The construction industry remains under immense pressure to reduce its material and climate related impacts. Increasing material demand and reduced building lifetimes have therefore motivated efforts for urban mining in buildings. Even though urban mining has been projected as a crucial measure for improving resource efficiency, its adoption as a practice in the construction industry remains at a very symbolic stage. Upscaling secondary resource recovery and reuse in the construction sector requires further efforts to understand urban mining feasibility from the perspective of project timelines, salvage time, skills and costs. Hence, this study develops an empirical research approach to measure urban mining feasibility and applies it to demolition-ready urban residential buildings stock in Singapore with semi-skilled construction workers. It develops indicators for urban mining feasibility based on planning stages, process change, behavioural practices and reuse-driven economic considerations. Based on urban mining of over 350 building components from 34 categories, results show an average of 1 to 12 min recovery time with an estimated urban mining cost from S$0.8 to S$9 per building component. Further, regulatory requirements for demolition permits can provide sufficient time for urban mining without affecting project timelines. Even though the mining skills of workers seem important, results highlights significant improvement in mining skills based on repeated salvage of specific building components. Results also provide robust evidence of reuse-driven urban mining feasibility in the case under study with significant prospects for embodied carbon savings. Overall, urban mining of buildings can contribute to net-zero targets and climate mitigation efforts with greater multi-stakeholder involvement and market push for reuse in the construction sector.
The research presented in this paper focusses on the concept of “Di-terial” which aims to merge digital design and fabrication technology with natural materials such as bamboo poles and raw timber. It proposes a digital workflow that uses sensing techniques to gain individual material information of natural, unprocessed construction resources and identify their individual strengths and characteristics and therefore its potential in load-carrying structures. This information is then used to develop bespoke designs and fabrication concepts, bridging the gap between unprocessed material and automated fabrication setups. Two case studies, developed to prove this concept, are described and compared. Both cases focused on the development of spatial structures using node-bar combinations of local resources.
AirMesh es la primera estructura arquitectónica del mundo hecha de componentes impresos en 3D en acero inoxidable, que demuestra las innovadoras tecnologías de diseño y fabricación digital desarrolladas por AirLab en la Universidad de Tecnología y Diseño de Singapur en Singapur. El pabellón ultraligero, situado en Gardens by the Bay, es a la vez un espacio de reunión y una escultura ligera.
According to the United Nations, approximately three out of every five cities in the world with at least 500,000 inhabitants are at high risk of a natural disaster. If no better work is done on mitigating and adapting cities, in the future they will be more populated, hotter, and less biodiverse. The environmental and climate crisis accentuates inequality, given that the most socially and economically vulnerable groups are more exposed to natural risks and generally have less access to infrastructure and ecosystem services. In Latin America and the Caribbean, the most vulnerable populations often reside in informal, precarious or popular settlements. In recent years, important advances have been made in rethinking these settlements, developing intervention strategies to improve the quality of life, safety and opportunities for their inhabitants. Today it is essential to effectively incorporate climate criteria into urban interventions. Ecological Design measures the impacts of the climate crisis in the most vulnerable areas of our cities - the informal city - while reflecting on how to protect those who are most strongly affected by the consequences of climate change. In addition, it provides new lenses to analyze risk and design nature-based solutions in precarious, informal, popular, vulnerable urban settlements, to make the informal city a more resilient city in the face of the climatic pressures that will come in the coming decades.
La falta de datos en las áreas informales de las ciudades es una gran limitación para la gestión de políticas públicas, afectando a todos los ámbitos de la gestión, desde la capacidad de hacer un buen diagnóstico de los problemas en la población más vulnerable, hasta la evaluación de la efectividad de los programas de desarrollo. Esta monografía aborda esta problemática con el objetivo de servir como un manual que ofrezca alternativas de diferentes metodologías de recolección de información en áreas informales a los gestores de políticas públicas. Esto incluye desde las metodologías más tradicionales (encuesta de hogar) a las más innovadoras pasando por fuentes secundarias. La monografía abordará las ventajas e inconvenientes de cada metodología y se proveerán ejemplos de aplicaciones reales en todo el mundo con el objetivo de orientar a los gestores de políticas públicas o investigadores en elegir la mejor metodología aplicada a su contexto especifico, mejorando así sus herramientas de gestión. La primera parte de la monografía discutirá distintas metodologías de levantamiento de información. La segunda parte realizará una valoración del estado de la información en la región (LAC). Por último, se discutirá distintas metodologías de levantamiento de información y se recogerá casos a lo largo de todo el mundo de la aplicación de distintas metodologías.
Homelessness—the state of having no home—is a growing global problem that requires local discussions and solutions. In the face of the coronavirus pandemic, it has noticeably become a collective concern. However, in recent years, the official political discourse in many countries around the world implies that poverty is a personal fault, and that if people experience homelessness, it is because they have not tried hard enough to secure shelter and livelihood. Although architecture alone cannot solve the problem of homelessness, the question arises: What and which roles can it play? Or, to be more precise, how can architecture collaborate with other disciplines in developing ways to permanently house those who do not have a home? Who’s Next?
Arquitecto de la Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, 1972. Fundador de Teodoro Fernández Arquitectos, oficina que, desde 1992, desarrolla edificios como la Biblioteca Lo Contador, la Capilla del campus San Joaquín, la Facultad de Comunicaciones, la Facultad de Teología y la Biblioteca de Derecho de la Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, junto a edificios públicos como el MOP de La Serena, la sede central de la ONEMI y el Edificio Moneda Bicentenario en Santiago, entre otros.
