Beyond the Façades in Tehran:When Tradition Meets Innovation

Over time,the traditional house in central Iran,which Tehran geographically belongs to,has undergone deep physical and morphological changes as a result of technological,social and economic transformations,passing from the characteristics of an introverted house enclosed by walls overlooking an inner courtyard to the multi-storey condominium with an extroverted outlook.Here the façade becomes a key element:it is a threshold between urban and private,outdoor and indoor.The article shows a mosaic of patterns and materials of the new mid-rise residential building façades via photographs and diagrams to emphasize the strict connection between contemporary design and local tradition.

The Development of a Smart Mobile App for Building Façade Defects Inspections

The manual visual inspections of façade building defects are posing a high and increasing cost for building asset managers,particularly when inspections delay projects or require asset outages,visits to decommissioned sites or work within hazardous environments.This paper reports on the development,testing and delivery of a working mobile app prototype to facilitate the inspections and documentation of building facade condition monitoring.The work presented builds upon the development of an online platform for remote building inspection based on the integration of methodologies and tools,including VR(virtual reality),and digital photogrammetry to collect real-time data that support automated decision making.The mobile app:(i)allows the user to import 3D models and 2D building plans;(ii)provides the means of first-person exploration of models via a VR headset;and(iii)captures,records and catalogues images of façade defect types,and the date and time.An inspection case study was used to demonstrate and evaluate the mobile app prototype.The Building Inspector app allows building professionals to manage inspections and to track past and ongoing monitoring of the condition of building façades.

Experiment and simulation to determine the optimum orientation of building-integrated photovoltaic on tropical building façades considering annual daylight performance and energy yield

Building-Integrated Photovoltaic(BIPV)on vertical façades is a potential PV application in today’s buildings.The performance of BIPV on façades is significantly influenced by the façade orientation.For tropical cities,the optimum façade orientation,in terms of maximum energy yield and daylight performance,cannot be simply determined,due to relatively symmetrical sun path throughout the day.This study therefore aims to determine the optimum orientation for BIPV on tropical building façades.To achieve the objective,experiment,modelling,and computational simulation are conducted to evaluate the BIPV energy yield and to predict the indoor daylight performance in a scale-model building with a 105Wp monocrystalline silicon PV,facing each cardinal orienta-tion in Bandung,Indonesia.The South orientation yields practically zero ASE_(1000,250),providing the best annual daylight performance,and yielding the most desirable value in four out of five daylight metrics.The greatest annual energy yield is at the North orientation,providing 179-186 kWh(95%prediction interval)per year,but with larger uncertainty compared to that at the South,due to direct sunlight occurrence.Based on three different objective functions,the South orientation is considered optimum for placing the BIPV panel on the prototype façade in the location.

Example-based dynamic façade design using the façade daylighting performance improvement(FDPI)indicator

It remains challenging to conduct an efficient dynamic façade design.In this article authors try to address this issue introducing the façade daylighting performance improvement(FDPI)indicator aimed to evaluate the performance of a dynamic(adaptive)façade from its daylighting performance point of view.To illustrate the FDPI application the authors introduced the preliminary dynamic façade concept for an office building located in Tel Aviv(Hot-summer Mediterranean Climate Csa)with further shape modification based on the daylighting performance analysis compared to the three alternatives representative of different typologies of dynamic façades.Al Bahr,One Ocean and The University of Southern Denmark façade systems were simulated under the same weather and building conditions of the preliminary dynamic façade concept and were considered as a benchmark for the study.The final dynamic façade concept elaborated by the authors in the preliminary comparative workflow showed noticeable daylight performance improvement with respect to the case studies comparative scenarios.The FDPI metric allowed to estimate a daylighting performance improvement of 43%of the final dynamic façade concept over the case study dynamic façade that showed the best performance in the daylighting simulations.

Applying Double Skin Facade with ETFE Membrane Assembly for Energy Saving and Acoustic Protection for the Building of the Czech Institute of Informatics,Robotics and Cybernetics in Prague

Multidisciplinary, integrated planning approach by architects, engineers, scientists and manufacturers to reduce energy consumption of buildings. The CIIRC Complex, located on the main campus of Czech Technical University in Prague consists of two buildings, newly constructed building and adaptive reuse of existing building. CIIRC—Czech Institute of Informatics, Robotics and Cybernetics is a contemporary teaching facility of new generation and use for scientific research teams. New building has ten above-ground floors, on the bottom 4 floors of laboratories, scientist modules, classrooms, above are offices, meeting rooms, teaching and research modules for professors and students. Offices of the rector are on the last two floors of the building. On the top floor is congress type auditorium, in the basement is fully automatic car park. Double skin pneumatic cushions facade. In the project are introduced series of architectural and technical features and innovations. Probably the most visible is the double skin facade facing south-transparent double layer membrane ETFE (Ethylen-TetraFluorEthylen) cushions with triple glazed modular system assembly. Acting as solar collector, recuperating of hot air on the top floors, saving up to 30% of an energy consumption.

Layout graph model for semantic façade reconstruction using laser point clouds

Building façades can feature different patterns depending on the architectural style,function-ality,and size of the buildings;therefore,reconstructing these façades can be complicated.In particular,when semantic façades are reconstructed from point cloud data,uneven point density and noise make it difficult to accurately determine the façade structure.When inves-tigating façade layouts,Gestalt principles can be applied to cluster visually similar floors and façade elements,allowing for a more intuitive interpretation of façade structures.We propose a novel model for describing façade structures,namely the layout graph model,which involves a compound graph with two structure levels.In the proposed model,similar façade elements such as windows are first grouped into clusters.A down-layout graph is then formed using this cluster as a node and by combining intra-and inter-cluster spacings as the edges.Second,a top-layout graph is formed by clustering similar floors.By extracting relevant parameters from this model,we transform semantic façade reconstruction to an optimization strategy using simulated annealing coupled with Gibbs sampling.Multiple façade point cloud data with different features were selected from three datasets to verify the effectiveness of this method.The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves an average accuracy of 86.35%.Owing to its flexibility,the proposed layout graph model can deal with different types of façades and qualities of point cloud data,enabling a more robust and accurate reconstruc-tion of façade models.

Exploring the synergy of building massing and façade design through evolutionary optimization

In performance-based architectural design optimization, the design of building massings and façades is commonly separated, which weakens the effectiveness in performance improvement. In response, this study proposes a hybrid massing-façade integrated design generation and optimization workflow to integrate the two elements in an evolutionary design process. Compared with the existing approaches, the proposed workflow emphasizes the diversity of building design generation, with which various combinations of building massing forms and façade patterns can be systematically explored. Two case studies and a corresponding comparison study are presented to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed workflow. Results show that the optimization can produce designs coupling the potential of building massings and façades in performance improvement. In addition, the optimization can provide information that supports early-stage architectural design exploration. Such information also enables the architect to understand the performance implications associated with the synergy of building massing and façade design.

Heating energy savings potential from retrofitting old apartments with an advanced double-skin façade system in cold climate

Apartments account for over 60%of total residential buildings and consume a significant portion of primary energy in South Korea.Various energy efficiency measures have been implemented for both new apartment constructions and existing apartment retrofits.Old apartment structures have poor thermal performances,resulting in a high energy consumption.The South Korean government initiated retrofitting projects to improve the energy efficiency in old apartments.Apartment owners typically replace old windows with high-performance windows;however,there is still a demand for better and more innovative retrofit methods for a highly improved energy efficiency.This paper proposes an advanced double-skin façade(DSF)system to replace existing balcony windows in old apartments.Considering the cold climate conditions of Seoul,South Korea,it mainly discusses heating energy savings.Three case models were developed:Base-Case with existing apartment,Case-1 with typical retrofitting,and Case-2 with the proposed DSF system.The EnergyPlus simulation program was used to develop simulation models for a floor radiant heating system.A typical gas boiler was selected for low-temperature radiant system modeling.The air flow network method was used to model the proposed DSF system.Five heating months,i.e.,November to March,and one representative day,i.e.,January 24,were selected for detailed analysis.The main heat loss areas consist of windows,walls,and infiltration.The results reveal that the apartment with the DSF retrofit saves 38.8%on the annual heating energy compared to the Base-Case and 35.2%compared to Case-1.

Solutions for the Rehabilitation of Historical Building Facades with Local Materials

The present research aims to identify the possibilities of rehabilitation of building facades in the centre of Chisinau, through the use of high-performance materials, use of high-performance technologies in execution, reduction of facade renovation costs, etc. In the process of organising the rehabilitation works of historical buildings of architectural value, we are dealing with the following: the value of the rehabilitation works of a historical building is very high, the duration of the rehabilitation is important, the attitude of the society is insufficient, the lack of strategies for the rehabilitation of buildings at the municipality level. In order to achieve this objective, we propose to research the following tasks: definition of the concept of rehabilitation of buildings in the Historic Centre of Chisinau;legislative, normative assurance of rehabilitation of historical heritage in the Republic of Moldova;analysis of the situation in Chisinau on the example of historical buildings with limestone finishes and examination by non-destructive methods of facades;solutions for rehabilitation of facades of historical buildings by comparing two types of technologies. In conclusion, emphasis will be placed on the choice of the most efficient method in terms of material, technology and cost.

The effects of cool materials,façade orientation,and morphological parameters on energy consumption at the residential neighborhood scale

Building surface cool materials are novel materials that can reduce urban heat island intensity and decrease building energy consumption.This study investigated the impact of radiative properties of materials,façade orientation,and morphological parameters on energy consumption in six typical residential neighborhoods in Nanjing,China.The neighborhood energy consumption of 16 application schemes considering the façade orientation factor is compared to determine the best energy-saving scheme.Seasonal and annual energy-saving rates,savings in electricity costs,and the price ceiling for materials per unit area are analyzed.The results show that for low-rise buildings,using cool materials only on the roof can reduce the annual energy consumption by 1%.When cool or super cool materials are also used on the building façade,the annual energy saving rate can be up to 3.4%and 4.3%,respectively.Using cool materials on the south façade of buildings is not recommended due to significant heat loss in winter.Considering savings in electricity costs and the price ceiling for materials per unit area,the price of cool and super cool materials should be less than 3.0 and 3.7 RMB/m2,respectively,assuming a lifespan of eight years in Nanjing.