Building Form and Massing

The objective of this paper was to understand the basic concept of slums and comprehend the multidimensional
factors that affect the redevelopment of these settlements in India. This short exercise
with a help of a detailed case study reveals a generic loophole of these numerous redevelopment
programs; that is it ignores to fulfill the environmental aspects and comfort conditions of the
occupants. This, in the longer run causes higher maintenance costs which the urban poor cannot
afford. Therefore to begin with solving this issue, the paper tries to analyse the various spatial
organization strategies for urban layouts that can contribute towards environmental comfort for
developments with high population density (like slums).The analysis was done for hot and humid
climate of Kolkata in India which has the second highest percentage of its urban population living in
informal settlements.

Solar access requirements constitute a significant aspect for the performance of buildings and for
the image of cities. The solar envelope is a method used during the schematic design phase to
determine the maximum volume that buildings cannot exceed to guarantee good access to direct
sunlight in streets and on neighboring facades. However, two major shortcomings exist that
prohibit the use of existing solar envelope techniques in practice: They don’t include the
neighboring buildings in the overshadowing calculation, and they utilize a fixed start-and-end
time inputs for the selection of specific hours of direct solar access. Different direct solar access
ordinances exist that require that new buildings do not obstruct direct sun light in existing
dwellings: (1) during specific hours, (2) for a quantity of hours, (3) as a fraction of the actual solar
access. For the second and third type of ordinances no existing solar envelope methodologies
exist. The research presented in this paper develops a computational method that increases the
efficacy of the generated solar envelopes including the context in the calculations and provides
the possibility to select the quantity and quality of sun light hours, and thus allows the modeler to
generate solar envelopes optimized for different objectives. The method aims to help architects
and planners to design environmental conscious buildings and urban environments.

Vaulted or domed roofs have been frequently adopted by builders and architects throughout the Middle East and other hot dry areas. However, the thermal performance of such buildings under hot dry climatic conditions has rarely been quantitatively studied. In this paper, a detailed finite element model for the investigation of the thermal performance of non-air-conditioned buildings with vaulted roofs is suggested based on two-dimensional unsteady heat transfer in such roofs and solar geometry. This model allows a comparison of the thermal performance of non-air-conditioned buildings with a vaulted roof (VR) and a flat roof (FR) under different climatic conditions. Results obtained by numerical calculation show that, irrespective of building type the vaulted roofs are applied to, buildings with a VR have lower indoor temperatures as compared to those with a FR. The reason is that such roofs dissipate more heat than a FR does by convection and thermal radiation at night due to the enlarged curved surfaces. This implies that such roof forms are suitable for buildings located in hot dry regions but not for those located in hot humid areas, and reasonably explains why curved roofs have been extensively adopted by builders and architects in the hot dry areas in the past. However, with the decrease in the half rim angle of a VR, the difference of indoor thermal condition between a VR and a FR building becomes small and insignificant. Results also indicate that the indoor air temperature is slightly influenced by the half rim angle  and the orientation  of the vaulted roof. To be effective, the half rim angle should be  >50o, instead of  <50o, which is the optimal half rim angle of vaulted roofs of air-conditioned buildings, as found by the present authors in a previous study.

he rapid population growth and high demand of an affordable house in big cities of Indonesia bring the mass construction of public flat 1 (rusun). The description of rusun as a precedence and passive design strategies as a future product which specific discussion on heat intensity which gain the human perception in outdoor thermal using the comparison of indices: PET (heat budget), Y JS (thermal sensation) and PMV (ENVI-met) to find the better urban living quality. The optimum passive design recommendation has correlated to meteorological indicator to invent microclimate, which described through ENVI-met experiment.

This article presents the circumstances of the urbanization processes some Brazilian Eastern Amazonian cities have undergone, and discusses official investments to improve the urban configuration of Marabá as opportunities to settle new paradigms for urban design and assure mechanisms of urban control. It also offers explanations for the diversity these cities display as compared to other Brazilian cities with regard to their strong dependence on external economic processes and their relationship with a unique environment. A set of interventions from both the federal and state governments in Marabá is used to illustrate recent struggles between mechanisms of participatory management and traditional forces that represent the interests of the elites, which impose on our cities limitations to a more sustainable development mode.

As a passive design strategy, solar envelopes play a significant role in determining building mass based on
desirable sun access during a predefined period. Nowadays, advancements in the area of computational tools
permit designers to develop new methods for establishing solar envelopes. However, current approaches lack an
understanding of the existing environment’s site characteristics, especially when dealing with geometrical information
about the surrounding context. Consequently, this aspect affects the contextual analysis process during
the generation of solar envelopes because of insufficient information for the relevant input of simulation
modelling. With the support of geometric and radiometric properties stored in point cloud data, such as position
(XYZ), colour (RGB), and reflection intensity (I), this study has proposed novel subtractive solar envelopes that
specifically consider the surface properties of the existing environment. Through a subtractive mechanism, the
proposed method caters to several computational frameworks such as dataset pre-processing that aims to correct
erroneous measurement during scanning. In alignment with that, the proposed building’s visible sun vectors,
optimal normal values, and 3D polyhedra are generated for the hit-or-miss analysis of subtractive solar envelopes.
Furthermore, environmental assessments consisting of insolation and glare analysis are performed on the
solar envelopes’ final geometry. These performance assessments aim to investigate the potential and impact of
the generated solar envelopes as it pertains to the existing buildings. Ultimately, this study supports architects
not only in producing a new generation of subtractive solar envelopes based on real contextual settings but also
in comprehensively understanding the microclimate condition of design context.

There has been a growing interest in discovering human effects on the environment and energy consumption in the recent decades. It is estimated that the shares of energy consumed in transportation and housing systems are around 20 and 30 percent of the total energy consumption. Furthermore, it is believed that the residential greenhouse emissions depend on urban form and structure. This paper explores the effects of urban features on residential energy consumption at neighborhood level using data collected through household questionnaires (n = 140). Two residential districts in the metropolitan Shiraz, located in the south of Iran, were selected as case study areas. Different features of the two areas including building density, typology, housing location, parcel size, floor area and construction materials were compared. Ordinary linear regression was used to discover the impact of explanatory variables on energy consumption. It was found that some physical variables such as parcel size, setback, and the number of floors played significant roles in explaining the variances existing in energy use level. The results can be considered by governmental agencies in order to modify land use policies and subdivision rules in hope of saving energy and achieving a sustainable community.

In performance-based architectural design, most existing techniques and design approaches to assisting designers are primarily for a single design problem such as building massing, spatial layouts, or facade design. However, architectural design is a synthesis process that considers multiple design problems. Thus, for achieving an overall improvement in building performance, it is critical to incorporate computational techniques and methods into all key design problems. In this regard, this paper presents a full-circle application of different computational design approaches and tools to exploit the potential of building performance in driving architectural design towards more novel and sustainable buildings as well as to explore new research design paradigms for performance-based architectural design in real-world design scenarios. This paper takes a commercial complex building design as an example to demonstrate how building performance can be incorporated into different building design problems and reflect on the limitations of existing tools in supporting the architectural design.