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We conducted aerial fixed wing ultra low volume (ULV) spray trials with naled to investigate penetration of exposed and simulated cryptic habitat within opened buildings, partially sealed buildings, and outdoor locations targeting sentinel adult Aedes aegypti mosquitoes in north central Florida. Mortality was observed in open and closed buildings and outdoors, even in mosquitoes placed in cryptic habitats. Observations on the impact of building type, mosquito exposure method such as placement in cryptic habitat, and spray nozzle size on mosquito mortality are described and analyzed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A full-scale experimental series is undertaken to generate a comprehensive data set to study and characterise fires in large open-plan spaces, typical of contemporary infrastructure and Tall Buildings in particular. Developments in the understanding of enclosure fire dynamics for large spaces is intended to complement the knowledge of relatively smaller, low ventilation spaces developed from the extensive body of research that underpins the original compartment fire framework . A total of twelve experiments are conducted, ten using box gas burners and two using a bed of wood cribs. Both the fire development and ventilation characteristics are varied systematically to enable the careful examination of the effect of each on the fire dynamics within the compartment. For this set of tests, sensor instrumentation is, as far as practicable, provided at a resolution to enable benchmarking of field models. These tests form part of the Real Fires for the Safe Design of Tall Buildings Project. The current paper, the first in a series of publications, provides a thorough description of the full-scale experimental compartment, the various sensing techniques deployed within it, and the range of combined fire and ventilation conditions for each of the twelve tests performed. Characteristic results from the first experiment that forms part of the ‘Edinburgh Tall Building Fire Tests’ (ETFT) test series are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] We investigate Green Star buildings in Brisbane, all are open plan. [•] We collect 493 surveys tailored to assess discomfort glare in these spaces. [•] Physical luminance measurements are acquired using high dynamic range images. [•] A new modified index, the Unified Glare Probability, was created. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Membrankonstruktionen werden in der modernen Architektur zunehmend als Dach- und Fassadenkonstruktion eingesetzt. Besonders ETFE-Folien (Ethylen-Tetrafluorethylen) eignen sich aufgrund ihrer hohen Transparenz und ihres geringen Gewichts als Substitut für Glas, wenn es darum geht, große Flächen freitragend und transparent zu überspannen. Gerade in jüngerer Zeit werden durch prestigeträchtige Bauten, wie die Allianz-Arena in München (Bild 1), Membranen auch in der Öffentlichkeit vermehrt als eigenständiger Baustoff wahrgenommen, mit dem sich vollständige Gebäudefassaden realisieren lassen. Neben offenen Anlagen, wie Fußball-Arenen, werden aber auch zunehmend geschlossene Gebäude mit Membrankissen-Hüllen realisiert. Ein bekanntes Beispiel dafür ist der sogenannte 'Water Cube' - das National Aquatics Center in Peking, das anlässlich der Olympischen Spiele 2008 errichtet wurde. Der steigende Markterfolg ist vor allem dem neuartigen und optisch ansprechenden Charakter sowie dem geringen Gewicht solcher Konstruktionen zuzuschreiben. Bei allen Vorteilen, die der konstruktive Membranbau mit transparenten Folienkissen bietet, sind noch zahlreiche bauphysikalische Fragen ungeklärt. Insbesondere für eine fundierte und gesicherte wärmetechnische Beurteilung fehlen bislang angepasste Bemessungsverfahren und normative Festlegungen, die den Besonderheiten von Membrankonstruktionen Rechnung tragen. Für die geforderten Nachweise werden deshalb meist Prüfverfahren und Vorschriften aus anderen Baubereichen herangezogen, die oft nicht oder nicht ausreichend dafür geeignet sind. Thermo-technical characteristics of membrane cushion constructions Membrane structures are increasingly used in modern architecture as a roof and facade construction. Especially ETFE foils (ethylene-tetrafluoroethylene) are suitable as a substitute for glass to span large areas due to their high transparency and low weight. Particularly in recent times, due to prestigious buildings, such as the Allianz-Arena in Munich (Fig. 1), membranes are increasingly perceived as a separate building material to realize full building facades. Apart from open buildings, such as football stadiums, more and more closed buildings are realized with membrane cushion covers. A well-known example is the so-called 'Water Cube' - the National Aquatics Center in Peking, which was built for the 2008 Olympic Games. The increasing market success can be attributed mainly to the novel and visually appealing character and the light weight of such constructions. In spite of all the benefits that such membrane constructions provides, numerous building physical questions remain still unanswered. Especially for a basic and reliable heat-technical assessment adapted design methods and standards are missing, which take the specific characteristics of membrane structures into account. For required proof tests therefore procedures and standards are used from other construction areas, which are often not suitable or not sufficient for it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Close inspection of accidental fires in large, open-plan compartments reveals that they do not burn simultaneously throughout the whole enclosure. Instead, these fires tend to move across floor plates as flames spread, burning over a limited area at any one time. These fires have been labelled travelling fires. Current structural fire design methods do not account for these types of fires. Despite these observations, fire scenarios most commonly used for the structural design of modern buildings are based on traditional methods that assume uniform burning and homogenous temperature conditions throughout a compartment, regardless of its size. This paper is Part II of a two part article and gives details of a new design methodology using travelling fires to produce more realistic fire scenarios in large, open-plan compartments than the conventional methods that assume uniform burning. The methodology considers a range of possible fire sizes and is aimed at producing results consistent with the requirements of structural fire analysis. The methodology is applied to a case study of a generic concrete frame by means of heat transfer calculations to infer structural performance. It is found that fires that are around 10% of the floor area are the most onerous for the structure, producing rebar temperatures equivalent to those reached from exposure to 106min of the standard fire and approximately 200°C hotter than that calculated using the Eurocode 1 parametric temperature–time curve. A detailed sensitivity analysis is presented, concluding that the most sensitive input parameters are related to the building design and its use and not the physical assumptions or numerical implementation of the method. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Close inspection of accidental fires in large, open-plan compartments reveals that they do not burn simultaneously throughout the whole enclosure. Instead, these fires tend to move across floor plates as flames spread, burning over a limited area at any one time. These fires have been labelled travelling fires. Current structural fire design methods do not account for these types of fires. Despite these observations, fire scenarios most commonly used for the structural design of modern buildings are based on traditional methods that assume uniform burning and homogenous temperature conditions throughout a compartment, regardless of its size. This paper is Part I of a two part article and is a literature review of the research on the new topic of travelling fires. A brief background to the traditional methods that assume uniform fires is given along with critiques of that assumption, such as the observation of heterogeneity among compartment temperatures and the travelling nature of fires in both accidental events and controlled tests. The research in travelling fires is reviewed, highlighting the pioneering work in the field to date, and compared to the state of the art. The main challenge in developing tools for incorporating travelling fires into design is the lack of large scale test data. Nonetheless, significant progress in the field has been made and two methodologies using travelling fires to characterise the thermal environment for structural analysis have recently been developed. The research in quantifying the structural response to travelling fires is also reviewed, demonstrating the benefit of collaboration between fire engineers and structural fire engineers. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

La arquitectura como arte dentro de la ciencia ha evolucionado a medida que Io ha hecho tecnología de la construcción. La morfología de edificios singulares, en los últimos veinte años, se asocia inexorablemente al uso de un determinado software de diseño arquitectónico dentro de la tecnología digital, Io que ha abierto un tema de reflexión y debate muy importante. Es necesario analizar y cuestionar a cerca de los nuevos espacios que comienzan a gestarse desde la inteligencia artificial del ordenador que están transformando la arquitectura. Este artículo pretende aportar una serie de reflexiones a esta cuestión y abrir un debate necesario. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hospitals are never finished, and in the best cases they retain value and coherence for decades while they adjust in response to the dynamics of the healthcare field. In the worst cases, the facility is demolished, incapable of accommodating cycles of change. These are well known but poorly documented realities. Today, it is not unusual for one architect to design a hospital and another to design the interior fit-out, either initially or years later. Some clients ask for "shell space" to be fitted out later by another firm. Architects educated to define function first and to maintain unified control find this unsettling, believing that only if one party controls everything can high-quality architecture result. This is not the case, as diverse buildings, cities, and neighborhoods show, but the belief dies hard. In fact, the educational paradigm in schools of architecture largely maintains the old myths. This article describes this reality and poses questions about habit and method that are now at odds with reality. Finally, the paper suggests a way to handle new realities in the education of the next generation of architects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Electric lighting consumes 19% of total electricity production worldwide. Open-plan offices constitute the majority of office stock, in which most office workers perform their daily tasks, and hence the lighting in those offices has significant impact on, not only energy usage, but also occupants’ productivity. This paper presents a unique lighting optimization approach for open-plan offices that is capable of tuning task lighting to each occupant''s preference in the most energy-efficient fashion. Exploiting individual controllability of the advanced networked lighting systems, each luminaire can be dynamically actuated at a different level to realize various lighting configurations without any physical rewiring. This research formulates lighting actuation into a linear programming problem and finds the optimal light outputs for each of the luminaires that collaboratively deliver specified lighting to each workstation while using the least amount of energy. Simulations using our lighting optimization approach have shown its versatility in providing proper workstation-specific task lighting under different requirements compared to business-as-usual practices. Energy savings are generated from tuning the light levels to occupants’ needs as well as keeping unoccupied areas unlit or minimally lit with this approach. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper describes a large-scale wireless and wired environmental sensor network test-bed and its application to occupancy detection in an open-plan office building. Detection of occupant presence has been used extensively in built environments for applications such as demand-controlled ventilation and security; however, the ability to discern the actual number of people in a room is beyond the scope of current sensing techniques. To address this problem, a complex sensor network is deployed in the Robert L. Preger Intelligent Workplace comprising a wireless ambient-sensing system, a wired carbon dioxide sensing system, and a wired indoor air quality sensing system. A wired camera network is implemented as well for establishing true occupancy levels to be used as ground truth information for deriving algorithmic relationships with the environment conditions. To our knowledge, this extensive and diverse ambient-sensing infrastructure of the ITEST setup as well as the continuous data-collection capability is unprecedented. Final results indicate that there are significant correlations between measured environmental conditions and occupancy status. An average of 73% accuracy on the occupancy number detection was achieved by Hidden Markov Models during testing periods. This paper serves as an exploration to the research of ITEST for occupancy detection in offices. In addition, its utility extends to a wide variety of other building technology research areas such as human-centered environmental control, security, energy efficient and sustainable green buildings. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The vast majority of buildings being constructed in Hong Kong today are massive 40+-storey high-rise residential building towers housing hundreds of families. Immense resources – land, material, time, labour, money, energy – have been invested in their realization. However, almost all of these buildings, including those currently under construction and on the drawing boards, are not designed with adaptability and flexibility as a design intention and will cause major problems in the future: their lack of capacity for re-activation means that their only fate is demolition, thereby consuming even more resources, producing more waste, and causing more disruption to the environment. Unless we change our mind-set in mass housing design, today''s designs will inevitably become tomorrow''s problems. This paper studies the scenario design requirements and critical dimensions of use-territories in public mass housing in Hong Kong in view of extracting useful patterns for use in future designs. Case studies of popular residential layouts currently used in Hong Kong will be used to illustrate the kind of problems the majority of the existing residential building stock will face when the need for renewal and upgrade arises. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Continuous noise is played in many open-plan offices to partially mask ambient sounds, in particular background speech. With this, the detrimental impact of background sounds on cognitive performance is intended to be reduced as well as subjectively perceived disturbance. Our experiments explored whether background music can achieve the same effects. Besides collecting subjective rating data, we tested cognitive performance using verbal serial recall. This is the standard task for exploring verbal short-term memory, which is central to human information processing. Either staccato music, legato music or continuous noise was superimposed on office noise. In Experiment 1 (N = 30), only continuous noise reduced the detrimental impact of office noise significantly. Legato music did not qualify in this respect although it did not diminish cognitive performance when presented in isolation in Experiment 2 (N = 20). Subjective ratings in both experiments revealed that most participants would prefer legato music to continuous noise in office environments. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Open plan living spaces have become ubiquitous in Australian housing today. These spaces gained popularity during the 1950s and 1960s, yet the reasons behind their enthusiastic adoption by many post-war families have remained under-explored. A determining factor in the introduction and acceptance of open plan living may be traced to dominant cultural ideas about the family and the role of the child, which not only allowed these architectural shifts but demanded them. This article considers how house design was influenced by the prevailing understandings of childrearing following the Second World War through the examination of 1950s South Australian architect designed house plans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This prospective research study was conducted at a government office which moved from an open-plan office with somewhat enclosed workspaces to another open-plan office with open work- spaces. The study at the old office was conducted almost one year before the move, and the study at the new office was conducted more than one year after the move. The purpose of this study was threefold: (1) to measure and evaluate changes in patterns of accessibility and visibility due to changes in office layout, (2) to understand the effects of layout changes on observed behaviors, and (3) to determine the effects of layout changes on environmental perception. The study included the analysis of visibility and accessibility of each layout using space syntax techniques, field observations of behaviors, and questionnaire surveys of employees' perceptions of privacy, job satisfaction, and commitment to the organization. During field observations, movement, visible copresence (ie the number of people visible from a space), and face-to-face interaction were observed along a predefined route in each office. Thirty-five people responded to the questionnaire survey at the old office. Out of the thirty five, only twenty nine were available for survey at the new office. On the basis of the questionnaire survey data, three multi-item scales were constructed in order to measure perceived privacy, job satisfaction, and commitment to organization. Results indicate better visibility and accessibility, increased face-to-face interaction, and improved perceived privacy at the new office. Results also show consistent effects of space on movement, and significant positive correlations between perceived privacy, job satisfaction, and commitment to the organization at these locations, despite significant design differences. Implications of the research results and limitations of the research design are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study reports quantity and quality of daylight delivered by tubular daylight guidance systems in large open plan offices. The daylight contribution was of the order of 25% of total design workstation illuminance giving daylight penetration factors of between 0.5% and 1.3%. User views suggest that tubular daylight guidance systems were inferior to windows in delivery of both quantity and quality of daylight although satisfaction with some aspects improves with increased daylight penetration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Open-plan living areas are one of the defining features of contemporary suburban architecture in spatially expansive nations like Australia, the United States, and Canada. In these contexts, the European and modernist meanings of 'open plan' are joined by relations between parents and children and identities associated with motherhood and homemaking. Using a feminist and material-culture analysis of the practices of living open plan in this distinctive historical and geographical context, this paper offers a different interpretation of the social significance of the open-planned domestic interior. Drawing on research conducted with residents of new, open-planned houses on the outskirts of Sydney and, in particular, mothers' narratives of the materialities of their home and the place of children and open plan within it, I show how open plan is held together, as a material and imaginative space, by a balancing of aesthetic considerations and the materiality and anxieties produced by children. The processes of living open plan entailed accommodating family ideals and practices to suit the house and/or altering the house to suit the family: banishing children from open-plan areas to maintain their simplicity; embracing children's presence; placing furniture to enclose it; knocking out walls to open it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents results of a combined experimental and analytical approach to investigate modal properties of a lively open-plan office floor. It is based on state-of-the-art finite-element (FE) modeling, FRF-based shaker modal testing, FE model correlation, manual model tuning, and sensitivity-based automatic model updating of a detailed FE model of this composite floor structure. The floor studied accommodates a fully furnished office. Such environments can be problematic regarding their vibration serviceability. However, there is a lack of reliable information about their as-built modal properties and the ability of designers to predict them. Therefore this paper has two aims: (1) to assess the ability to both predict and measure as accurately as possible the fundamental and higher modes of floor vibration, and (2) to correlate and update the initially developed FE model of the floor, so that its modes match as accurately as possible their measured counterparts. It was found that even a very detailed FE model, the development of which was based on best engineering judgment, missed the natural frequencies by 10–15% in some of the first four modes of vibration which possibly could be excited by walking. The key reasons for this were both over- and underestimation of the stiffness of the main composite beams, depending on the beam location. This was probably caused by uncertainties due to visible cracking of the lightweight concrete in the zone above the beams, effects of nonstructural elements, such as false flooring, and the inevitable uneven distribution of mass and stiffness in the real-life floor in operation. All of these factors are difficult to model explicitly in the floor, so their aggregate effect was taken into account via changes in the beam stiffness. This was found by performing a sensitivity-based FE model updating in which the first four vertical bending modes of the floor were successfully updated. Such updating was possible only after all perimeter walls were explicitly modeled. The obtained updated properties are by no means a unique solution which minimizes the difference between natural frequencies and maximizes the MAC values between the experimental and analytical mode shapes. Rather, it is a reasonable set of modeling parameters which quantifies the possible uncertainty when specifying FE modeling parameters for an open-plan floor structure like the one described in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three air temperatures (22/26/30°C) and two acoustic conditions—quiet (35 dBA) or open-plan office noise (55 dBA)—were established in an office. Thirty subjects aged 18–29 years (16 male), clothed for thermal neutrality at 22°C, performed simulated office work for 3 h under all six conditions. Many more (68% vs. 4%) were dissatisfied with noise in the noise condition (P < 0.01). Warmth decreased thermal acceptability (P < 0.001) and perceived air quality (P < 0.01) and increased odour intensity (P < 0.05) and stuffiness (P < 0.01). After 2 h, some forehead sweating was observed on 4, 36 and 76% of subjects (P < 0.001) at 22, 26 and 30°C, while 0, 21 and 65% felt“warm” (P < 0.001). Raised temperature increased eye, nose and throat irritation (P < 0.05), headache intensity (P < 0.05), difficulty in thinking clearly (P < 0.01) and concentrating (P < 0.01), and decreased self-estimated performance (P < 0.001). Noise increased fatigue (P < 0.05) and difficulty in concentrating (P < 0.05) but did not interact with thermal effects on subjective perception. In an addition task, noise decreased workrate by 3% (P < 0.05), subjects who felt warm made 56% more errors (P < 0.05) and there was a noise–temperature interaction (P < 0.01): the effect of warmth on errors was less in the noise condition. Typing speed (P < 0.05) and reading speed (P < 0.05) were higher in noise. This paper demonstrates that open office noise distraction, even at the realistic level of 55 dBA, increases fatigue and has many negative effects on the performance of office work, as does a moderately warm air temperature. These findings may be used to provide economic justification for the provision of private offices and air temperature control in hot weather. The additional finding that noise distraction and heat stress can sometimes counteract each other in the short term is of academic interest only, as they both increase subjective distress and fatigue. In practice, neither should be deliberately introduced to counteract the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the merits and benefits of open buildings, edifices with the in-built capacity to adapt over time to changing uses and preferences. Perception that real estate decisions will represent sustainable investment and sustainable architecture when buildings are constructed for both present requirements and future change.

Top management at Nutrientes Venezolanos considered moving the company’s offices as an opportunity to reduce investment in fixed assets and redesign the new offices in accord with the concept of open space. But this implied relocating staff in a smaller area. Moreover, the idea of working in an open space became a source of concern for some staff. Positive and negative outcomes of the decision had to be assessed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]