Architecture

Debates on contemporary urban conditions often center on the periphery of the city where an ever-increasing proportion of the urban population is forced to live. This article focuses on the banlieue-the periphery of Paris-as a model for the breakdown of the spatial order in cities globally. We examine how France's urban planning, guided by political and economic influences, has created and sustained banlieue poverty and marginalization. With rising anxieties about civil disorder in Paris resulting from the spatial inequities and cultural stigma toward the banlieue, it is now generally agreed that the city's historical planning policies have failed. We argue that any attempt to allocate space within a city equitably cannot emanate from the city center alone, but must also come from the marginalized periphery, which is equally a part of the system. I S Paris burning? Whether on the movie screen or in political history, this infamous question has never lost its charge.' The city still burns as tensions mount among factions of the urban populace, particularly between those within the city core and those on the periphery, or banlieue. The word banlieue is.the product of two French words: ban (to forbid) and lieue (league, or about four kilometers). The term refers to a belt of residential neighborhoods surrounding the city core. While "periphery" can refer to both rich and poor neighborhoods, banlieue has become a pejorative euphemism for neighborhoods with low-income housing projects, predominantly for immigrant families, that are characterized by widespread poverty, unemployment and violence. Historically, the city limits of Paris were marked by tax-collection barriers that only extended to its immediate margins.2 Therefore, policies and laws applied to those in the city core and the immediate periphery. Beyond this area lay the "zone," a barren stretch of land in which inhabitants were cut off from the

Purpose: Construction has always been a labour intensive industry, but the demographic changes, high-wage manpower and their shortage are the factors posing new challenges especially for the developed countries. This paper outlines the study for a construction project to meet the new challenges. The aim of the study and initial idea was to provide a construction solution for an urban environment while integrating certain design parameters, creating least disturbance to neighbours, applying modern construction engineering techniques and management to limit the structure erection time down to ten days. In most of the Japanese automated construction systems like Shimizu’s SMART and ABCS & Big Canopy of Obayashi, robotic trolleys/cranes are used for transportation and positioning of building elements. These systems have vertical material transportation/delivery systems for high rise buildings, but there is nothing significant for rapid construction if the buildings are longer horizontally. Method: Seven design parameters are analysed and available real world models are studied. These parameters are decentralized energy generation, in-situ farming, in-situ resource utilization, life-work integration, rapid construction, Ubiquitous-city design and on site & off site logistics. Although, it is found difficult to fully integrate these parameter in designing the building. An underground building construction is selected, and is emphasized to mainly integrate in-situ farming as one of the design criteria. Pre-fabricated customized elements, construction automation and robots are used to reduce the labour consumption and completion time. The past two decades have witnessed an intense/active search among researchers for suitable ways to introduce robotics into the construction field1. The future points to the application of IT to the construction robots for the overall processes of civil engineering work from the planning and design stages to the maintenance management2. Results & Discussion: As a result of study, the concept of a new construction robot is presented which performs horizontally. It will receive the stack of building elements from a suitable starting point and will move horizontally on the rails to reach at required location for placement. These rails are the structural members of the building as well. The proposed robot can be used for horizontal on-site logistics in combination with robotic cranes to expedite the construction progress. This will set a new paradigm of horizontal building construction in the future, but at the moment still there is plenty of room for improvement pertaining to robotics and automation.

Sustainable urban development requires a long-term sector-integrative approach. This paper proposes a method of system analysis and partial simulation for urban structures for this purpose. It couples a discussion-based holistic approach for systems analysis and modelling of urban structures with quantitative modelling and simulation of partial scenarios that serve to examine specific questions regarding the long-term development of urban structures. In the first part, the application in the City Lab Nuremberg West, a multidisciplinary urban research laboratory, serves to develop the methodology and its illustration. The main objective is to examine the transition of the existing underperforming quarter to a sustainable and livable urban environment. Scenario-based experiments with respect to development paths determine robustness and risks of different configurations. The second part of the paper describes the transfer of the methodology to education. The approach serves to teach students in the Energy-Efficient and Sustainable Building master course program an integrative way of planning a sustainable built environment. The definition of educational objectives concerning the students' understanding and management of systemic interdependencies of sustainability help assess the use of the method in the classroom. The aim is to provide them with the competence to develop strategies for complex situations while planning a sustainable built environment.

In this paper a glass façade system is proposed, which controls the energy flows within the transparent building envelope [1]. Yearly energy consumptions of an office space are calculated in Munich and Dubai [2]. The office space is calculated with a theoretical glazing share of 100% within the south-west oriented façade area. A standard solar-control glazing unit (SCGU) is adopted as benchmark for the fluid glass. Three fluid glass scenarios are considered: two with adjustable transparency (dyed) and one with constant properties of a clear fluid. One of the adjustable scenarios is simulated with white glass (low iron). The cooling demand is strongly connected to the g-value of the glass unit. Without coloring the fluid, the cooling demand with fluid glass is approximately 39% higher than with SCGU in Munich, and approximately 25% higher in Dubai. While colored fluid glass nearly halves the cooling demand compared to the SCGU. Colored fluid glass show an overall saving in the energy...

High-rise buildings with a large proportion of transparent areas, where conventional external overheating protection cannot be used due to the wind loads, are often problematic from an energetic and comfort point of view. In this paper a glass façade system is examined, which controls the energy flows within the transparent building envelope. Two fluid-filled layers are implemented in a glass façade. The inner fluid layer controls the inside surface temperature and thus the room temperature, while the outer, dyeable liquid layer controls the energy transmission by absorption of the solar radiation. The inside and outside fluid layers are thermally separated.

District heating networks are commonly addressed in the literature as one of the most effective solutions for decreasing the greenhouse gas emissions from the building sector. These systems require high investments which are returned through the heat sales. Due to the changed climate conditions and building renovation policies, heat demand in the future could decrease, prolonging the investment return period. The main scope of this paper is to assess the feasibility of using the heat demand-outdoor temperature function for heat demand forecast. The district of Alvalade, located in Lisbon (Portugal), was used as a case study. The district is consisted of 665 buildings that vary in both construction period and typology. Three weather scenarios (low, medium, high) and three district renovation scenarios were developed (shallow, intermediate, deep). To estimate the error, obtained heat demand values were compared with results from a dynamic heat demand model, previously developed and validated by the authors. The results showed that when only weather change is considered, the margin of error could be acceptable for some applications (the error in annual demand was lower than 20% for all weather scenarios considered). However, after introducing renovation scenarios, the error value increased up to 59.5% (depending on the weather and renovation scenarios combination considered). The value of slope coefficient increased on average within the range of 3.8% up to 8% per decade, that corresponds to the decrease in the number of heating hours of 22-139h during the heating season (depending on the combination of weather and renovation scenarios considered). On the other hand, function intercept increased for 7.8-12.7% per decade (depending on the coupled scenarios). The values suggested could be used to modify the function parameters for the scenarios considered, and improve the accuracy of heat demand estimations.

This paper introduces the work and application of the Modelica IBPSBuilding package which has been developed at TU München. The aim of the package is to simulate building energy performance, especially the thermal behaviour of buildings. Its application is focused on research and education in order to help applicationoriented researchers and students to understand the physical processes of a building performance simulation and gain persuassive simulation results. The package describes all basic processes including conduction, convection, radiation and ventilation, and it is validated with German VDI-Guidelines.

This article presents the results of the Urban Strategy Playground research group. Over the last 5 years, the focus of an interdisciplinary team of researchers was the conception, implementation and evaluation of a decision-support system for inner-city urban and architectural planning. The overall aim of past and ongoing research is to enable planners to validate and compare possible planning measures based on objective criteria. The Urban Strategy Playground software framework is an expandable toolbox that supports planners in developing strategies, evaluating them and visually preparing them for political decision-making processes and public participation. Examples of implemented tools are the simulation and monitoring of building codes, analysis of key density indicators and green space provision, simulation of shading, building energy and noise dispersion. For visualising the planning results, the framework provides interfaces for rapid prototyping of haptic models, as well as ...

Semantic 3D city models provide an essential basis for the visualization and communication of planning measures, e.g. of densification strategies in inner-city areas. Howe ver, it appears that the simulation of amendments in the building codes and their impact on the built environment cannot be modeled efficiently in common city model schemata. In the paper, a parametric 3d city model is pr esented, in which the building representations do not consist of static geometric objects, but also depict the generic geometric relationships, in terms of the semantic and geometric constraints of the modeling of different building typologies and their topological interdependencies. Based on the concept of Petri nets, the parametric 3d city model has been prototypically implemented and evaluated on the basis of inner-city planning tools.

Re-densification of inner-city areas is a highly topical socio-political issue. In order to meet the increasing demand for centrally located living space, the cities have to amend building laws. At present, there are no analytical means of directly comparing and assessing different strategies and measures aimed at identifying the potential for internal development in specific urban quarters and learning about the consequences for the citizens. In this publication, we describe an interactive digital tool that monitors the key building codes and visualizes their effects on the urban structure in real-time, so that this can serve as an informed basis for debate and argumentation in the political decision-making and planning process, consequently supporting the development of re-densification strategies that are well-suited to their urban context.

The paper describes the interdisciplinary course, Escaping Flatlands, focusing on improving communication between students, who were either from the field of architecture or media informatics and human-computer interaction. There were two underlying themes. The first, the integration and augmentation of digital media and haptic models, escaping the flatland of classic architectural media such as paper or screens. The second theme, expert-laymen communication in public participation, was addressed in the contextual theme and content of the course task, the communication between students of different fields, and the presentation of robust working prototypes at an architectural exhibition. Students, in groups of four, developed three interactive architectural models enhanced with digital content. The course resulted in a number of benefits to students, the chairs, and implications for research. It also led to further collabourations between the two universities involved, including cros...

1 www.lib.ar.tum.de 2 www.ai.ar.tum.de 1,2 {nils.seifert|michael.muehlhaus}@tum.de Re-densification of inner-city areas is a highly topical socio-political issue. In order to meet the increasing demand for centrally located living space, the cities have to amend building laws. At present, there are no analytical means of directly comparing and assessing different strategies and measures aimed at identifying the potential for internal development in specific urban quarters and learning about the consequences for the citizens. In this publication, we describe an interactive digital tool that monitors the key building codes and visualizes their effects on the urban structure in real-time, so that this can serve as an informed basis for debate and argumentation in the political decision-making and planning process, consequently supporting the development of re-densification strategies that are well-suited to their urban context.