Designing for Future Building Adaptive Reuse

ii (350 words) Adaptive reuse of existing buildings can play a significant role in mitigating climate change by reusing embodied energy and resources in place and acting as a viable alternative to demolition and landfill. It also offers social benefits by revitalising familiar landmarks and preserving cultural and heritage values. Further, it is important that designers should explicitly consider maximising the adaptive reuse potential of new buildings at the time that they are designed and anticipate their future uses aside from its original use. Reviewing the design principles implemented in the past, this research identifies a knowledge gap pertaining to an absence of clear criteria for future adaptive reuse and the lack of consensus as how to maximise adaptive reuse potential. Thus, this research is an explorative study and retrospectively analyses successful adaptive reuse projects with a view to establishing and testing a multi-criteria decision

Sustainability and Maintainability of High Rise Vertical Greenery Systems (VGS): its Lessons and Assessment Scoresheet

Vertical Greenery Systems (VGS) applied on building has proven economic, environmental and social benefits which made it one of the widely accepted green building design strategies to support sustainable development. However, incorporating vertical greenery systems into innovative facades generates maintainability challenges. This paper highlights the best and good practices Design for Maintainability scoresheet, as well as the VGS defects and issues. The Design for Maintainability (DfM) assessment scoresheet will be beneficial in assessing and avoiding potential VGS defects leading to its maximum performance, longevity and sustainability. This research has established a list of best practice guidelines and measures with weighted scoring system for evaluating the maximum performance and efficient maintainability of VGS applications on facades while minimizing cost, risks, negative environmental impacts and consumption of matter/energy. The paper’s contribution will be the improvement of the designers’ decision making process, expanded library on vertical greenery systems defects as well as the importance of integrating maintainability of high-rise VGS facades in tropical conditions during its design inception

Shared Design Framework for Autonomous Vehicles and Land Use Interface

Technologies around Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) have improved enormously in the last decade. Autonomous vehicles are increasingly being tested on roads around the world. While the commercialisation of AVs seems imminent and researchers have explored various scenarios on the impact of driverless cars, trucks and buses on urban planning, the research around how AVs interface with land use and buildings remains scarce. This means that AVs may not be ready for full end-to-end transportation of passengers in high-density cities where drop off points are built within the buildings. This research study aims to fill the gap by examining the issues around the AV interface with land use and buildings, before these vehicles can become a viable option for commuters. Further research is required to investigate how these vehicles can navigate away from the roads into buildings, navigate within buildings, and then navigate out of buildings back onto the roads. This paper reviews current literature on the subject of autonomous vehicles and how they interact with and impact on the built environment. The findings identified a knowledge gap on how autonomous vehicles interface with buildings. The scant research in this area could slow the adoption of autonomous vehicles in a city like Singapore. Thus, this paper proposes a novel shared design framework plan for stakeholders, such as commuters, car manufacturers, building owners and design consultants, etc., to adopt so that building owners may enhance their assets for smoother access by autonomous vehicles. The inputs from a range of stakeholders could steer the formulation of guidelines for upgrading existing buildings to be AV-friendly and introduce relevant design considerations for new buildings to be AV-read

Planning for the temporary: temporary urbanism and public space in a time of COVID-19

It is a cliché to say we live in strange times: COVID-19 has focused our attention on schedules of lockdowns and long-term economic effects, and has even slowed down our experience of time due to increased cognitive loads. But as planners or urban designers it is our urban places that have also become strange: COVID-19 is altering our use of, and behaviour in, public space – from physical and social distancing to staying at home or even leaving the city altogether. We are concerned with how long we will tolerate state encroachments in public space, especially new techniques of surveillance and control, but we also see local governments opening up streets to give more public spaces back to pedestrians. In this Viewpoint we explore these paradoxes of public space in a time of COVID-19, from its temporary disappearance to the potential for temporary changes to underpin lasting strategies for liveable, economically viable and resilient public space. Although some link temporary urbanism to neo-liberal urban development and austerity policies (Stevens et al., 2019), we ponder how the COVID-19 moment critiques the status quo by providing new openings for shifting temporary urbanism into the mainstream planning toolkit. Does COVID-19 present an opportunity to make temporariness more deliberate and programmatic,thereby catalysing long-term change

Design for maintainability of high-rise vertical green facades

10.1080/09613218.2018.1440716Building Research & Information447453-46