Building | EPFL Graph Search

A building or edifice is an enclosed structure with a roof and walls, usually standing permanently in one place, such as a house or factory. Buildings come in a variety of sizes, shapes, and functions, and have been adapted throughout history for numerous factors, from building materials available, to weather conditions, land prices, ground conditions, specific uses, prestige, and aesthetic reasons. To better understand the concept, see Nonbuilding structure for contrast. Buildings serve several societal needs – occupancy, primarily as shelter from weather, security, living space, privacy, to store belongings, and to comfortably live and work. A building as a shelter represents a physical separation of the (a place of comfort and safety) from the outside (a place that may be harsh and harmful at times). Ever since the first cave paintings, buildings have been objects or canvasses of much artistic expression. In recent years, interest

Active House: new buildings for sustainable architecture

Arianna Brambilla

Buildings consume more than 40% of all the energy we use, and about 50% of it is used for the conditioning systems, for this reason it is important to work on the energy demand, improving the buildings behaviour, in order to save the environment of the future. And sustainability is the keyword. Light constructions, based on the structure/envelope model, where all the envelope's depth is filled with insulation, are the first step to a sustainable architecture. Active House Alliance is a non-profit organization supported and managed by a group of Alliance Partner working on the same vision: the natural step forward for the sustainability, the innovation in the answer of the buildings to the climate stress. The concept of the active house is based on a responsive (active) behaviour of the building, that it is no more an inertial shell but it is capable to answer instantly to the thermal strains, assuring the indoor comfort and saving energy. What makes that possible is the coupling of an innovative envelope, seen as a changeable membrane (due to the external conditions), with a management's automation system. An active house can change its configuration to meet the users need: for example opening the windows or shadowing it, activating the artificial ventilation or enhancing the natural one. The aim of the alliance is to understand the principles of the active buildings and spread the knowledge to a larger public; Politecnico di Milano, as member, investigates the energetic issues for the warm regions of Europe, while the other partners are more focalized on the cold climate regions. The idea of active has a double vision: active is the building behaviour, thanks to its physical features and to the management system, but active is also the skin of the house, thanks to the innovative materials used. The aim of the research is to understand the characteristics that make a building capable to answer itself to the thermal strains, but also how innovative nanomaterials, such as phase change materials and aerogel, could affect the performances. This innovation, especially the coupling of phase pcm to the envelope, thanks to their cyclical capability of taking heat from the room and give it back later, summarize and materialize the possibility of having an active envelope that could assure indoor comfort minimizing the energy request.

2013

First assessment on the principles for building a mediterranean Active House

Arianna Brambilla

Innovation of the energy saving and optimization of the renewable sources are the most important sides of the building sector in the last years. Considering that buildings consume more than 40% of all the energy we use and about 50% of it is used for the conditioning systems, it is clear the reason why there is a precise need of improvement in the building behaviour and in the way of designing. In the last years the buildings vision itself is changing faster, from the passive house principles we are moving to the zero energy buildings or the latest active houses. Active House is a vision of buildings that create healthier and more comfortable lives for their occupants without impacting negatively on the climate. The concept is based on a responsive behaviour of the building, capable to answer instantly to the climate strains changing automatically its configurations and assuring the indoor comfort and energy saving, and it is promoting by an international no-profit organization, the Active House Alliance. This vision was born in the North European regions and it is moulded on some case studies, model homes built to spread the image of the future houses and designed for northern climate, so it fits perfectly cold climate. Politecnico di Milano, as member of the Alliance, is developing a solution for the adaptation to the south Europe, where the climate and the weather stress are different. VELUXlab is the first prototype of this vision in Italy. It is the first Italian NZEB in a university campus and, soon, it will be certified also as the first Italian Active House. The wireless sensor network system allows to control in real time the duo envelope (multi-layer dry construction) and automation technology performances, strengthening the good results obtained from the virtual dynamic simulations made during the design process.

2014

Seismic Vulnerability Assessment at Large Scale – City of Geneva

Babak Haftgoli Bakhtiari

In order to evaluate the seismic vulnerability at large scale, it is necessary to gain awareness of the soil properties, types of materials used in the construction of buildings during different periods, the construction standards of each period, different techniques of construction, the epicentre of the earthquake, etc. An ideal evaluation would take into account all the mentioned variables above; however, in this study only the building typologies are considered (Classification according to EMS-98). More precisely, the typologies are identified for a small data set manually. Each building possesses four attributes such as: 1) construction period, 2) number of floors, 3) surface of the building, and 4) Roof shape. In order to obtain the attributes above, data sets from Statistic Federal Office (OFS) and territorial information system in Geneva (SITG) were acquired. In addition, these data which embodied many imprecisions as well as irregularities were examined and treated. Furthermore, machine learning techniques are applied and will result in the acquisition of the building typologies for the whole city of Geneva. These machine learning methods are trained on a learning set collected manually, and then applied to the testing set which corresponds to the whole attribute combinations of Geneva. All in the interest of obtaining the corresponding typologies.

2020

Active House: new buildings for sustainable architecture

Arianna Brambilla

2013