Reusing built heritage resources with sustainability

Many old cities spread all over the world, face obsolete buildings, quarters or areas that urge for maintenance, re-adaptation or demolition. Among time, built heritage has always been re-used or recycled, suffering adaptations related to the living needs of its inhabitants and contemporary society context. Commonly, building’s lifespan regarding its survival and eventual disappearance, either partial or total, has scarcely been taken into consideration. But now, with the Ecological concerns as an imperative XXI century claim from our devastated planet, Society has to face existent buildings as a liable construction resource, that already occupies a considerable area of our cities and that would be foolish to waste. Re-Architecture: Lifespan Rehabilitation of Built Heritage, born in 2002 as a concept and is now being developed in a PhD research; coordinated by Prof. Ir. Jouke Post and Dr. Ir. Peter Erkelens. This renewal system under development, will not only contribute for the quality improvement of existent buildings interventions; in flexibility, sustainability and lifespan assessment, adaptive to consumer/user expectations and needs; but also for the preservation of both built and environmental heritage

How sustainable rehabilitation designers really are

RE-ARCHITECTURE is a design process support system that aims to support designers, when involved in rehabilitation design developments. Before getting access to the full content of RE-ARCHITECTURE, users were asked to contribute to a pre-survey, by answering online Questionnaire B1. The analysis of its results, intended to identify the category of designers, their design processes and guiding principles. As RE-ARCHITECTURE aims to contribute to a more sustained and lifespan conscious rehabilitation design development, this pre-survey is fundamental to understand how sustainable rehabilitation designers really are and how appropriate RE-ARCHITECTURE can be to sustain their aims. This paper synthesizes the pre-survey results, where such issues were most evident

Re[valuating]-architecture

The architectural hierarchy of aims altered in the last decades. Quality and comfort have dethroned functionality! We are already familiar with the taxonomy – quality certification in the construction world; but in architectural designs, it is not common to evaluate scientifically, if the design has quality or, if the designer has performed qualitatively well regarding the circumstances. Therefore, evaluations that go beyond technical regulations are usually vague and subjective. Integrated in the doctoral research Re-Architecture: Lifespan rehabilitation of built heritage, supervised by Prof. Post and Prof. Erkelens, the architect Ana Pereira Roders is theorizing a design process for rehabilitation interventions, where the pre-design and design evaluation are key stages

How does the electromagnetic field couple to gravity, in particular to metric, nonmetricity, torsion, and curvature?

The coupling of the electromagnetic field to gravity is an age-old problem. Presently, there is a resurgence of interest in it, mainly for two reasons: (i) Experimental investigations are under way with ever increasing precision, be it in the laboratory or by observing outer space. (ii) One desires to test out alternatives to Einstein's gravitational theory, in particular those of a gauge-theoretical nature, like Einstein-Cartan theory or metric-affine gravity. A clean discussion requires a reflection on the foundations of electrodynamics. If one bases electrodynamics on the conservation laws of electric charge and magnetic flux, one finds Maxwell's equations expressed in terms of the excitation H=(D,H) and the field strength F=(E,B) without any intervention of the metric or the linear connection of spacetime. In other words, there is still no coupling to gravity. Only the constitutive law H= functional(F) mediates such a coupling. We discuss the different ways of how metric, nonmetricity, torsion, and curvature can come into play here. Along the way, we touch on non-local laws (Mashhoon), non-linear ones (Born-Infeld, Heisenberg-Euler, Plebanski), linear ones, including the Abelian axion (Ni), and find a method for deriving the metric from linear electrodynamics (Toupin, Schoenberg). Finally, we discuss possible non-minimal coupling schemes.Comment: Latex2e, 26 pages. Contribution to "Testing Relativistic Gravity in Space: Gyroscopes, Clocks, Interferometers ...", Proceedings of the 220th Heraeus-Seminar, 22 - 27 August 1999 in Bad Honnef, C. Laemmerzahl et al. (eds.). Springer, Berlin (2000) to be published (Revised version uses Springer Latex macros; Sec. 6 substantially rewritten; appendices removed; the list of references updated

Individual Confidence-Weighting and Group Decision-Making

Group-living species frequently pool individual information so as to reach consensus decisions such as when and where to move, or whether a predator is present. Such opinion-pooling has been demonstrated empirically, and theoretical models have been proposed to explain why group decisions are more reliable than individual decisions. Behavioural ecology theory frequently assumes that all individuals have equal decision-making abilities, but decision theory relaxes this assumption and has been tested in human groups. We summarise relevant theory and argue for its applicability to collective animal decisions. We consider selective pressure on confidence-weighting in groups of related and unrelated individuals. We also consider which species and behaviours may provide evidence of confidence-weighting, paying particular attention to the sophisticated vocal communication of cooperative breeders