Freeform Supertall Buildings

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Massive Wood Construction in Finland: Past, Present, and Future

Finland has a long history of massive wood construction such that the log construction technique has been used as a traditional method of Finnish residential construction for thousands of years, and the entire history of Finnish architecture is based on this technique. Today, almost all leisure buildings, for example, cottages in Finland are made of wood and mostly log construction. Also, today 90% of Finland’s detached houses have timber frames, and a quarter of them are made from industrial glue logs. Apartment buildings began to be made of wood, especially cross-laminated timber (CLT) and laminated veneer lumber (LVL). The most common way of constructing wooden apartments is to use volumetric elements as compared to load-bearing large elements and post-beam systems. The increase in environmental awareness in Finland, as in many European countries today, strengthens the popularity of wood construction, and this brings the search for innovative and environmentally friendly engineered wood product solutions (e.g., dovetail massive wood board elements) as a future vision. The chapter aims to identify, combine, and consolidate information about massive wood construction in Finland from past, present, and future perspectives. This study will assist and guide Finnish key professionals in the design and implementation of timber buildings.publishedVersionPeer reviewe

Tallest Timber Buildings: Main Architectural and Structural Design Considerations

Since the end of the twentieth century, the question of how to deal with the increasing scarcity of resources has been at the center and the need for renewable materials has come to the fore, especially in the construction sector. A possible solution to these environmental challenges is represented by the development of engineered timber products, which allowed the realization of tall timber structures. Their main drivers are decarbonization, forest management, and timber life cycle, urbanization, and densification, productivity in the construction industry, and the benefits of using timber indoors. In this context, this chapter will analyze data from the 10 tallest timber building cases to enhance the understanding of contemporary trends. Data are collected through literature surveys and case studies to analyze the main architectural and structural design concerns to contribute to the knowledge about the growing tall timber structures around the world. By revealing up-to-date features of the tallest timber towers, it is thought that this chapter will contribute to aiding and directing key construction professionals such as architects, structural engineers, and contractors, in the design and construction of future tall timber build-ing developments.publishedVersionPeer reviewe

EXIT Chart-Based Power Allocation for Iterative Frequency Domain MIMO Detector

Transmission power allocation in single-carrier　multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems with iterative frequency-domain (FD) soft cancellation (SC) minimum　mean-squared error (MMSE) equalization is considered. A novel framework for transmission power minimization subject to equalizer convergence constraints, referred as convergence constrained power allocation (CCPA) method, is proposed based on extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) chart analysis. The proposed method decouples the spatial interference between the streams using singular value decomposition (SVD), and minimizes the transmission power while achieving the target mutual information for each stream after iterations at the receiver. We show that the transmission power optimization can be formulated as a convex optimization problem. Three CCPA methods, one approximately optimal, and other two heuristic methods inspired by the Lagrange duality are derived. The numerical results demonstrate that the proposed scheme outperforms the existing linear precoding schemes. Moreover, the proposed heuristic schemes can achieve performance close with that of the approximately optimal method in terms of the equalizer convergence properties as well as transmission power

Perceptions, Attitudes, and Interests of Architects in the Use of Engineered Wood Products for Construction: A Review

Increased use of engineered wood products (EWPs) and thus decreasing share of non-biobased materials such as concrete reduces the impact of buildings on the climate by mitigating the primary energy use and greenhouse gas emissions in construction. A construction project includes many parameters, where the selection of construction material is one of the crucial decisions with its numerous criteria e.g. cost, strength, environmental impact. Furthermore, this complicated process includes different parties such as architects, engineers, contractors. Architects are among the key decision-makers in material selection, and their perceptions influence what they propose and hence an increase in wood construction. In literature, many studies have been conducted on the technological, ecological, economic aspects of EWPs, while limited studies are focusing on EWPs for construction from stakeholders’ perspective. In this chapter, architects’ attitudes towards the use of EWPs in buildings were scrutinized

On Greedy Methods for EXIT Chart Based Transmission Power Allocation

This paper addresses the problem of power allocation for single carrier point-to-point multiple input multiple output (MIMO) systems with iterative frequency-domain (FD) soft cancellation (SC) minimum mean squared error (MMSE) equalization. Two novel heuristic power allocation methods are proposed. The proposed methods explicitly take into account the convergence properties of the iterative equalizer while transmission power is minimized. The proposed heuristic schemes are based on, convergence constraint power allocation (CCPA), technique that decouples the spatial interference between streams using singular value decomposition (SVD), and minimize the transmission power while achieving the target mutual information for each stream after iterations at the receiver side. The proposed heuristic transmission schemes are inspired by well-known greedy algorithm resulting in a simple and efficient solutions to the power allocation problem. Numerical results show that the proposed heuristic schemes can achieve close to optimal performance in the terms of equalizer convergence as well as the total transmission power

Log Construction Practices and Future Outlook: Perspectives of Finnish Experts

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Promoting creativity in teaching drama

Conference: Future Academy Multidisciplinary Conference ICEEPSY & CPSYC & ICPSIRS & BE-CI Location: Istanbul, TURKEY Date: OCT 13-17, 2015The use of drama in education can be seen as an alternative to traditional teacher-led, scripted schooling and an answer to the challenges of our current postmodern knowledge culture, which aims at deeper conceptual understanding by preparing students to be more creative and create multimodal knowledge. At the same time the research project “Challenge of the empty space”, at Helsinki University's Teacher Education Department, has established that the potential complexity and diversity of creative processes in drama education is a challenge for teachers and as well for Finnish teacher education. In this article we bring together three doctoral studies of teaching drama (Kaasinen, Karjalainen-Väkevä and Lehtonen). They present three different approaches for how a teacher could support students’ creativity in a drama class. We suggest, that it might be beneficial for teachers teaching drama to have training in improvisation, to pay attention to the holistic presence and to focus on students’ perspectives, agency and ownership in teaching.Peer reviewe

Tall Wooden Residential Buildings in Finland: What Are the Key Factors for Design and Implementation?

This chapter examines tall residential buildings using engineered wood products (EWPs) in Finland. As specified in the National Building Code of Finland, ‘tall wooden building’ is defined as a structure with more than 8-story. Currently, there are two wooden residential buildings, 14-story Lighthouse Joensuu (2019) with laminated veneer lumber (LVL) structure and 13-story HOAS Tuuliniitty (under construction) with cross laminated timber (CLT) structure, that fit the definition above. This study analyses the phenomena associated with the design and implementation processes of these remarkable buildings, the starting points for the projects as well as the prospects of tall wooden housing in Finland through the case study method and interviews with the key actors in the projects. These cases are mapped with extremely detailed information, comprising a valuable source both for designers, engineers as well as developers. As a result, the current state-of-the-art and the critical factors influencing the design and implementation of these challenging sustainable projects in Finland have been identified. It is believed that this chapter will aid and direct key stakeholders in the construction industry in the sound planning and development of tall wooden residential projects in Finland