increase satisfaction with its modulation of light, sound, heat and mass transfer between the outdoor and indoor environments. In the past 10 years, there have been noticeable attempts to develop...

Building Impulse Toolkit (BIT): A novel IoT system for capturing the influence of façades on occupant perception and occupant-façade interaction

The design and operation of responsive resource-efficient buildings requires high resolution data in space and time on building performance and the associated occupant response, but capturing this high quality data has traditionally been technologically challenging, costly and disruptive to building occupants. Recent developments in Internet...

Substantiation of home occupant archetypes with the use of generative techniques: analysis and results of focus groups

A previous study clustered home occupants into archetypes with a questionnaire. This study uses qualitative methods to strengthen those previously-found archetypes with data pertaining to the participants’ home experiences. Focus groups were carried out where generative activities were conducted involving the generation of collages. The first...

Feasibility study of a wood-concrete hybrid super tall building and optimization of its wind-induced behaviour: A case study on a skyscraper in the city-centre of Rotterdam

The demand for sustainable high-rise buildings is growing. Such sustainable high-rise could be realized by the use of mass timber for the structural design instead of more conventional building materials such as steel and concrete. Timber is a renewable resource which can be CO₂ neutral if reforestation takes place to close its carbon...

Making a home out of a temporary dwelling: a literature review and building transformation case studies

Temporary transformations of vacant buildings could alleviate the shortage of housing for urgent home seekers. However, not much is known about the transformation of buildings into temporary, adequate, and affordable housing. A multidisciplinary literature review covering design, indoor environmental quality, housing, and environmental...