EVALUATING THE WEIGHTED-SUM APPROACH FOR MEASURING BUILDINGS’ADAPTABILITY

As urban populations increase worldwide and more demands are placed on infrastructure and buildings,the topic of adaptable building design has experienced increased interest as a way to embed adaptability into the urban building stock and avoid unnecessary demolition and waste.Evaluation tools for judging building adaptability based on physical characteristics have recently been proposed.The most common approach for these tools is to use a weighted-sum of scores for different criteria.The primary purpose of this paper was to compare a weighted-sum measurement approach against a more rigorous,less abstract measurement that involved judgements about simulated adaptation projects(called an example-based approach).These measurements were performed through expert elicitation and an analytic hierarchy process(AHP)survey,where participants evaluated the relative adaptability of four case study buildings from the Clemson University campus.The results showed significant correlation between the weighted-sum approach and the example-based approach,supporting the reasonableness of using weighted-sum approaches to evaluate the adaptive potential of building designs.In addition,a separate group of experts rated adaptability of the case study buildings by providing qualitative reasons for their rankings.Unlike the other approaches,this group was not given a specific tool to guide their ratings.The qualitative data provided additional context for understanding results from the quantitative approaches.

Behavior and modeling of tessellated shear walls in a structural frame system

This paper studies the behavior of a reinforced concrete(RC)structural frame employing a tessellated structuralarchitectural(TeSA)shear wall as the lateral-load resisting element.TeSA walls are made of interlocking modules(tiles)that provide easier repairability and replaceability.A nonlinearfinite element model of a TeSA wall with tiles interlocking in one direction(1-D interlocking)is validated using test data.An RC frame from a building is modeled with a 1-D interlocking TeSA shear wall.The effects of varying rigidity of the wall-frame connections(rigid,hinged,slotted)on the lateral strength of the system and the axial load demands of the gravity-load resisting systems are evaluated.Finally,the effect of connection details on the damage of the TeSA wall is also studied.The study shows that the lateral strength of the system is the highest with a rigid connection between the wall and the system,followed by the system with hinged connections.Slotted connections,which provided no vertical coupling between the wall and the frame result in the lowest lateral strength.TeSA wall experienced“slight damage”up to a drift ratio of 2%.The system with rigid connections between the wall and the frame experienced the most damage,followed by system with hinged and slotted connections.