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Open Architecture and its Discontents
Get PDFThe qualities that characterise open works of art have become prevalent in mainstream architecture theory. Trying to elucidate why openness appears to mean so many different things and at the same time remains an ethereal concept, it seems worthwhile to reflect on potential justifications for its use. While the notion can be effectively and persuasively used to discuss the ethics that should govern our profession, beyond that axiological role its meagre explanatory power suggests that new directions in open architecture might require that we recognise its theoretical shortcomings and start looking for new and better ways to explain exactly what we’re talking about when we talk about the architecture of our time
Contextualizing Liberté D’Usage
Get PDFAnne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal have been at the forefront of European architecture for decades, as attested by numerous awards throughout their careers and culminating in the receipt of the prestigious Pritzker Prize in 2021.
Although much has been written and said about their relationship to the notion of openness in architecture, in this essay we explore the cultural context surrounding a particular aspect inherent in their way of working and conceiving the project: the desire to favour the maximum freedom of use, or liberté d’usage, particularly of – but not limited to – domestic spaces. Liberté d’usage is a declination of openness that brings forward the aspects of flexibility and adaptability suitable to contemporary architectural space, while engaging with its imaginative, atmospheric and emancipatory characteristics. This article elaborates on this view of freedom in architecture, pinning it against its cultural backdrop, and particularly the largely forgotten figure of Jacques Hondelatte, Lacaton & Vassal’s professor and mentor
Developing circular building components: Between ideal and feasible
Get PDFA building consists of building components, such as a kitchen, façade and roof. By replacing building components with more circular ones during new construction, maintenance and renovation, we can gradually create a circular built environment. In this dissertation, we develop and test 8 circular building components for housing renovation together with Dutch social housing associations and industry partners. Combining ‘Action Research’ and ‘Research through Design’ approaches, we generate knowledge on the development of feasible, circular building components. We present a design tool, assessment model, environmental design guidelines and identify key stakeholder choices. This research makes scientific contributions to circular design theories, management models for the built environment, and research methodology. We recommend 4 changes in practice to implement more circular building components. 
Facades-as-a-Service: A cross-disciplinary model for the (re)development of circular building envelopes
Get PDFFacades-as-a-Service (FaaS) is a systemic innovation model aiming to accelerate and enhance the energy and comfort performance improvement of our buildings, while safeguarding the availability of material resources for future generations. The circular economy and clean energy transitions in the built environment have respectively dominated the academic dialogue in architecture, engineering, and real estate over the last decades. While significant progress has been made, and many fine examples of more sustainable architecture exist, the process has been hindered by traditional systemic models for the planning, contracting, financing, construction, and management of building projects. If we are to meet the ambitious climate-change mitigation goals and material resource preservation challenges of our generation, it is crucial to re-think the way in which we build, operate, and decommission the built environment. Product-service systems (PSS) are a promising model for realigning environmental risks and responsibilities with financial and business objectives, while promoting much deeper and long-lasting collaboration between all parties involved in a building’s life-cycle. This thesis focuses on the building envelope, as one of the most performance-determining systems in our buildings. It then questions the technological, managerial, financial, and legal contexts which often perpetuate unsustainable linear practices despite the urgency for - and technical feasibility of - more energy- and resource-efficient alternatives. Facades-as-a-Service is a topic that extends far beyond technological readiness and architectural engineering. It is rather a thesis about how we make façade construction and retrofitting decisions, the systemic parameters that determine and constraint these decisions, and whether – in the search for a more sustainable built environment – we should question the fundamental concepts behind these decisions. The results show that gradual and strategic development with a multi-disciplinary perspective can enable and facilitate the implementation of more efficient and sustainable building practices
Unearthing Urban Narratives. Towards a Repository of Methods: Working Group 3
No full textUrban narratives offer a situated, experiential and subjective window into urban places. They come in spoken, visual and written forms and can be queried through a variety of approaches and methods. This contribution draws on the work of WG3–Methodological Framework of the COST Action–Writing Urban Places and reflects on the quest to find and bring together different methods and approaches to unearth, understand and retell urban narratives.
We begin this essay by contextualizing the growing interest in narratives within the multidisciplinary field of urban studies and acknowledging the need for methods and approaches to find, analyse, represent and construct such narratives. Following this introduction, we briefly describe the task of WG3 and broadly present the range of methods that were collected as well as the interesting outputs that were produced, including a special issue in a journal, an interactive and iterative online platform, an international digital conference, a book with around 50 methods and assignments, and a set of postcards to disseminate them.
Subsequently, we reflect on this process and discuss the way in which: it helped visualize the often hidden spaces/sites/places where narratives can be found; it unsettled our understanding of what constitutes an urban narrative as well as a method and what these methods are for; and it illustrated the potential of narratives as a medium not only to unlock and generate situated, subjective and experiential knowledge about urban places, but also to mobilize ideas that may even shape urban futures. 
Tampere: Co-Constructed Narratives of the Grassroots in the City Narrating Hiedanranta
No full textHiedanranta is a former industrial complex located on the shores of lake Näsijärvi in Tampere, the second largest city in Finland. Currently, the area is inhabited by diverse cultural actors that work on individual as well as collective projects and who have also appropriated the buildings and surrounding areas, physically transformed them and provided them with new uses, while unleashing other, often political, processes. It is the work of these actors on the territory that renders this site’s special, haptic and creative character. Notwithstanding, the area is currently undergoing a dramatic transformation. Due to a large urban development project, the material substrate of the site as well as its internal social dynamics are rapidly changing, already seeing some cultural groups being permanently displaced. It is within this context that the COST Action team in Tampere organized a workshop to gather, understand and retell the stories of different cultural actors working on the site by employing different participatory visual and narrative methods.
In this contribution, we explore Hiedanranta through six co-constructed narratives. These narratives bring together visual material and poetic practices as well as long narrations of personal experience that shed light on the lives of these cultural actors as they unfold in and relate to Hiedanranta. By bringing these narratives to the fore, we aim to challenge objectivist and positivist forms of generating knowledge about urban places by taking narratives of personal experiences as legitimate sources of knowledge seriously, recognizing that knowledge is both situated and subjective; to deploy co-constructed narratives of a site as a form of subjective representation of a place that counters abstract representations of space; to illustrate the way in which the grassroots are also shaping plans, policies and spaces and therefore should find a place in theoretical planning discourses. Most importantly, through these narratives we hope to keep the stories of Hiedanranta alive before, like the old factory buildings, these are forever erased. 
Optimising the wave attenuation of bamboo fences using the numerical wave model SWASH
Get PDFMangroves protect tropical coastlines from flooding and erosion, reducing flood risks along coastal communities worldwide. Nevertheless, mangrove forests have experienced considerable losses due to activities like urbanization and aquaculture, exposing coastal areas to wave attack. To restore mangroves at eroding coastlines, structures formed by bamboo poles and a brushwood filling are used to shelter the coast from waves, and create a favourable habitat for mangrove colonization. However, these structures often lose their brushwood filling during storms, resulting in high maintenance costs. This study proposes a new type of design to reduce maintenance expenses, consisting of only vertical bamboo poles without a filling of brushwood. Structure designs are evaluated for a case study in Demak, Indonesia, using the numerical wave model SWASH to predict wave attenuation through the structures. Field measurements and WaveWatch III data are analyzed to obtain the design conditions for the structures in Demak. SWASH is validated against laboratory experiments, and applied to investigate the optimum number of rows and their optimum spacing (in the direction of wave propagation). The model shows that for a structure consisting of two rows of bamboo poles, the transmission rate Et/Ei decreases from 75% to 55% when the row spacing in the wave direction is increased from sx = 0.42 m to sx = 5.8 m. Larger spacings do not result in less transmission, and at least three rows are needed to have a transmission rate lower than 50 % - a common wave reduction target used in restoration efforts with structures. This study thus identifies potential strategies to maximize wave attenuation by bamboo structures, which can be used to reduce wave attack along muddy coasts without the need of a brushwood filling. Hereby, it provides an economically and user friendly alternative with respect to the previous brushwood structure designs, as it requires less material costs and maintenance. In addition, this study presents a new method to schematize these kind of structures in SWASH in an efficient way
Field Survey of 2021 Typhoon Rai –Odette- in the Philippines
Get PDFTyphoon Rai struck the Philippines on the 16th December 2021, damaging and inundating many coastal areas along the Visayas region of the country due to the high winds, storm surges and wind driven waves it generated. In order to understand the various damage mechanisms, the authors conducted a field survey to measure the storm surge heights at several locations in the provinces of Cebu and Bohol. As part of the survey, local residents were interviewed to understand the phenomena and survey the height reached by the storm surge. The maximum storm surge level measured were 2.54 m, 4.24 m and 4.06 m along the provinces of Cebu and Bohol. Finally, some interesting characteristics of the storm surge are summarised, and the lessons learnt in terms of disaster risk management are discusse
Standards project the future
Get PDFStandards are shown to be fundamental to measurements and measurements emerge with early agrarian civilizations. This paper proposes that each of the six human civilizations: hunter/gatherer, agrarian, city state, industrial, information, and the future, may be better understood by examining the general form of standards necessary for that civilization. Then the latest form of standards offers some insight into future value systems
Fast contrail estimation with OpenSky data
Get PDFContrails, formed under specific atmospheric conditions, have a noteworthy role in heat-trapping within the atmosphere. This study bridges the gap between theoretical contrail formation models and real-world data by employing flight information from OpenSky and meteorological data from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. We introduce a computationally efficient contrail estimation module, leveraging a client-server architecture that allows on-demand weather data interpolation via an API, significantly reducing computational load and enhancing performance locally. The study also benchmarks the entire pipeline, from data acquisition to contrail prediction, offering a robust tool for future air traffic studies requiring interpolated weather data