Suchergebnisse

Daylighting" waterways (also known as stream restoring) is a concept that has been gaining popularity in the United States and Europe over the last three decades but in Latin America less so. There is significant evidence of daylighting projects of creeks within cities, which have represented important contributions to the improvement of environmental quality of life in their urban surroundings. Santa Elena Creek has an important historical value for Medellín's community that is not recognised by younger generations who do not even know of its existence. Santa Elena Creek runs under La Playa Avenue, one of the most traditional avenues in the historical center of Medellín. In the 1930s, with the growth of the city and rapid population increase, a process of covering the creek with paving began, in order to remove the creek from the core of the city. It was considered an obstacle in the urban development of Medellín. Today the creek remains buried under La Playa Avenue, representing a lost sense of cultural and historical identity. Addressing daylighting urban creek projects presents technical, legal and economic challenges. This project is based on a theoretical framework, as well as on case studies provided in relevant literature sources, most of them research reports from governmental organisations. A design approach is developed based on the results of the analysis and the theoretical approach taken from foreign experiences and adapted to the Latin American urban context.

The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission is investigating the feasibility of daylighting historical urban creeks to mitigate flooding and combined sewer overflows in an attractive and multi-functional way in San Francisco. Examining the successes and shortcomings of existing creek daylighting projects in similar cities elsewhere in the world can provide valuable insight for potential future daylighting projects in San Francisco. The following daylighting projects share similar hydrologic, geographic, and/or urban characteristics with San Francisco: Berkeley, El Cerrito, and Albany, California; Seattle, Washington; and Zurich, Switzerland. In general, the projects in the United States were initiated by citizens, while in Zurich a city-wide daylighting program was the primary impetus. The projects reviewed tended to be located in the most economically, politically, or geographically feasible areas, representing "low-hanging fruit." They were most often sized to accommodate the 100 year storm event. Capital costs ranged from $30-3,000 per linear foot. Community acceptance varied, but generally increased over time. In the US examples, a general lack of sufficient monitoring and maintenance pervaded

Historical towns ¡n Europe usually have as their main feature an extremely dense urban tissue. This, in turn, generates a wide variety of situations which make it difficult to provide adequate light to the ¡nside of buildings. On the other hand, the trend for revitalization of cities often demands a change in the utilization of spaces adding even more difficulties to the case because the previous constraints and standards are heavily modified. Architecture today must face this challenge as a new aim for creativity based on the idea of "design with the environment". Basically, the achievement of the said urban renewal of oíd towns should not entail the creation of a kind of enclosure where sustainability is absent as the conservationists would have it. With this concept in mind, the complex process of building an architect's office was been launched, and though the starting situation was that of "a windowless fagade", a number of strategies have been devised to provide for sun and light in the working and living spaces. Simulations of the project taking into account the principies of radiant energy transfer have been duly conducted and after some corrections the office was completed and monitored. The procedure yields both the thermal gains and the luminous distribution of the building in order to assess the performance and comfort level on a seasonal basis. Therefore, we consider that the project is a valid example of sustainability in historical cities not merely because of the former but also due to its integration with professional practice and its attempt to address severe urban and political constraints.

Auckland City's burgeoning waste stream is projected to exceed current landfill capacity by 2026. A proposed new landfill site in the forested Dome Valley, 70 miles north of Auckland, is controversial. In the secluded valley, a capped landfill will hide the inconvenient and relegated externalities of modern consumer society. Since the second half of the twentieth century, such practices have come under increasing censure around the world, particularly from environmentalists and indigenous people. Contemporary city infrastructure has prioritised making waste flows invisible. Against this emphasis, this paper considers conceptual artistic practice from the 1970s that made visible the matter, politics, and potential of overlooked residue. The creative engagements of Billy Apple, Mierles Laderman Ukeles, and Noel Lane reframe waste residue and processes as materially and ethically continuous with the sites and societies from which they come. The paper re-reads these instances of artistic practice in terms of infrastructures of city waste disposal, suggesting ways in which art practice might help build new approaches to waste's accumulation.

This paper presents a study for the transformation of an industrial area in Turin, Italy. The area hosts two buildings (one of which appointed as listed) to be transformed into dwellings. A synergic approach was adopted which combined expertise from architecture, social-economics, psychology and building physics sciences. Building physics sciences lead the research team. A user-centered design was pursued, using a bottom-up approach. A specifically developed questionnaire was submitted on-line to potential users. The survey showed that 'amount of daylight', 'size of rooms', 'tranquility of the area' and 'presence of a private garden' were perceived by users to be the most positive aspects of both their present and future, ideal home. These results were then implemented into the project. The exploitation of daylight became the driving force of the transformation project. Especially for the listed building, skylights and light wells were designed to bring daylight into the cores of the buildings, which host common spaces such as libraries or study rooms. The amount of daylight was assessed through the legislative index of the average daylight factor and through a climate-based modeling approach, calculating dynamic metrics such as the spatial daylight autonomy and the Useful Daylight Illuminance. The paper critically compares and discusses these two approaches. Finally, the energy demand for lighting was also calculated to analyze how the increased exploitation of daylight may imply a reduced need for electricity for lighting.