Real estate | EPFL Graph Search

Real estate is property consisting of land and the buildings on it, along with its natural resources such as growing crops (eg. timber), minerals or water, and wild animals; immovable property of this nature; an interest vested in this (also) an item of real property, (more generally) buildings or housing in general. In terms of law, real is in relation to land property and is different from personal property while estate means the "interest" a person has in that land property. Real estate is different from personal property, which is not permanently attached to the land (or comes with the land), such as vehicles, boats, jewelry, furniture, tools, and the rolling stock of a farm and farm animals. In the United States, the transfer, owning, or acquisition of real estate can be through business corporations, individuals, nonprofit corporations, fiduciaries, or any legal entity as seen within the law of each U.S. state. History of real estate The natural rig

Du savetier au financier: la famille Borel, de Neuchâtel à San Francisco

The Borel Family From Neuchâtel to San Francisco : From shoemaker to banker Did you know that the Cable Car was owned by Swiss citizens? BACKTRACKING : PRIVATE FINANCING OF PUBLIC METROPOLITAN INFRASTRUCTURES Executive Summary: Did you know that one of San Francisco most famous fixtures, the Cable car, was owned by Swiss citizens? Through this detailed study of the Borel family, and its business and investment plans we will observe an example of private financing of public metropolitan infrastructures in the 19th Century and see if it can teach us lessons for tomorrow’s needs? TOPICS Looking at today’s infrastructures, one does not always remember how much work contracting firms had to accomplish in order to produce our contemporary standard of urban comfort . What is to be said of yesterday’s planners or engineers and the credit they deserve? We often hear stories of local events brought to epic proportions, but who are the responsible players who really proved the feasibility of regional infrastructures? Who actually did support, sponsor or finance such achievements? The present study is a trial to propose a new view over such apparently hidden business phenomenons. This research shows us an inspiring case-study of local entrepreneurs who gather key success-factors. The author concentrates on the economic aspect of infrastructure financing to which modern metropolitan society owes its specific urban growth. Contemporary challenges such as job creation, globalisation, technology transfer and local economic development are all interconnected to metropolitan development. XIXTH CENTURY METROPOLITAN INFRASTRUCTURES FINANCING Le Temps, 30th July 1998, D. Masmejan : «Alfred Borel, Auguste’s elder son, enters the finance world. He meets an extraordinary businessman fate. His understanding of the economic impact of the Californian Gold Rush allows him to seize the opportunity of the westward American expansionism. He sails to San Francisco in 1855 where he is the founder of the «Alfred Borel & Company», followed in 1856 by a Mortgage fund (the “Caisse Hypothécaire” bank). The same year sees the foundation of Credit Suisse in Zurich. Alfred Borel investment bank participates in very important infrastructure projects in California and elsewhere in the second half of the XIXth century. At first, its investment into the worldwide famous San Francisco Cable Car is marginal and then becomes overwhelming. Other investments include the “Los Angeles Railway Company” or the “United Railroad Company”, the San Francisco Waterworks, other banks and real estate.» DETAILED RESEARCH ALLOWING TO UNDERSTAND FINANCIAL DECISION MAKING The author reviews financial decision-making through personal correspondence and private accounting in some of those completely documented yearly archives. The «sixth Switzerland» well-connected to the Presbyterian «Huguenot International» cosmopolitan network leads us to detailed research and discoveries. The accounting of 1866 to 1884 goes through the 3rd and 4th San Francisco City real estate crises that the mortgage bankers Borel brothers had to endure. Alfred Borel faced the 2nd Californian real estate crisis (which resulted from the first loss of public interest in gold mines in the years 1854-1858). Then he went back to Switzerland after the death of his father and uncles in order to reconstitute the Swiss end of the pipe connecting his bank’s investors to the Borel family network. He left duty of the day-to-day San Francisco business to his younger brother Antoine after having set up asset management rules. Together both brothers explored new ways of diversifying the investment of the funds they are managing and place them into infrastructures networks. Taking shares «upstream» into equipment industries (for instance the wire works delivering the precise traction rope of cable cars) or other real estate assets, allowed them to guarantee superior interests payments to European investors or creditors in comparison with other financial markets. This anticyclical economic strategy set up their financial success that occurred during the 5th local economic recession, which coincides with the beginning of the big worldwide Victorian economic crisis (1880-1895). UNIQUE SPECIFICITY OF THIS RESEARCH This research process is rarely accomplished in engineering and architecture schools, construction and infrastructures institutes or research centers. The integrity of construction professionals precludes their questioning « where does the whole process originate from?». Builders ultimately considered themselves as «honest craftsmen» that have to dedicate their energy and resources to the proper technical execution of the clients wishes and orders. Customers duty is then to write the project’s specifications and thus to initiate its process. The author of this case-study demonstrates the feasibility of comparisons between similar structural change periods in the XIXth century and the years 1990-2000. Hence, a new theme of interdisciplinary studies for engineers could be implemented by promoting this systemic approach between urban infrastructure financiers, suppliers and users. Last but not least, the insider observations and outsider revelations which are featured in this work are seldom considered in an engineering historical approach. It is not often that an author with a contemporary outsider vision has access to family archives that entirely document bicentennial confidential banker correspondence.

EPFL1999

Médiathèque pour une cité en régénération (Dublin, Irlande)

Soizic Micol, Mélanie Monks

Ballymun is a satellite city developed in the 1960's as a high-rise Utopia upon green fields in the outskirts of North Dublin. This city for 15'000 people unfortunately turned out to lack the programmatic infrastructure to support a self-contained community and as a result rapidly encountered social and economical problems. In 1994 city authorities decided to demolish the estate and rebuild in its place a new low-rise housing city deserved by a dense commercial Main Street. In ten years most of the former green fields were filled with a series of housing developments. Today the old estate blocks are being demolished and a new void is appearing. The project inserts itself in this new void and proposes a series of green links in the form of two large and mirrored C's along the trace of the old buildings. These permeate from the Main Street to the neighborhoods and offer a spine onto which programs can branch themselves in a spread out manner. To counter the disjoint created by the Main Street, the green links are connected by an urban garden at the level of the existing plaza and planned Metro station. This urban garden is programmed as a multimedia library so as to address the need for community and education facilities at the heart of Ballymun.

2008

Reinforcement Learning for proactive operation of residential energy systems by learning stochastic occupant behavior and fluctuating solar energy: Balancing comfort, hygiene and energy use

Amirreza Heidari, Dolaana Khovalyg, François Maréchal

When it comes to residential buildings, there are several stochastic parameters, such as renewable energy production, outdoor air conditions, and occupants’ behavior, that are hard to model and predict accurately, with some being unique in each specific building. This increases the complexity of developing a generalizable optimal control method that can be transferred to different buildings. Rather than hard-programming human knowledge into the controller (in terms of rules or models), a learning ability can be provided to the controller such that over the time it can learn by itself how to maintain an optimal operation in each specific building. This research proposes a model-free control framework based on Reinforcement Learning that takes into account the stochastic hot water use behavior of occupants, solar power generation, and weather conditions, and learns how to make a balance between the energy use, occupant comfort and water hygiene in a solar-assisted space heating and hot water production system. A stochastic-based offline training procedure is proposed to give a prior experience to the agent in a safe simulation environment, and further ensure occupants comfort and health when the algorithm starts online learning on the real house. To make a realistic assessment without interrupting the occupants, weather conditions and hot water use behavior are experimentally monitored in three case studies in different regions of Switzerland, and the collected data are used in simulations to evaluate the proposed control framework against two rule-based methods. Results indicate that the proposed framework could achieve an energy saving from 7% to 60%, mainly by adapting to solar power generation, without violating comfort or compromising the health of occupants.

2022

Du savetier au financier: la famille Borel, de Neuchâtel à San Francisco

EPFL1999

Reinforcement Learning for proactive operation of residential energy systems by learning stochastic occupant behavior and fluctuating solar energy: Balancing comfort, hygiene and energy use

Amirreza Heidari, Dolaana Khovalyg, François Maréchal

2022