What are the opportunities and challenges for upscaling energy retrofit of heritage buildings? Heritage buildings comprise approximately 20% UK building stock challenging to sensitively because their values traditional construction. These may therefore be unconducive standard retrofitting approaches. Twelve case studies in examined. Three key findings presented together with implications retrof...

Open kitchens have been designed for many small residential units in tall buildings in Southeast Asia. This open design, without enclosing the kitchen with fire resisting walls has failed to comply with building fire safety codes in places like Hong Kong. Performance-based design was adopted to determine fire safety provisions. Gas cookers with flames are not allowed. Additional fire protection...

More than 90% of historic buildings have traditional clay tiles as roof covering exposed to solar radiation, largely impacting buildings’ thermal-energy performance and urban climate, since most of historic buildings are located in dense urban contexts. In this view, the optimization of these traditional elements could represent a key research issue, with the purpose of building energy retrofit...

Atmospheric turbulence results from the vertical movement of air, together with flow disturbances around surface obstacles which make low- and moderate-level winds extremely irregular. Recent advancements in wind engineering have led to the construction of new facilities for testing residential homes at relatively high Reynolds numbers. However, the generation of a fully developed turbulence in...

The ongoing urban transition toward decarbonized energy systems has raised the attention on local energy planning practices. Besides the multiple actors involved in the planning process, the complexity of the urban energy systems requires the elaboration of heterogeneous data. In such contest, the paper introduces and compares two GIS-based methodologies for supporting the spatial characterizat...

The impact of residential dampness or mold on respiratory health is well established but few studies have focused on university students. This study aims to: (a) describe the prevalence of exposure to residential dampness or mold in university students according to socio-geographic factors and (b) identify associated housing characteristics. A web survey was conducted in 2014 among the 26,676 s...