Year: 2012

Our consumption-driven society produces an enormous volume of waste every day. Over-crowded cities do not have a good quality of urban life. Together with the numerous problems that exist in these cities, they have resources that are plundered unsustainably and an ever-increasing generation of waste. This immensely high volume of waste is leading to overflowing…

This paper is centred on knowledge building within research and design as a layered and collaborative approach. It develops a small case study of the learning journey of an undergraduate landscape architecture student and her supervisor through a research project that itself is about a process of collaborative learning through design with children (co-design). In…

A public health crisis is looming. The recent Australian Bureau of Statistics report ‘Australian Health Survey’ (October 2012) highlighted increasing overweight/obesity and alarmingly low rates of exercise in the country’s population. It is projected that the problem will decimate the nation’s future capacity to pay for health-support as the population ages, unless the trend can…

ABSTRACT: Due to the increase in migration to Dhaka city every year, it is undergoing rapid growth in the area of urbanization and consequently the new settlements, housing development projects and slum areas are all adding to the environmental impact. Due to the elevated price and scarcity of land, the city is developing both vertically…

Urban design guidelines are one set of a range of instruments used to control or influence public and private works so as to optimise the production of reliably ‘good’ physical built environments. They address the public domain of our cities as well as the private domain in so far as this impacts on the public…

Temperature is the most relevant factor affecting the urban microclimate. Increased urban density, hard surfaces with inappropriate thermal property and lack of vegetation have resulted in the increase of temperatures in urban areas and high pollution levels. In return, greening is known as the best solution for mitigating high temperatures in urban context, thus has…

A significant increase of extreme summer heat waves in Central Europe is arising, which has a strong influence on the living quality of its people. Thermal comfort and micro climate around buildings become important issues in urban planning affecting everyone’s daily lives. The major meteorological parameters, such as air temperature, air humidity, wind direction, wind…

The importance of field study to the measurement and prediction of thermal comfort is well known. Field-based studies have served to highlight the real-world relationship between adaptive opportunity and thermal preference and acceptability reported by occupants. While real-world complexity is integral to field-based study, the reasons why it influences the comfort responses of participants is…

Aorangi House is a recently refurbished 12-storey commercial building located in the CBD of Wellington, New Zealand. This paper sets out to investigate the nature of its environmental re-design, and report on its performance in practice in terms of energy consumption and users’ perceptions. The original building was from the 1970s, fairly typical of its…

This research explores the adequacy of simulation using HDR images to map the luminance distribution both of the sky and of the building interiors. Currently the BRANZ Building Energy End-Use Study (BEES) team have one internal lighting measurement point recording light levels in each of more than 100 randomly selected commercial buildings in New Zealand….

Drawing upon a review of the literature and discussion with teachers and practitioners, this paper studies conceptions of teamwork and group-work in the context of the design disciplines. The paper is a precursor to national study examining the teaching and assessment of teamwork in design education, and aims to inform andragogy through an examination of…

The Castle, a collaboration between the School of Architecture & Design and Youth Futures, assists youth at risk of homelessness by deploying micro-dwellings to households experiencing spatial and emotional distress. The digital construction system has been tailored specifically for low-skilled labour through the development of a reliable and predictable component jointing regime, a limited palette…

Flexible design concept is a relatively new trend in airport terminal design which is believed to facilitate the ever changing needs of a terminal. Current architectural design processes become more complex every day because of the introduction of new building technologies where the concept of flexible airport terminal would apparently make the design process even…

Understanding how students utilise any element presented in teaching for their learning is important, particularly with increasing enrolments and resource limitations. This paper explores the ways in which design studies and architectural engineering students utilised digital learning elements alongside face-to-face teaching in a (so-called) blended learning environment when learning about the tectonics of designed construction….

The use of blended learning techniques is beneficial for design and engineering (architectural) students. In the case studies reviewed, a range of feedback and assessment was provided through blended learning, although none was provided solely utilising online elements. In considering the barriers to a more widespread adoption of digital or online feedback in the blended…

Whenever a computational or mathematical analysis of architectural space or form is undertaken, a range of assumptions must be made about which information in the building, survey drawing or CAD model to include. For example, shape grammar analyses of architectural forms are typically focussed on the macro-scale geometry of plans while tectonic details (like column…

This paper concerns questions about whether blended learning (comprising the designed amalgamation of face-to-face and digital learning components) can be matched with the delivery of online feedback. In the architecture and engineering (architectural) field where there are complex design problems presented to students, design studios with instruction and feedback often one-on-one over the drawing board…

Spatio-cognitive properties – including the capacity to evoke a sense of place or support wayfinding – are amongst the most important considerations in the design of large urban and architectural spaces. Both wayfinding and spatial identity rely on the capacity of a space to be noticeably distinct; a property that is called saliency. However, there…

Risk-assessment is seen as a tool for future refinement of performance-based building codes; the goal being to allocate consenting resources toward high-risk projects though risk-informed criteria. Research was conducted into building regulations, consenting processes and the role of professionals in a mixture of countries, states and cities internationally for elements of risk-based consenting with a…

Plantation timber forms an integral part of the future of timber industries, but in its production, significant quantities of timber is lost as waste in the form of plantation ‘thinnings’ (plantation thinnings are the sub-standard or poor quality trees that are removed prior to trees reaching full rotational age and have no to low commercial…

This paper follows the progress of deploying a prefabricated building overseas. In the Solar Decathlon in 2011, a solar-powered house was designed, constructed in New Zealand and then shipped to the USA for a ten day long competition. The First Light House received a high ranking in the student competition, winning major awards. This paper…

As an energy saving measure, part of an integrated response to mitigate climate change, the New Zealand Government raised the legal minimum requirements for the thermal performance of new homes. A carbon footprint provides a means to quantify the effect this action has had to reduce the impact our new homes have on the environment….

This study was a joint research project between Victoria University of Wellington’s School of Architecture and Design and the Wellington-based architectural practice Studio Pacific Architecture. It is a continuation of a previous study. The aim of the study was to determine the best methods of improving the thermal performance of new houses and to provide…