Design and procurement based on holistic whole life appraisal can improve functional quality and, therefore, the overall cost effectiveness and performance of buildings. It is furthermore expected these principles can strengthen the competitiveness of concrete. The initial part of the work, analysed requirements on buildings and how concrete provides answers to these. Life cycle costing, enviro...

The energy consumptions in households and the energy resources used for fulfilling the energy needs have been changing in a quite short period of time. The present study aims to provide a background of the energy consumptions in Portugal in a European context. A significant part of the energy consumptions is related to buildings. It is estimated that buildings use about 40% of all the energy ne...

natural ventilation is one of the best and the cheapest methods of ventilation that is accomplished by production of natural air flow inside of building. in iran traditional architecture, natural ventilation had been an important part of building designing but nowadays wind energy optimum usage has disregarded because of buildings congestion. rasht in gilan province is placed in a moderate and ...

BACKGROUND The increase in obesity is due in part to changes in the environment that affect behaviours such as physical activity. Stairwells in buildings present an opportunity to increase physical activity in the workplace. We characterized the stairwell accessibility in business buildings in the downtown core of Vancouver. METHODS Characteristics of the stairwells in business buildings with...

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In this paper, we introduce our approach as well as examples of realizations for situated interaction in the context of future work environments. These environments will be populated with a range of smart artefacts. The artefacts and their mutual interaction are designed to facilitate awareness and notification as well as informal communication. They constitute examples of our approach to devel...

Energy consumed the in urban sector accounts for a large proportion of total world delivered energy consumption. Residential building energy consumption is an important part of urban energy consumption. However, there are few studies focused on this issue and that have simulated the energy consumption of residential buildings using questionnaire data. In this research, an eQUEST study was condu...

Several recent studies have shown that airborne laser scanning (ALS) of urban areas delivers valuable information for 3D city modelling and map updating. Building footprint detection from multi-temporal ALS lacks in comparability because of changing ALS flight parameters, flying season, interpolation settings if digital elevation models are used, and the ability of the used building detection m...