The challenges to which contemporary building design needs to respond grow steadily. They originate from the influence of changing environmental conditions on buildings, as well as from the need to reduce the impact of buildings on the environment. The increasing complexity requires the continual revision of design principles and their harmonisation with current scientific findings, technological development, and environmental, social, and economic factors. It is precisely these issues that f...

Leftover spaces are neglected and obsolete spaces within the city. As they are temporarily unoccupied by defined urban functions, leftover spaces provide unique “interstitial conditions” that open for wild species as well as different informal social activities, offering crucial complements to the formal and defined urban spaces. In this context, the design of leftover spaces poses a paradox between the practice of design that projects a set of definitions onto the site, and the indeter...

Shell structures carry loads with their thin yet curved shapes. Being thin means shells require little material, which is desirable for minimizing embodied carbon footprints. However, the feature of being curved implies shells require immense effort to design and fabricate. To address the challenges, this dissertation consists of three parts: developing a design algorithm based on radial basis functions (RBFs), inventing a fabrication technique based on reconfigurable mechanisms, and producin...

Indoor navigation applications are actively investigated and developed due to their capacity to provide users with essential information in the modern extensive building complexes. Therefore, many researchers have developed a range of indoor navigation applications, which have focused on aspects such as localization, indoor route computation, and human spatial cognition. Unfortunately, current indoor navigation systems do not consider the user's access rights when it comes to navigating safel...

Indoor arenas are important public buildings catering for various activities (e.g., sports events, stage performances, assemblies, exhibitions, and daily sports for the public) and serving as landmarks in urban contexts. The multi-functional space and long-span roof structure of an indoor arena are highly interrelated, which impact the multi-functionality and structural performance and mainly define the overall form of the building. Therefore, it is crucial to integrate the multi-functional s...

Oil is a dangerous product. Its transport, storage and refining present numerous environmental and health challenges. Local, national and European regulators have taken steps to locate it in space since the beginning of industrial oil drilling in the 1860s. But key leaders of the oil industry in Northwest Europe, and beyond, have also served as policy makers and aimed to keep legal constraints (decrees, laws, taxes) as limited as possible to prevent the emergence of obstacles in the developme...

In climate-responsive design the building becomes an intermediary in its own energy housekeeping, forming a link between the harvest of climate resources and low energy provision of comfort. Essential here is the employment of climate-responsive building elements, defined as structural and architectural elements in which the energy infrastructure is far-reaching integrated. This thesis presents the results of research conducted on what knowledge is needed in the early stages of the design pro...

In the past decades, diversity has become a popular catchphrase in theoretical, policy and public discourses in Canadian cities. This study seeks to add to our understanding of urban diversity, as perceived and experienced by those who inhabit, frequent and govern urban areas. The study further makes use of a variety of qualitative and participatory techniques (i.e. qualitative interviews, roundtable talks, participant observations, and focus groups) to gather rigorous empirical data on livin...

The aim of this issue of A+BE is to propose urban design guidelines to positively influence the heat islands in Dutch cities and regions. As an architect and urban planner, the challenge was to provide a series of spatial planning guidelines that had to be open enough to be compatible with other urban planning priorities and accurate enough to mitigate the Urban Heat Island (UHI). This thesis is thus marked by this tension between a generic reflection on the integration of scientific findings...