Design for sports facilities with structural components in wood as evidence of a new technological challenge

The book is the result of the project “Wood in Sport Equipment - Heritage, present, perspective” funded in 2021 by the World Wood Day Foundation - www.worldwoodday.org. The Project, aimed to publish a digital book, that provides an overview on the use of wood in sport equipment. Researchers from around the world involved in wood contributed to the book

Digital Twins for Climate-Neutral and Resilient Cities. State of the Art and Future Development as Tools to Support Urban Decision-Making

The increased effects of climate change in the built environment require a rapid and effective response to adapt urban settlements to the main impacts related to heatwave, extreme precipitation, sea-level rise, and so on. At the same time, there is not much time to reduce Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions that contribute to climate change and limit the mean temperature of the planet within the 1.5 °C imposed by the Paris Agreement. In this perspective, cities around the world have a key role toward carbon neutral and resilient targets. In parallel in the last years, we are witnessing the impacts of a big amount of data and information available at the city scale. There are many data coming from different databases that can be processed and managed to support the urban climate action planned and designed by decision-makers and urban practitioners, for example, to assess the carbon emission of the building sector or to simulate the effects of extreme precipitation or urban heat island and consequence behavior of the built environment. In this scenario, in the last years, among many different digital enable technologies available in the Industry 4.0 ambit, it has gained more attention in the field of urban planning and urban design the digital twin concept that could synthesize in a digital representation of the real-world data and information flow that could exchange from the physical side to digital representation and vice versa. The aim of the paper is to analyze the urban digital twin developed in last years in Europe to evaluate if and how they consider the climate change issue, in order to understand the state of the art, the applications developed for climate change and which is the level of experimentation in order to study and develop guidelines to build urban digital twin as a support tool for a climate-neutral and resilient city

Territorial Ecosystem for circular economies: Eco3R research project

Among the transitional processes that could lead to building consistent sustainable solutions, circular economies practices (CE) are complex processes which must take into account diff erent topics such as stakeholder engagement, material fl ows opportunities, end of life expectations and EU limit perspectives or targets. This paper introduces briefl y the concept of circular territorial ecosystems with respect to the Eco3r research project, carried on by the Politecnico of Turin (DAD) from 2020, in collaboration with CCS, the in-house providing company of 19 municipalities in the area of Turin. Some crucial data on waste management and the main project’s targets are presented. Some Eco3r projects’ outputs are outlined in order to show this local experiment can become a model to scale or replicate in other communities in Europe. The paper is structured as follows: Section 1 describes the background problem with main data and critical issues regarding the case study; Section 2 is describing the target of the research project Eco3R and the scientifi c approach adopted; Section 3 is dedicated on the main output of Eco3R project and the discussion on the further research developments

Naturwall: active timber wall for renovation of existent buildings

The renovation of old buildings is actually the challenge to cope with increased effort in order to reduce climate global change, channeling more investment and awareness in this sense, defining more experimentations and find innovative solutions. The difficulty of carrying out an intervention on the existing buildings necessarily arise from the lack of information on the existing structure and the lack of coordinated processes between the multidisciplinary skills involved, as well as a difficulty to optimize the process that would make it even more competitive on the renovation work instead on the new construction. Naturwall is an innovative energy saving system for existent buildings by using wood in multifunctional components able to mitigate the environmental effort in building management. The project meant to introduce an industrialized design method in the renovation of existing build environment that highlights opportunities gave by "off site" production and parametric design approach, without neglecting the aesthetical values and the possibility to change the architectural image of residential and non residential constructions. The project aims to create a representative model of solution that will be promoted in Italy and widespread in other similar contex

NATURWALL© - A Solar Timber Façade System for Building Refurbishment: Optimization Process through in Field Measurements

Building renovation is one of the key issues of recent European policies towards energy efficiency. The concept of an opaque, modular and prefabricated vertical façade, made of wood and lightweight components, is proposed in this framework. Naturwall© is an Italian patented project intended for the retrofitting of existing buildings, to improve both the energy performance of the building and its architectural aspect. Different prototypes of the façade were tested during an experimental campaign carried out in outdoor test cells. The here presented results describe the winter and summer behavior of the façade through the use of synthetic indexes i.e. the U-value and pre-heating efficiency

When biophilic design meets restorative architecture: the Strambinello project

The present crisis in the complex relationship between Man and Nature offers an extraordinary context for experimentation also in the architectural field, where we must rethink the relationship between Man’s relational structures and his physical-spatial surroundings in terms of the material and non-material components. The multidisciplinary vision of the biophilic program examines the design of living spaces with reference to the physiological functions and the psychological, behavioral, emotional and cognitive development of the individual. Biophilic Design thus brings greater awareness of the concept of sustainability in architecture, which can then facilitate the regenerative features of human residential environments. This project presents an experimental case study of biophilic architecture that becomes a design variable for the physical and psychological well-being of the inhabitants according to certain characteristics that are known as regenerative factors by the attention restoration theory (ART). The case study, a single-family home that is being built in the municipality of Strambinello (Piedmont, Italy) is an example of a regenerative residential environment that respects the Man-Nature bond

Retrofit scenarios and economic sustainability. A case-study in the Italian context.

The aim of the paper is to highlight the potentialities for supporting the decision making process and design activities, for the case of retrofit projects with alternative technological solutions to compare. A multidisciplinary approach was adopted, involving the contribution of Real Estate Market and Economic Evaluation of Project, Architectural Technology and Building Physics. A simplified application of the Life Cycle Costing methodology was used, in synergy with energy analyses, to select, among different scenarios, the most viable solution for the retrofitting project of a single house in Northern Italy