Acoustics combined with digital fabrication has been investigated for multiple years. Most research in this area has focused on the combination of acoustics and additive manufacturing. This is mainly due to the ability of this technique to create any geometry, which allows for very high absorption. However, it has the downside that additive manufacturing is quite expensive and the production process is time-consuming. Therefore, this study has chosen to put the geometry first and the performance of the resonators second.
To be able to produce a resonant panel based on Helmholtz resonators some additional knowledge was needed. Therefore, five experiments were performed to gain the knowledge needed to design the panel. The samples were printed using a fused filament printer and tested within an impedance tube located at the Faculty of Architecture in Delft. The experiments were concerned with:
- The position of the neck compared to the cavity: According to the results of the experiments the position of the neck has a minimal to no effect on the performance of the resonator.
- The crosstalk effect: According to the results of the experiments the effect of the crosstalk effect is minimal within the scope of this project. A small change in absorption was noticeable but so small as to be irrelevant.
- The effect of the cavity separation between two resonators: According to the results of the experiments the cavity separation can be removed without a large effect on the absorption of the resonators.
- The effect of the neck length on the width of the absorption curve: According to the results of the experiments a longer neck causes the width of the absorption curve to decrease.
- The impedance of resonators with L-shaped cavities: According to the results of the experiments an L-shaped cavity can be approximated by replacing the L-shaped cavity by a cavity with an identical horizontal section right below the orifice but altering the height, so the cavity has the same volume as the original L-shaped cavity.
After the experiments were done, a computational workflow was designed that is able to produce resonant panels based on the targeted frequency range and the possible size of the panel. The tool was theoretically verified using a case study. For the case study two panels were designed to improve the reverberation time for a room in the Faculty of Architecture. Using the Arau-Puchades method of calculating the reverberation time the panels showed to be effective at absorbing sound at low frequencies.

The Corona crisis highly affected socio-economic circumstances, and this was expected to have changed housing preferences. Understanding what needs to be built in quality in addition to quantity is key to a sustainable housing market. Hence, this thesis researched whether and how housing preferences of (aspiring) owner occupiers in the Dutch housing market have changed due to the Corona crisis. The change in housing preferences was researched through a survey inquiring expressed stated preferences for dwelling attributes. Quantitative and qualitative data of 1458 useful respondents combined showed that due to Corona, for 17.8% their housing preferences changed for one or more housing attributes, and thus their preferred dwelling had changed. Per attribute, an average of 3.4% of the respondents changed their preference. Most changes relate to working from home, which severed the link between the home and the workplace, enabling as well as causing people to move further away, and which necessitates space in and outside the dwelling. Accordingly, the crisis has had the biggest effect on the preferred number of rooms in a dwelling. The number of rooms is imperative, not the size. The apartment decreased in popularity, and the preference for dwelling types with a garden increased. The functionality which respondents seek of their outdoor space are enabling social possibilities, providing entertainment and supporting mental health. The living environment for which people are willing to move further away should provide greenery, nature nearby, space, tranquility and privacy. It appears that due to the crisis the willingness to pay has increased as housing has increased in importance. The Corona crisis has had more effect on the housing preferences of multi person households with children than on other households. The crisis has had an excessive effect on households living in highly urban places. Four out of five respondents expect their changed preferences to be permanent, in particular regarding the number of rooms, the dwelling size and the preferred outdoor space. The preferred price range is expected to change again as the micro and macro level financial circumstances change. It needs to be kept in mind that this regards expectancy of respondents and thus regard uncertainties. The results need to be interpreted with caution as the data suggests a discrepancy in the level of ideality or reality which respondents have conjugated in their expressed preferences. Lastly, the effect of Corona on housing preferences might be bigger than currently observed, since identifying Corona as the cause for changing preferences seemed to be difficult when the preferences concerned diffuse attributes. Additionally, the current extremely high macro level constraints constrain respondents to the point where their new preferences might not be able to manifest.

In this thesis a two-stage model is proposed, combining the idea of a two-stage model from Anjos and Vieira [1] with a gradient descent approach, much like proposed in Sikaroudi and Shahanaghi [42], in order to solve the facility layout problem for problems consisting of 8 and 12 departments . This method was chosen after analyzing the criteria for a vegetable processing factory and combining this with a literature research to previous methods applied to solve these "facility layout problems". The gradient descent approach uses the partial derivatives of a multi-variable objective, the flow-cost, in order to get a vector which is the direction of greatest descent. Computing this vector for all departments and then moving them creates an iterative improving loop. In addition to the gradient descent approach a swapping procedure and a shooting procedure is introduced in order to reduce the effect of random starting position. From the result of the first-stage model, relative location constraints are extracted to be used in the second-stage model, a linear constraint programming solver capable of running optimizations by google or-tools [36], to greatly reduce the solution space. The proposed method was tested on two toy-problems from Tam and Li [44] and compared to results existing in literature. Additionally, the effect of including a first-stage model was tested as well. When looking directly at the results, the proposed method is consistent and shows good results. Especially the inclusion of the first-stage model helps finding better solutions. Compared to other results found in the literature, the method shows slightly less good results based purely on the objective value. However, the final layouts found in this thesis are more compact.

Humanitarian architecture is a field which is very open to different interpretations and for free uncontrolled experimentation. For architects willing to contribute to this field there is no defined framework that can support them in designing a suitable project. The core of this research is based on a case study in which three different cases in humanitarian architecture are investigated and analysed to create a framework with design principles for humanitarian architecture. These design principles can be used as a tool to evaluate projects or as a supportive framework by architects designing buildings with humanitarian purposes. The design principles are explicated as People, Planet, Profit, Place and Process. At the end of the research, Participation is added to this framework as the sixth principle to emphasise the importance of social design in humanitarian architecture. Those six principles are supposed to produce humanitarian architecture projects which can contribute to the creation of autonomy for communities in need. Project MIMPI includes a multidimensional design of a homelike orphanage in Jakarta in which the created framework is used and validated.

Design of elderly care buildings like nursing homes usually looks for balances between the livability for residents and the circulation efficiency for staffs and workers. Losing the balance between these two has the potential of either dissatisfying residents, uncomfortable living experiences, or causing low efficiency in operations, which might lead to extra working loads, longer service hours and higher service costs. This thesis first proposes an interactive computational methodology to embed daylight hour potential analysis and pathfinding of circulations into the early stage of the architectural design workflow, then the methodology is implemented to a test design case and the result is evaluated and compared to a manually designed result.

Currently, cities are in the midst of a transportation transition, namely, from human-driven to driverless vehicles. Because of the rapid development of technology, many systems are being automated or even becoming autonomous. Autonomous means that the system is able to perform each task automatically without any human intervention. Much research has been conducted to find answers to the way autonomous vehicles might impact cities. However, the results of this research are limited in practical application, because the integration of autonomous systems is still in an early stage and there have not been many integration projects in the world yet. In the Netherlands, more and more pilot projects are being established to explore the impact and applicability of driverless vehicles. As such, this exploratory study analyses how autonomous vehicles have been integrated during the autonomous vehicle transition in the Netherlands. Alongside qualitative research methods including desk research and semi-structured interviews, an analysis framework is designed and used as a means to measure the technical, social, environmental, and regulatory challenges represented in five case studies. The results show that the main challenges are, among others, road obstacles, intersections, weather implications, communication between the shuttle and other traffic flows, communication between the project team and the inhabitants of the area, and restrictions from the Dutch Vehicle Authority. Challenges such as weather implications, road obstacles, and intersections occur in each project. Looking at the current technological developments, there are autonomous vehicles that can pass intersections and obstacles already. The inability to deal with these challenges could be explained by the high costs of the technology.

This exhibition presents analytical models of hofjes(the little charity courtyard), made by MSc2 students in the elective course Analytical Models at the faculty of Architecture in Delft.

Exhibition 2 February – 30 March 2018, Art Entrance Gallery, Mumbai, India

Charles Correa Over the course of his 50 year career, Charles Correa realized an impressive number of important and influential projects in and outside his native country India. However, alongside his cultural and other institutional work, housing, and especially housing for the poor, remained for him one of the key - if not the primary - responsibility of an architect. Correa’s oeuvre, especially in housing design, is remarkable for the consistency with which he addressed the various complex issues of generating habitat where forming intelligent responses to climate, culture and resources remained at the heart of all his work. Through both his built and un-built projects, deceptively simple ideas expressed with great clarity of thought help identify clear lineages between ideas and projects, whether they were for single-family homes or townships, built for the poor or for the rich. The exhibition It is the intention of the exhibition to pay tribute to Charles Correa’s legacy as one of the most prominent and inspiring authorities on housing design as well as highlight the main concerns and themes that guided his work. Through drawings, photographs and sketches from the Correa Archives, as well as models produced here at the faculty, the exhibition will chart the development of Correa’s ideas on housing, from his seminal Tube House linear model, based on the idea of a climate-responsive architecture, to the complex courtyard clusters of Belapur, focusing on the ideas of creating community and opportunities for growth and change in time. Through the exhibition, we hope to highlight these important paradigms and their development over time through a number of projects that remain key references for students and architects today.