Form follows zero energy: technological design for sustainable housing in extreme climate areas

Hot and humid Extreme Climate Areas, like the United Arab Emirates, pose unique challenges for architects and engineers seeking innovative technologies for energy and environmental efficient building designs; at the same time, these regions are characterized by an innovative spirit that pushes to develop and implement projects to test renewable building technologies and solutions. The research team, which includes the Engineering faculty of The British University in Dubai, is working to develop design strategies that contribute to implementing low-energy and off-grid architecture in the UAE. The goal is to design a home balancing human comfort and efficient energy use, and to respond to the site’s climatic and contextual variables. The research aims to design a water-conserving, net-zero energy single-family home that can be used as a prototype for new building developments in this area. The approach developed toward an energy-efficient design process includes both traditional bioclimatic elements and high-performance active technological systems. The experimental design process also aims to reduce the building’s environmental impact while creating a comfortable and responsive living environment. In this way, efficient water use and renewable energy features can be aesthetically, economically and culturally integrated into the home’s architecture to improve its residents' quality of life. The house design responds to the climate challenges and complements active systems reducing energy use and associated carbon emissions. At the same time, it aims to contribute to the development of appropriate architecture, a starting point for simple architectural expression in the UAE

Maintenance-Oriented Design in Architecture. A Decision Support System for the Evaluation of Maintenance Scenarios Through Bayesian Networks Use. A Case Study: the Headquarters of ING Groupe in Amsterdam

This study was developed at the Department of Architecture of Pescara and Department of Energy, Systems, Territory and Construction Engineering of the University of Pisa as part of an experimental thesis that led to the implementation of a Decision Support System. The objective of the work was to implement a tool capable of evaluating - in relation to the choices concerning the morphology of the building, the construction technologies, the materials and the design of the architectural elements - the levels of maintenance quality implemented in the various phases of the project, from the first phases, in which few relevant decisions are made, to the executive phase characterized by a multiplicity of choices. The aim was to construct a tool in which the reliability of the evaluations was related to the quantity and quality of the data that feeds the decision-making process, but which is also able to evaluate preliminary decisions based on the elements of choice that characterize the first phases of the project. The conceptual model has been defined through the construction and implementation of a Bayesian Network or a graphical system of probabilistic inference able to represent the set of stochastic variables and their conditional dependencies through the use of a direct acyclic graph. Through the interrogation of the network it is therefore possible to evaluate through the expression of a synthetic index, a real overall rating of the different aspects that contribute to define the maintenance quality. The use of Bayesian Networks, in the light of the analyses carried out on an experimental basis - exemplified here on the case study of ING Groupe headquarters - for the ability to control a multitude of factors linked to the durability of materials, the morphology of systems and ease of intervention, seems capable of generating useful, effective and expandable tools to support the design decision-making process

Autonomy, Independence, Inclusion

The living environment must not only meet the primary needs of living, but also the expectations of improvement of life and social relations and people’s work. The need for a living environment that responds to the needs of users with their different abilities, outside of standardizations, is increasingly felt as autonomy, independence and well-being are the result of real usability and adaptability of the spaces. The project to improve the inclusivity of living space and to promote the rehabilitation of fragile users need to be characterized as an interdisciplinary process in which the integration of specialized contributions leads to adaptive customization of space solutions and technological that evolve with the changing needs, functional capacities and abilities of individuals

A repository of recovered materials from post-earthquake reconstruction areas

Following the series of ‘severe’ seismic events that began in 2009, Italian legislation classified demolition debris as urban waste, despite Directive 2008\98\EC calling for the reuse/recycling of 70% of all waste from human activities by 2020. This choice will produce a technical, cultural, environmental and economic impoverishment in territories already under heavy strain. Considering the convergence between the paradigms of the Circular Economy and Smartness, the essay identifies possible technological innovations for creating repositories of recovered materials. Collective activities and spatialities tied to processes of selection, reuse and recycling can generate forms of social-organisational-collective resilience required to confront the losses and damages suffered by a community.

Le tecnologie no-dig per la ricerca, la mappatura e la diagnostica delle reti

Il sottosuolo urbano è progressivamente riconosciuto quale luogo fisico entro cui attivare politiche d’intervento e regole di comportamento coerenti con i principi di sostenibilità ambientale e fattibilità economica e sociale; una vera e propria risorsa di cui è necessario fare un uso razionale, avendo la consapevolezza del suo limite di sfruttamento. Le pubbliche amministrazioni devono garantire e migliorare le prestazioni delle reti – minimizzando al contempo i costi finanziari e ambientali – mediante metodi e strumenti d’ottimizzazione dei processi al fine di perseguire obiettivi di miglioramento continuo dei livelli di servizio erogati come della sostenibilità delle infrastrutture. Lo sviluppo delle tecnologie non distruttive per la mappatura, la diagnostica e la riabilitazione delle infrastrutture a rete assume un ruolo di rilievo poiché la necessità di effettuare interventi sulle infrastrutture esistenti minimizzando al contempo gli impatti con le funzioni urbane e con l’ambiente trova in queste una soddisfacente risposta. In questo contributo si descrivono le principali tecnologie per la diagnostica non distruttiva per la mappatura delle reti

Flexible Design to Territory Smart User-Centered

The contemporary city is an organism that lives of connection and relationship between the different element and layers that it is made and of everything that exists around it; the same concept of city has radically changed. The speed at which the social and economic context changes, the uncertainty of the tastes and the interests of consumers make spaces unable to be rigidly characterized based on a function but need to be flexible to be readapted to the needs that users are faced with from time to time. Where a space was defined for the positioning of an activity or a service (useful to living in stability the territory), the user change (population made mostly of children, elder people, people with mental and physical disabilities, the poor or temporary city-users) involves rethinking the organization of the city about a new programmatic flexibility model is based on a “logistically open” structure, programmable by subsequent additions and “self- evolutionary” from an organizational point of view (in which the evolution of a part leads to the evolution of the whole). Then a Healthy City that bases its organization on the relationship between design-man environment, where the design is one of basic human activities – implementing such strategies as to allow humans to improve their living conditions in their relationship with the natural or artificial environment. Suh (1999) defines design as an essential activity that determines the generation of systems, i.e. that associates the users’ requirements with a system that can meet them with matching solutions. The issue of correlation between project and user is not new and has been constantly debated both in practice and in theory throughout the XX century. In this respect, we can identify three generations of approaches to user oriented design which, despite sharing the objective “of the well-being of humans while being environmentally-friendly”, differ in meanings and man-space relational strategies. Among all of these approaches, the flexible design, analyzed in the paper seems more appropriate to the creation of a smart user-centered territory (Cellucci and Di Sivo 2016)

Flexible Design to Territory Smart User-Centered

The contemporary city is an organism that lives of connection and relationship between the different element and layers that it is made and of everything that exists around it; the same concept of city has radically changed. The speed at which the social and economic context changes, the uncertainty of the tastes and the interests of consumers make spaces unable to be rigidly characterized based on a function but need to be flexible to be readapted to the needs that users are faced with from time to time. Where a space was defined for the positioning of an activity or a service (useful to living in stability the territory), the user change (population made mostly of children, elder people, people with mental and physical disabilities, the poor or temporary city-users) involves rethinking the organization of the city about a new programmatic flexibility model is based on a “logistically open” structure, programmable by subsequent additions and “self- evolutionary” from an organizational point of view (in which the evolution of a part leads to the evolution of the whole). Then a Healthy City that bases its organization on the relationship between design-man environment, where the design is one of basic human activities – implementing such strategies as to allow humans to improve their living conditions in their relationship with the natural or artificial environment. Suh (1999) defines design as an essential activity that determines the generation of systems, i.e. that associates the users’ requirements with a system that can meet them with matching solutions. The issue of correlation between project and user is not new and has been constantly debated both in practice and in theory throughout the XX century. In this respect, we can identify three generations of approaches to user oriented design which, despite sharing the objective “of the well-being of humans while being environmentally-friendly”, differ in meanings and man-space relational strategies. Among all of these approaches, the flexible design, analyzed in the paper seems more appropriate to the creation of a smart user-centered territory (Cellucci and Di Sivo 2016)

Maintenance Oriented Approach – Technological Design to Ethic of Sustainability

The Bruntland Report has for the first time formulated the concept of “sustainable development” defining it as “development able to meet current needs without compromising future generations’ ability to meet their own needs”; such definition has emphasized not only the need to limit natural resources consumption and pollution emissions, but has also introduced the concept of (ethical) “responsibility” of man’s action, both towards the natural environment and towards the anthropized one. Applying the sustainability objectives to the building process (project, construction, maintenance, management, dismission) - with the intention of reducing raw materials demand and wastes - forces to reflect even on the maintenance process role. Maintenance can indeed be intended as a tool to build up a co-evolution project between man and nature, to be achieved by considering and managing maintenance-oriented buildings. Carrying out the maintainability requirement during the project phase becomes crucial since it guarantees, during the managing phase, that the maintenance intervention is carried out without any unforeseen or unpredictable collateral events characterized by a waste in the financial and environmental resources. A number of researches and experimentations have been developed at the Department of Technologies for Built Environment in order to encourage the carrying out of the maintainability requirement during the project phase

Toward the programmed preventive conservation of the historical-architectural heritage as system and as "antifragile" process

The conditions of fragility to which the built environment and, consequently, the architectural historical heritage are exposed, necessitate the activation of approaches characterized by a greater attention tothe relationships between causal links and systems, logically interscalar and interdisciplinary. It seems increasingly unavoidable the need to arrive at cultural and disciplinary guidelines useful for allowing conservation to come out of the dimension of the extraordinary and finally move towards thatof ordinariness; to build more effective organizational and procedural tools for the maintenance of buildings in relation to the multiple factors that characterize each specific urban and territorial area. The implementation of maintenance processes aimed at preserving the historical and architectural heritage postulate the affirmation of a new design culture that can be based on the "antifragility" paradigm for the affirmation of more effective ways of organizing the processes and systems for conservation of architecture. The essay proposes a methodological reflection on how to conserve the historical-architectural heritage by analyzing the characteristics of programmed preventive conservation as a process and as an organizational system, highlighting how the contribution of maintenance technologies gives specific connotations of "antifragility" essential to counteracting the insurgent conditions of "fragility" of the heritage