This edited collection provides an up-to-date account, by a group of well-informed and globally positioned authors, of recently implemented projects, public policies and business activities in Open Building around the world. Countless residential Open Building projects have been built in a number of countries, some without knowledge of the original theory and methods. These projects differ in architectural style, building industry methods, economic system and social aims. National building standards and guidelines have been promulgated in several countries (Finland, China, Japan, Korea), providing incentives and guidance to Open Building implementation. Businesses in several countries have begun to deliver advanced FIT-OUT systems both for new construction and for retrofitting existing buildings, demonstrating the economic advantages of ‘the responsive, independent dwelling.’ This book also argues that the ‘open building’ approach is essential for the reactivation of the existing building stock for long-term value, because in the end it costs less. The book discusses these developments in residential architecture from the perspective of an infrastructure model of built environment. This model enables decision-makers to manage risk and uncertainty, while avoiding a number of problems often associated with large, fast-moving projects, such as separation and distribution of design tasks (and responsibility) and the ensuing boundary frictions. Residential Architecture as Infrastructure adds to the Routledge Open Building Series, and will appeal to architects, urban designers, researchers and policy-makers interested in this international review of current projects, policies and business activities focused on Open Building implementation.

As one of the worlds megacities, São Paulo has for decades seen an investment in architectural infrastructures that attempt to mitigate its open space shortages as well as fulfill the constant need for recreational, cultural, and sports programs. These buildings and open spaces - which can be public, semi-public, or privately-owned - arguably attempt to create inclusive places for urban society. This exhibition catalogue presents projects at different scales, focusing on their programmatic characteristics rather than the formal qualities usually emphasized in scholarship on Brazilian architecture. While many cities around the world are still chasing the so-called "Bilbao Effect" - the creation of a monofunctional "signature" architectural work by a famous architect that can attract tourism - this exhibition catalogue advocates for architectural infrastructure that adds programs of different natures, and that are aimed at social sustainability for local citizens. This aspect of urban growth in São Paulo - quite a vertical and densely-populated city; a city of great resources and also tremendous poverty; a city with high crime rates; a city with severe traffic issues; a city with public-health problems - illustrates how architecture and infrastructure can contribute to a city's urban development in multiple ways.

Our cities are constantly changing. The last 100 years in particular have seen radical conversions, extensions and the development of residual areas in inner cities which have significantly changed urban panoramas. Urban infrastructures play a pivotal role in conversion processes. These include transport routes, supply and disposal services, communication networks and the like, making a modern functioning city possible. In the publication Infrastructure as Architecture, acclaimed authors and planners show why architects' participation in the design of future urban infrastructures is vital. Theoretical contributions from the fields of economics, ecology, culture, politics, and land use planning investigate the issue from different perspectives. Practical examples and designs provide readers with an exciting glimpse of the future of our cities.

Duplex Architects exemplify innovative housing design in Switzerland and what it can contribute to urban development. Duplex Architects was founded in 2007 in Zurich and now also run offices in Düsseldorf, Hamburg, and, most recently, in Paris. They have gained an excellent reputation internationally for their designs of various scales and across a vast range of typologies. This first monograph on Duplex Architects' work offers a close look at their approach to housing design. Five projects in Switzerland are documented extensively through a wealth of images, plans, and visualizations, exemplifying the firm's position on urban planning, typology research, and materiality and demonstrating their utterly independent way of working. Urban scale, search for new forms of communal living, the importance of community, and a collaborative design process are at the core of Duplex Architects' explorations into residential architecture. Nele Dechmann's text and Ludovic Balland's photo essay serve to illuminate Duplex Architects' work each in their own way. Further texts are contributed by the firm's founding partners Anne Kaestle and Dan Schürch, as well as by other expert authors, who cast their own personal glance at the five projects featured in this book.

Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics (AHFE 2023), July 20–24, 2023, San Francisco, USA

This book discusses human factors research directed towards realizing and assessing sustainability in the built environment and architecture. It reports on advanced engineering methods for sustainable infrastructure design, architecture as well as on assessments of the efficient methods and the social, environmental, and economic impact of various designs and projects. The book covers a range of topics, including the use of recycled materials in architecture, ergonomics in buildings and public design, sustainable design for smart cities, design for the aging population, industrial design, human scale in architecture, and many more. Based on the AHFE 2019 International Conference on Human Factors in Architecture, Sustainable Urban Planning and Infrastructure, held on July 24-28, 2019, in Washington D.C., USA, it offers various perspectives on sustainability and ergonomics. As such, it is a valuable reference resource for designers, urban engineers, architects, infrastructure professionals, public infrastructure owners, policy makers, government engineers and planners, as well as operations managers and academics active in urban and infrastructure research.

You can use this book to design a house for yourself with your family; you can use it to work with your neighbors to improve your town and neighborhood; you can use it to design an office, or a workshop, or a public building. And you can use it to guide you in the actual process of construction. After a ten-year silence, Christopher Alexander and his colleagues at the Center for Environmental Structure are now publishing a major statement in the form of three books which will, in their words, "lay the basis for an entirely new approach to architecture, building and planning, which will we hope replace existing ideas and practices entirely." The three books are The Timeless Way of Building, The Oregon Experiment, and this book, A Pattern Language. At the core of these books is the idea that people should design for themselves their own houses, streets, and communities. This idea may be radical (it implies a radical transformation of the architectural profession) but it comes simply from the observation that most of the wonderful places of the world were not made by architects but by the people. At the core of the books, too, is the point that in designing their environments people always rely on certain "languages," which, like the languages we speak, allow them to articulate and communicate an infinite variety of designs within a forma system which gives them coherence. This book provides a language of this kind. It will enable a person to make a design for almost any kind of building, or any part of the built environment. "Patterns," the units of this language, are answers to design problems (How high should a window sill be? How many stories should a building have? How much space in a neighborhood should be devoted to grass and trees?). More than 250 of the patterns in this pattern language are given: each consists of a problem statement, a discussion of the problem with an illustration, and a solution. As the authors say in their introduction, many of the patterns are archetypal, so deeply rooted in the nature of things that it seemly likely that they will be a part of human nature, and human action, as much in five hundred years as they are today.