Abstract
More than 60% of housing in South Korea consists of mass constructed apartment neighborhoods. Due to poor quality construction materials and components, the average operative life of apartment buildings is 20 years. The rapid degradation and low maintenance condition of transparent and semi-opaque components, as well as the limited daylight access in the standard apartment layout, are cause for the lower visual comfort of occupants. This research analyzes the improvement in visual comfort for the renovation of an exemplary apartment unit in Seoul, using Building Information Modeling (BIM) and parametric environmental analysis tools. The existing apartment is virtually reconstructed with BIM software. The building model is exported to Computer-Aided Design software to execute parametric daylight analyses through environmental simulation software. An enhanced modular building envelope and apartment layout are developed to reduce the energy demand for heating, cooling, artificial lighting, and to improve visual and thermal comfort. The visual comfort analysis of the refurbished apartment results in average improvements of 15% in terms of Daylight Factor and 30% of daylight autonomy. Therefore, this research proposes, the renovation of aged Korean apartment buildings to enhance daylighting and visual comfort.
Highlights
Mass construction of apartment neighborhoods in South Korea started with the enforcement of a series of national housing plans developed during the 1970s and 1980s [1]
This study focuses primarily on the improvement of daylight and visual comfort of the exemplary apartment unit
The daylight analysis presented in this research provides the assessment of visual comfort in Korean apartment units according to specific illuminance thresholds based on international standards
Summary
Mass construction of apartment neighborhoods in South Korea started with the enforcement of a series of national housing plans developed during the 1970s and 1980s [1]. During the years of economic development (1960–1992) [4], the Korean government employed multiple strategies to reach the goals set by national housing plans: industrialization of the building sector and mass construction of standard apartments as well as support for the private initiative for the realization of residential buildings [5]. Real estate sector speculation caused a further reduction of the quality and quantity of construction materials, by concurrently increasing apartment unit selling prices to maximize profits [10]. The quality of the apartment stock in South Korea is comparably low, with an average building life time of Sustainability 2019, 11, 2699; doi:10.3390/su11092699 www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability
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