Sharing Innovation. The Acceptability of Off-site Industrialized Systems for Housing

From the sixties, innovation and industrialization have been a returning mantra for the construction sector at every new building cycle passage after an economic crisis, as a tool of overcoming difficulties. This positivism has always been disregarded, especially for housing and for Italy. To avoid this dynamic recur-rence even in the current ecological transition passage, research must provide, in parallel with innovative products and techniques, innovative cultural approaches so that extraordinary products and techniques can be accepted by the market, demon-strating how the synergy between them leads to a high added value for sustainable quality of living. Most of the actors (from designers to builders and maintainers) agree that innovative systems, especially industrialized off-site, are more sustainable, espe-cially today when sustainability and resilience are the core of the construction sector; despite this, these systems are struggling to spread. This contribution focuses on acceptability and decision-making processes that lead to innovative choices, iden-tifying the innovation of the functional, social and economic management of the buildings as the “missing ring” for housing. This acceptability has certainly increased today because of new form of “atypical” living, such as senior/student and temporary housing and co-living, which contribute to intensifying the demand of “industrial-ized”, flexible, affordable and reliable houses. Technological innovation, in fact, actives only if technical innovation is combined with strategies and new approaches in organization, marketing and after-sales services focused on sharing and partici-pation. Through an example of a realized off-site transformable residential building and case studies of new form of management, this contribution proposes innovation perspectives capable of overcoming design and decision-making obstacles to the spread of off-site systems, also identifying in the institutional sustainability one of the cores of this subject

Housing Design: Furniture or Fixtures? Accommodating Change through Technological and Typological Innovation

The recent global pandemic has sped up architectural research in residential design aimed at rethinking housing layouts, services, and construction methods to accommodate the changing needs of the rapidly evolving contemporary society. New typological and technological design approaches are required to address, on the one hand, the adaptability of the plan as a result of higher flexibility and temporariness in familiar and working patterns, together with a downsizing of the layouts to ensure affordability and quality of life. On the other hand, the issues of sustainability and circular economy require specific attention to interpret the resilience of the building and the reuse/recycle of the fit-out systems. The paper aims at interpreting the notion of integration between fixtures and furnishing in housing design, based on a comprehensive literature review enriched with a case study analysis that shows design concepts and approaches rooted in theories and experiences of 20th-century architecture. Principles, potentials, and barriers to the development of integrated systems are highlighted and the possible implementation of industrialised production components, the potential for modularity, flexibility, and assembly are discussed

Landscape and Environmental Impact Evaluation of Roundabouts

The interest of researchers and practitioners on roundabout solutions has been growing increasingly in the last decades. The often large areas occupied by this type of intersections require special attention on the use of ground and the preservation of the natural, environmental and architectural heritage. This aim also presents the opportunity for evaluating their impact on the landscape and environment. The paper proposes a new method developed for roundabout evaluation (but generalizable to other infrastructures and fields) borrowed from building technology and based on the needs, requirements and performance expected from an object rather than on prescriptions for and descriptions of its dimensions and quality. Applications on two roundabouts are presented in order to highlight practical developments. Their final evaluation sheets are presented and through them it is relatively easy to single out the problems and drawbacks of the roundabouts from the landscape point of view

Case studies of landscape and environmental impact evaluation of roundabouts

This paper is a follow-up to a previous one that presented a new method for evaluating the landscape and environmental impact of roundabouts borrowed from building technology and based on the needs, requirements and performance expected from an object rather than on prescriptions for and descriptions of its dimensions and quality. The proposed method aims at defining criteria to set up an information structure based on a need and performance approach capable of evaluating impacts on the landscape and environmental integration. After a brief résumé of the above-mentioned principles, two applications are presented in order to highlight two practical developments. The roundabouts on which the applications are focused are located in an urban and in a rural environment respectively in the Northern part of Italy. Obviously their analysis cannot be considered comprehensive of all possible cases but it covers a large proportion of them. Differences between the two roundabouts are many and they concern, besides the landscape and environment, geometrical dimensions, type of flow, presence of weekday users (pedestrians and bikers). The final evaluation sheets are presented and through them it is relatively easy to single out the problems and drawbacks of the roundabouts from the landscape point of view

The architecture of energy systems between technological innovation and environment

This paper has the aim of defining possible interpretive models concerning the integration of energy infrastructures and landscape, highlighting emerging issues and drafting future paths for further development through technological innovation of energy systems and beyond. A taxonomy of different design approaches is disclosed, portraying different energy landscapes and supported by a selection of case studies (built and concepts) in a historical perspective. Whilst the research towards alternative sources of energy has recently downsized, albeit considered determining at the beginning of the century, technological change moves towards the enhancement of the existing common sources, an incremental innovation which benefits from well-established experiences and therefore affordable in terms of availability and size of investments. Product innovation trends are directed towards an increased upgrading and advancement in order to develop flexibility in architectural integration or to improve energy storage systems for a widespread uptake of microgeneration. Finally, the paper emphasizes the need for an active, bottom-up involvement of society in the energy transition and thus in landscape transformation, a perspective requiring a rethinking of energy laws and market regulations still strongly related to top-down energy policies and oligopoly

Dynamic relationship between landscape and new energy system categories

Landscape is an ethics-oriented human action. Even energy systems have an active role in structuring landscape. They must establish with landscape a positive and proactive role and be able to guide it towards a conscious and structured goal. To do this, energy systems should be first identified through a functional and perceptual classification, whose steps include: structuring of the information system; identification of principles and of objective and requirement classes for interpretative classification; benchmarks for the perceptive classification of the energy systems in use; classification method; results. This process attempts to define which cases can be positive for landscape and are recognized by stakeholders as such. This, however, without using ordinary analysis and management systems. These techniques often seem to originate from the assumption that landscape is just an unchanging good to be preserved and that any human action involving it, especially with regards to energy systems, should produce the least possible impact. The starting point intends to be different, as different are also the concept of landscape and the idea of energy systems. The identified interpretive categories, related to the use of the energy system, mean to be proactive and meta-planning, as well as to provide guidelines for defining a project’s contours and possible, positive role within landscape and lived space

On the relationship between directed percolation and the synchronization transition in spatially extended systems

We study the nature of the synchronization transition in spatially extended systems by discussing a simple stochastic model. An analytic argument is put forward showing that, in the limit of discontinuous processes, the transition belongs to the directed percolation (DP) universality class. The analysis is complemented by a detailed investigation of the dependence of the first passage time for the amplitude of the difference field on the adopted threshold. We find the existence of a critical threshold separating the regime controlled by linear mechanisms from that controlled by collective phenomena. As a result of this analysis we conclude that the synchronization transition belongs to the DP class also in continuous models. The conclusions are supported by numerical checks on coupled map lattices too

Mesoscopic theory for fluctuating active nematics

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Contact process with long-range interactions: a study in the ensemble of constant particle number

We analyze the properties of the contact process with long-range interactions by the use of a kinetic ensemble in which the total number of particles is strictly conserved. In this ensemble, both annihilation and creation processes are replaced by an unique process in which a particle of the system chosen at random leaves its place and jumps to an active site. The present approach is particularly useful for determining the transition point and the nature of the transition, whether continuous or discontinuous, by evaluating the fractal dimension of the cluster at the emergence of the phase transition. We also present another criterion appropriate to identify the phase transition that consists of studying the system in the supercritical regime, where the presence of a "loop" characterizes the first-order transition. All results obtained by the present approach are in full agreement with those obtained by using the constant rate ensemble, supporting that, in the thermodynamic limit the results from distinct ensembles are equivalent