Architecture Commons^™

Enhancing Bim Implementation In The Ethiopian Public Construction Sector: An Empirical Study, Solomon Belay, James D. Goedert, Asregedew Woldesenbet, Saeed Rokooei3

Durham School of Architectural Engineering and Construction: Faculty Publications

Recently, the popularity of BIM has grown rapidly in the public construction sector. However, only a few studies so far have been seeking to address the BIM adoption benefits and barriers in developmental public projects across the low-income countries. Thus, the study aims to investigate the benefits and barriers of BIM adoption in the context of the Ethiopian infrastructure market. To achieve the objectives, a comprehensive systematic literature review was conducted to identify BIM adoption benefits and barriers in developing countries. Then, a structured questionnaire survey was conducted to collect data from various professionals working in organizations including client, consultant, …

Enhancing Research In Natural Hazards Engineering Through The Designsafe Cyberinfrastructure, Ellen M. Rathje, Clint Dawson, Jamie E. Padgett, Jean Paul Pinelli, Frederick L. Haan

University Faculty Publications and Creative Works

The DesignSafe cyberinfrastructure (www.designsafe-ci.org) is part of the NSF-funded Natural Hazard Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) and provides cloud-based tools to manage, analyze, understand, and publish critical data for research to understand the impacts of natural hazards. The DesignSafe Data Depot provides private and public disk space to support research collaboration and data publishing through a web interface. The DesignSafe Reconnaissance Portal uses a map interface to provide easy access to data collected to investigate the effects of natural hazards, and the DesignSafe Workspace provides cloud-based tools for simulation, data analytics, and visualization; as well as access to high performance computing …

Opportunities And Challenges Of Geospatial Analysis For Promoting Urban Livability In The Era Of Big Data And Machine Learning, Anna Kovacs-Györi, Alin Ristea, Clemens Havas, Michael Mehaffy, Hartwig H. Hochmair, Bernd Resch, Levente Juhasz, Arthur Lehner, Laxmi Ramasubramanian, Thomas Blaschke

GIS Center

Urban systems involve a multitude of closely intertwined components, which are more measurable than before due to new sensors, data collection, and spatio-temporal analysis methods. Turning these data into knowledge to facilitate planning efforts in addressing current challenges of urban complex systems requires advanced interdisciplinary analysis methods, such as urban informatics or urban data science. Yet, by applying a purely data-driven approach, it is too easy to get lost in the ‘forest’ of data, and to miss the ‘trees’ of successful, livable cities that are the ultimate aim of urban planning. This paper assesses how geospatial data, and urban analysis, …

Condition Rating Prediction Using An Interactive Deterioration Model Development Package, Minwoo Chang, Mitchell S. Maguire

Durham School of Architectural Engineering and Construction: Faculty Publications

This paper presents an advanced method to determine explanatory variables required for developing deterioration models without the interference of human bias. Although a stationary set of explanatory variables is ideal for long-term monitoring and asset management, the penalty regression results vary annually due to the innate bias in the inspection data. In this study, weighting factors were introduced to consider the inspection data collected for several years, and the most stationary set was identified. To manage the substantial amount of inspection data effectively, we proposed a software package referred to as the Deterioration Model Development Package (DMDP). The objective of …

Led Zip Model Development, Mhd Anas Alkrch

Durham School of Architectural Engineering and Construction: Dissertations, Thesis, and Student Research

The representation of load components deemed to be an essential factor for power system studies as the load characteristics influence the system performance. Thus, choosing an appropriate load model for load behavior studies is very significant for system analysis purposes. Load models can be categorized into three types: static, dynamic, and composite models. Static ZIP load model is a well-known model in the power industry, it represents the relationship between the active and reactive power as a function of the applied voltage. In this paper, a detailed review of the existing static ZIP model coefficients for load components achieved by …

Brazil, Big Hydro, And A Beautiful Monster: “Green” Energy Generation In The Xingu River Basin, Ian F. Hirons

Student Works

Brazil is quickly becoming an influential actor on the world stage of geopolitics. The nation has achieved global economic and environmental recognition due to the extensive development of its hydrological resources in the form of hydroelectric power plants. As the world’s second greatest generator of hydroelectricity, Brazil has proven a staunch adherence to building dams in the large-scale. Though these dams have brought electricity to millions of people across the country, the socio-ecological toll inflicted by their construction has been devastating to natural biomes and local inhabitants. This article traces Brazil’s proclivity for large-scale hydropower to four motivational categories often …

Scenario Analysis Of Downtown One-Way Street Conversions In Lincoln, Nebraska: A Case Study For Downtown Livability And Pedestrian Safety, Terrence Lage

Community and Regional Planning Program: Theses and Student Projects

An era of downtown street design benefiting the automobile has become over designed for the movement of volumes of traffic in many North American cities. Since the 1950s, the primary focus of planners and traffic engineers has been to address the growing problem of traffic congestion caused by the suburban traveler coming into and out of downtown. The solution was retrofitting the original two-way street grid into a network of wide and straight multi-lane one-way corridors. This design successfully moved volumes of traffic through downtown streets but induced behavior to favor the automobile instead of design that favors active mobility …

Landfill Suitability Analysis Using Gis (Geographic Information System) And Ahp (Analytic Hierarchy Process): A Case Study Of Scotts Bluff County, Nebraska, Sunah Moon

Community and Regional Planning Program: Theses and Student Projects

The objective of this study was to identify and prioritize the potential sites that are the most suitable to host landfills using Geographic Information System (GIS) and Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) in Scotts Bluff County, Nebraska. First, the criteria that influence in a decision-making process of landfill placement in social, environmental, and physical perspectives were established, and the area was assessed based on the grading structure of each criterion on a scale of 0 to 10. The second step was the main process for the study using the AHP. Thirty-two experts who work as planners, engineers, landfill staff, and environmental …

Framework For Extracting And Characterizing Load Profile Variability Based On A Comparative Study Of Different Wavelet Functions, Andrew Parker, Kevin James, Dongming Peng, Mahmoud Alahmad

Durham School of Architectural Engineering and Construction: Faculty Publications

The penetration of distributed energy resources (DERs) on the electric power system is changing traditional power flow and analysis studies. DERs may cause the systems' protection and control equipment to operate outside their intended parameters, due to DERs' variability and dispatchability. As this penetration grows, hosting capacity studies as well as protection and control impact mitigation become critical components to advance this penetration. In order to conduct such studies accurately, the electric power system's distribution components should be modeled correctly, and will require realistic time series loads at varying temporal and spatial conditions. The load component consists of the built …

The Institute’S Team For Damage Investigations, Lucas A. Laughery, Aishwarya Y. Puranam, Christopher L. Segura Jr., Anahid A. Behrouzi

Architectural Engineering

ACI Committee 133, Disaster Reconnaissance, was conceived in the aftermath of the 2010 Chilean Earthquake, an event that affected thousands of structures. That event caused extensive damage to an estimated 50 to 100 mid-rise and high-rise reinforced concrete (RC) buildings, including seven that were damaged beyond repair.^1-3 Although ACI has had a strong history of publishing assessments of disasters (refer to textbox: Historical Disasters Examined in ACI Publications), the Institute had no formal mechanism in place to deploy a team to investigate and report on critical lessons to its technical committees and membership. Furthermore, the broadening international reach of …

A Window To Urban Arabia, Andrew M. Gardner

All Faculty Scholarship

This set of images collectively seeks to provide viewers with a window into Doha, Qatar, and into the urban heart of the modern Middle East that’s arisen on the Arabian Peninsula. Designed as an exhibit of photography, the images include overlapping themes that explore particular facets or threads of the urban landscape and life therein. In the final accounting, the collection as a whole is intended as an ode to the city itself.

Creating A Web-Based Tool For Determining Drought Acknowledgments In State Plans, Raeanna Hartsgrove

Community and Regional Planning Program: Professional Projects

Drought is a lingering and costly disaster and can cause billions of dollars of damage throughout the United States. Drought produces social, economic, and environmental impacts which makes it become a disaster. Due to the long-lasting and intense effects, drought research is needed to understand weather and climate more efficiently so that preparedness, mitigation, response recovery, and resilience is more effective. Policies that include drought mitigation are shown to reduce the likelihood that drought become disasters. The National Drought Mitigation Center (NDMC) has been working on a new web-based tool to identify which plans in a state address key aspects …

Acknowledging Our Past: Race, Landscape And History, Alea Harris, Kaycia Best, Dieran Mcgowan, Destiny Shippy, Vera Oberg, Bryson Coleman, Luke Meagher, Rhiannon Leebrick Ph.D., Phillip Stone

Student Scholarship

This book is the product of nearly a year's worth of student research on Wofford College's history, undertaken as part of a grant by the Council of Independent Colleges in the Humanities Research for the Public Good initiative. The research was supervised and directed by Dr. Rhiannon Leebrick.

"Guiding Research Questions:

How did Wofford College and its early stakeholders support and participate in slavery?

How is the legacy of slavery present in the landscape of our campus (buildings, statues, names, etc.)?

How can we better understand Wofford as an institution during the time of Reconstruction through the Jim Crow era? …

Uncertain Regional Urbanism In Venezuela. Government, Infrastructure And Environment, Fabio Capra-Ribeiro

Faculty Publications

Uncertain Regional Urbanism in Venezuela explores the changes cities face when they become metropolises, forming expanding regions which create both potential and problems within settlements. To do so, it focuses on three metropolitan areas located in Venezuela’s Center-North region: Caracas, Maracay and Valencia, designated as "Camava."

Considering three core topics, government and territorial administration, infrastructure and environment, as well as looking at the reciprocal impact, this book describes and analyzes the determinant variables that characterize the phenomenon of regional urbanization in this area and in the wider Global South. It includes documentary research, semi-structured interviews and Delphi methodology, involving a …

Impact: The Visual Communication Of Information, Jennifer Shields, Mark Cabrinha, Sasha Menshikova, Catherine Trujillo, Emily Chung, Miles Young, Hope Golden, Laura Akatsu Kuffner, Markus Rogne, Aimie Olson

Creative Works

Impact: The Visual Communication of Information focuses on the diversity of visual communication created by students, faculty, and staff across California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. Drawing from a multitude of methods in courses and activities across the campus, the exhibit displays the influences of visual communication in fields ranging from statistical data and geography, to art, design, and engineering, to performance and physics. This project was made possible by a gift from the Austin and Gabriela Hearst Foundation.

This catalog represents the onsite exhibit of the same name, which opened in winter of 2020 at Robert E. Kennedy …

Team Mks Oakvillage Hackathon Submission, Pave Denisov, Dave Clark, Shannon Pirie, Majdi Haddad, Steven Chen, Nicole Ann Bermudez, Tim Corcoran, Mark Hillis

Publications and Scholarship

Team MKS Oakvillage Hackathon submission provides innovative energy, construction and circular economy solutions for the Town of Oakville’s upcoming Oakvillage development by Minto Communities.

Effectiveness Of Building Systems Strategies For Mitigation Of Airborne Transmission Of Sars-Cov-2, Meng Kong, Jialei Shen, Bing Dong, Jianshun Jensen Zhang

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering - All Scholarship

Airborne transmission has been recognized as a major transmission pathway for the infectious disease COVID-19. This study investigated the effectiveness of several indoor air quality (IAQ) control strategies on the mitigation of airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. The well-known airborne disease infection risk model (Wells-Riley equation) was used to estimate the infection risk of the SARS-CoV-2 in seven (7) different types of spaces including conference center/ballrooms, hotel bistro//cafeteria, hotel lobby, classrooms (lecture), conference room/small classroom, hotel or cruise ship guest rooms and open plan offices. The IAQ control strategies included increased ventilation rate, improved air distribution …

Leveraging Abet Accreditation To Promote Inclusion Of Noise Control Engineering Concepts In Engineering Programs, Lily M. Wang, Bryan Beamer

Durham School of Architectural Engineering and Construction: Faculty Publications

Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology, Inc. (ABET) accreditation is an internationally recognized system ensuring consistency and quality in engineering education programs. As a part of ABET accreditation, there is no set requirement for any general engineering program to include noise control engineering concepts in their curricula. However, one of the seven student outcomes that each ABET accredited engineering program must document is their students’ “ability to apply engineering design to produce solutions that meet specified needs with consideration of public health, safety, and welfare…” Controlling noise in the authors’ view is a fundamental strategy for protecting workers from occupational …

The Use Of Green Pond Conglomerate As Building Stone In Morris County, New Jersey, Gregory A. Pope

Department of Earth and Environmental Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Green Pond Conglomerate (GPC) is a maroon colored quartzite with white quartz pebbles, a classic “puddingstone”. GPC derives from a NW-SW-trending sliver of Paleozoic sediments, the “Green Pond Outlier”, surrounded by older metamorphic and igneous rocks of Morris and Passaic Counties. Buildings, retaining walls, field fences, and monuments incorporate the durable and attractive stone, in a distinct geographic area of Morris County. Several instances of structures completely constructed or faced with GPC occur in and around Morristown, limited to affluent houses and one prominent church. In these cases, GPC stones were dressed and faced, a labor-intensive effort. Elsewhere in the …

Online Implementation Of Structural Analysis Tool For Remote Learning, Ghada El-Mahdy, Amany Micheal

Civil Engineering

The delivery of a structural analysis module to architectural or civil engineering students needs the visualization of certain diagrams, such as the internal force diagrams and the elastic line. These diagrams are difficult to grasp for students new to structural analysis and need a lot of practice to become proficient in drawing them. Current structural analysis textbooks with electronic platforms do not include tools to draw the internal force diagrams or deflection. This has led to the initiative of creating an online structural analysis tool to enable the student to easily apply different loadings on different statical systems to draw …

Semi Open Partitions: A Defense Strategy For Airborne Disease, Kerrie Marshall, Arik Palileo, Eric A. Schiff

SyracuseCoE Research Brief Series

This brief summarizes research on two measures that reduce the risk of transmitting COVID-19 from an infected person to a virus-free individual. Semi-partitioned spaces can reduce airborne disease transmission when combined with a proper ventilation flow pattern in a room. With advanced displacement ventilation risk can be reduced by at least 4 times.

Analyzing The Structural Properties Of Fire Clay Bricks After Adding Cigarette Filters, Karim Galal Abdullatif, Marianne N. Guirguis, Rania Rushdy Moussa

Architectural Engineering

Cigarette filters are one of the most littered objects in the world that damage the environment. Incorporation in construction bricks offers the prospect of limiting damage and solves the recyclability problem for a typical non-biodegradable waste. This paper aims to explore that prospect, by adding cigarette filters in the production of two samples of fired clay bricks with the cigarette filters comprising 5% and 10% of the volume. The mixing and molding processes were done manually which had an effect on the bricks when tested, The results of testing were corresponding with those of previous studies (outside Egypt), however, only …

Transforming Downtown Springfield: The Green And Equitable City Of Tomorrow, Frank Sleegers, Abriana Brown, Ella Cormier, Benjamin Devos, Matheus Gomes, Justin Hailey, Stuart Han, Ming Huang, Nan Jiang, Joshua Lemieux, Rachel Newman, Zachary Numan, Makenna Palzkill, Carter Roy, Hannah Welsh

Landscape Architecture & Regional Planning Studio and Student Research and Creative Activity

Transforming Downtown Springfield, MA: The Green and Equitable City of Tomorrow

This urban design studio is a community service project that developed visions for the downtown in Springfield, MA, as a revitalized mixed-use walkable neighborhood. The project emphasizes neighborhood connectivity through walking and biking and creating a green mosaic of places to sit and gather outdoors. We understand cities as active, vibrant, and inclusive places that are accessible and inviting to all. The project covers 7 team projects from Dwight Street down to the Connecticut River.

Main Project Goal:

Create visions for a green downtown district and ways to foster …

Blue Collars In Green Cities: Exploring Transit Oriented Manufacturing, J. Mark Pendras, Yonn Dierwechter

Urban Design

The theme of Blue Collars in Green Cities seeks to advance inclusive urban economies by confronting longstanding tensions between planning for urban sustainability and planning for urban industry. The legacy of industrial pollution and the erosion of industrial jobs have contributed to perceptions of urban industry as incompatible with vibrant green city visions and healthy urban environments. Consequently, various forms of urban sustainability planning—land use, transportation, economic development—have either ignored or actively discouraged industrial sectors. The resulting antagonisms between industrial interests and sustainability advocates threatens to stall progress in both areas. The 2020 MACP Studio project starts from the assertion …

Architecture Student Design Competition 2020 Final Report, Andreas Luescher

Architecture and Environmental Design Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Qi And Garden Wall, Gaole Dai

Architecture Thesis Prep

By using Feng Shui’s principles of Qi in relation to specific residential properties – site organization, surrounding environment and existing structures – this thesis will demonstrate new spatial, formal, and material potentials of the garden wall, as the medium for occupation. The prototypes that achieving therapeutic qualities of Qi and phenomenological effects of the garden wall will be developed for diverse residential landscapes.

Rethinking Participatory Design: Tools For Modelling Community Potentials, Adam Liu, Stephen Marinelli

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis aims to provide an alternative method of community engagement through the process of participatory model-making. Rather than only seeking out community voices for surveys and data collection, this project’s goal is to empower a community’s sense of ownership through collective design.

The methods of this project will be tested and examined in collaboration with students from Dr. King Elementary School in Syracuse, New York. By designing a participatory method for model-making, the project will involve students in the early stages of urban design and make it more educationally and socially accessible.

Resembling Legitimacy: Restructuring The American Civic Architectural Myth, Estefany Lona

Architecture Thesis Prep

By looking at three case studies--Esposizione Universale Roma, the New Deal, and Red Vienna--this project demonstrates that the architecture within each context to be more than subjective constructions of political ideology. They grasp at the history of nations, tangible environments, and coincide with implementation of public policy.

Living Memories: Rethinking Remembrance, Timothy Mulhall

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis will interrogate conventional types and methods of memorialization, challenging the memorial as a complete product. Developing from inquiries into alternative acts of commemoration, this investigation will seek to conceive a memorial in the making. An ever-changing memorial that embraces temporality and the process of becoming will offer a new way of rendering remembrance in the built environment.

Image Carnival, Kaixin Huang, Siting Xing

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis project will begin with a basic understanding of iconology, and research on social and technological changes, and explore the different levels of images in a certain range of Instagram-based image sharing social media, and the current social media The space design for the goal is characterized by two directions, which leads to our architectural iconology.