Nature displays profound preference for certain specific ratios to design her life-forms. These are geometric relationships that are transcendent and originated from Sacred Geometry. The view that geometry had a ritual origin is a part of a wider view that civilisation itself had a ritual origin, and therefore the history of utilisation of Sacred Geometry by man goes back to many centuries ago....

As a rule, public buildings should have higher safety level compared to residential ones. Hence, using base isolation systems is an effective and widely known way for improving dynamic response of such buildings. The idea of base isolation was known hundreds years ago, however practical implementation of base isolators started in the last few decades. The main advantage of a base isolation syst...

We present the results of the microstratigraphic, phytolith and wood charcoal study of the remains of a 10.5 ka roof. The roof is part of a building excavated at Tell Qarassa (South Syria), assigned to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B period (PPNB). The Pre-Pottery Neolithic (PPN) period in the Levant coincides with the emergence of farming. This fundamental change in subsistence strategy implied th...

The most important determinant of whether there is a radon problem is the presence of uranium and radium in the bedrock and overburden. As the permeability of the ground controls the ease with which radon can be transported, any cavity that exists underground has the potential to accumulate elevated levels of radon. Buildings built upon the ground surface have the potential to draw in ground ga...

A high standard education is, nowadays, a clear objective for any modern society. In Portugal, the retrofit of educational buildings has an enormous relevance as demonstrated by the ‘‘Program for Retrofit and Upgrade of High Schools’’. Educational buildings specific characteristics such as high occupancy rates and high amount of time children spend in classrooms make them a special case compare...

In the framework of the European SCenarios for tsunami Hazard-induced Emergencies MAnagement (SCHEMA) project (www.schemaproject.org), we empirically developed new tsunami damage functions to be used for quantifying the potential tsunami damage to buildings along European-Mediterranean coasts. Since no sufficient post-tsunami observations exist in the Mediterranean areas, we based our work on d...

Material stocks are an important part of the social metabolism. Owing to long service lifetimes of stocks, they not only shape resource flows during construction, but also during use, maintenance, and at the end of their useful lifetime. This makes them an important topic for sustainable development. In this work, a model of stocks and flows for nonmetallic minerals in residential buildings, ro...

Solar passive techniques are being used in vernacular buildings throughout the world. Researchers have done extensive study on thermal performance of vernacular buildings in the different parts of the world. Vernacular architecture of North-Eastern India represents the principle of climate-responsive architecture, which still lacks experimental validation and quantitative analysis. Thermal comf...