Architectural Quality Research Articles

Urban Chandelier: How Experiences of Being Vision Impaired Inform Designing for Attentiveness

Prevailing conceptions of disability in architectural discourse give rise to the devaluing of disabled people's lived experiences. However, several studies in architecture and disability studies show how disability experience may lead to a careful attentiveness toward the qualities of the built environment that are relevant for design. Using focused ethnography, we examine how architect William Feuerman's disruptive vision impairment restructured his attention. The insights gained from his experience were incorporated conceptually into his design practice, and the resulting design principles were realized in one of his office's projects—Urban Chandelier, a design intervention positioned in an urban installation. Feuerman's experiences encouraged him to deliberately introduce disruption into his design, aiming not to disable everyone, but to make passers–by attentive to their surroundings. He re–organizes people's modes of attention through the distinct visual qualities of architecture, generating new meaning, in a similar manner as the stroke that affected his attention. We conclude that considering disabled people's lived experiences demonstrates potential in designing artifacts experientially interesting for a broad population, including but not limited to disabled people.

The impact of daily caffeine intake on nighttime sleep in young adult men

Acute caffeine intake can delay sleep initiation and reduce sleep intensity, particularly when consumed in the evening. However, it is not clear whether these sleep disturbances disappear when caffeine is continuously consumed during daytime, which is common for most coffee drinkers. To address this question, we investigated the sleep of twenty male young habitual caffeine consumers during a double-blind, randomized, crossover study including three 10-day conditions: caffeine (3 × 150 mg caffeine daily), withdrawal (3 × 150 mg caffeine for 8 days, then switch to placebo), and placebo (3 × placebo daily). After 9 days of continuous treatment, electroencephalographically (EEG)-derived sleep structure and intensity were recorded during a scheduled 8-h nighttime sleep episode starting 8 (caffeine condition) and 15 h (withdrawal condition) after the last caffeine intake. Upon scheduled wake-up time, subjective sleep quality and caffeine withdrawal symptoms were assessed. Unexpectedly, neither polysomnography-derived total sleep time, sleep latency, sleep architecture nor subjective sleep quality differed among placebo, caffeine, and withdrawal conditions. Nevertheless, EEG power density in the sigma frequencies (12–16 Hz) during non-rapid eye movement sleep was reduced in both caffeine and withdrawal conditions when compared to placebo. These results indicate that daily caffeine intake in the morning and afternoon hours does not strongly impair nighttime sleep structure nor subjective sleep quality in healthy good sleepers who regularly consume caffeine. The reduced EEG power density in the sigma range might represent early signs of overnight withdrawal from the continuous presence of the stimulant during the day.

Forecasting Architectural Decay From Evolutionary History

As a software system evolves, its architecture tends to decay, leading to the occurrence of architectural elements that become resistant to maintenance or prone to defects. To address this problem, engineers can significantly benefit from determining which architectural elements will decay before that decay actually occurs. Forecasting decay allows engineers to take steps to prevent decay, such as focusing maintenance resources on the architectural elements most likely to decay. To that end, we construct novel models that predict the quality of an architectural element by utilizing multiple architectural views (both structural and semantic) and architectural metrics as features for prediction. We conduct an empirical study using our prediction models on 38 versions of five systems. Our findings show that we can predict low architectural quality, i.e., architectural decay, with high performance—even for cases of decay that suddenly occur in an architectural module. We further report the factors that best predict architectural quality.

The architect as nomothete: Luigi Snozzi at Monte Carasso

This article discusses how the work of Luigi Snozzi in the village of Monte Carasso in Switzerland is relevant for the investigation of the relationship between rules and architectural form. It describes the work of Snozzi both as a nomothete and as a designer across thirty years, arguing that the impact of his code and that of harchitectural designs on the village are not separable. While Snozzi’s code for Monte Carasso, as reported in various publications and talks, builds on a series of indeterminacies that can potentially undermine its effectiveness, the architect’s own designs, such as the Guidotti House, act as models for the interpretation of the normative reach of the code. This article traces the indeterminacy of Snozzi's code, building on concepts borrowed from social ontology and philosophy of law, to describe how rules can contribute, in this case study, to determine architectural quality. In particular, the article questions the nature of the norms enacted in Monte Carasso to suggest that the unmediated application of building codes can lead to unfavourable architectural outcomes. It argues that, when considered as normative models, architectural projects can facilitate a more effective application of the ideas underlying the normative scope of architectural regulations.

From TTP to IoC: Advanced Persistent Graphs for Threat Hunting

Defenders fighting against Advanced Persistent Threats need to discover the propagation area of an adversary as quickly as possible. This discovery takes place through a phase of an incident response operation called Threat Hunting, where defenders track down attackers within the compromised network. In this article, we propose a formal model that dissects and abstracts elements of an attack, from both attacker and defender perspectives. This model leads to the construction of two persistent graphs on a common set of objects and components allowing for (1) an omniscient actor to compare, for both defender and attacker, the gap in knowledge and perceptions; (2) the attacker to become aware of the traces left on the targeted network; (3) the defender to improve the quality of Threat Hunting by identifying false-positives and adapting logging policy to be oriented for investigations. In this article, we challenge this model using an attack campaign mimicking APT29, a real-world threat, in a scenario designed by the MITRE Corporation. We measure the quality of the defensive architecture experimentally and then determine the most effective strategy to exploit data collected by the defender in order to extract actionable Cyber Threat Intelligence, and finally unveil the attacker.

Thermal Comfort in the Modern Movement – Consequences of Constructive Definition on the Summer Behaviour of a Housing Building in Porto, Portugal

The knowledge of the properties of construction materials, as well as the way they are organized in the construction systems, namely those of the facades, are essential to understand the functional performance of buildings, namely their thermal comfort. This article presents a research oriented towards the constructive characterization of the facades of a multifamily building and the consequences for its thermal comfort in summer. The building here analysed is Edifício Lino, built between 1951 and 1954 in Porto, designed by the architects Arménio Losa and Cassiano Barbosa, prominent figures in the architecture of the modern movement in Portugal. The importance of studying buildings at this time is related to the need to define strategies for use, maintenance and possible intervention in the existing heritage in order to respond to the contemporary expectations of habitability of these works of the Modern Movement, often forgotten due to the temporal proximity. From the study carried out, it can be concluded that thermal comfort emerges as a central concern of the reference architects of this time, who considered this issue an inexorable architectural quality.

Ascoltare il territorio

The recent history of urban development in Italy largely stems from a policy – here intended as a set of actions and strategies of administrators, entrepreneurs and experts – which has been incapable of planning transformations and, therefore, adopting a shared and far-sighted approach to development. The urban regeneration of metropolitan areas and their consequent demographic and economic development (70% of the population and 80% of GDP are concentrated in these areas) have often penalised internal areas such as the Alps and Apennines. Some peculiar experiences, including the regeneration of the village of Ostana (Cuneo), the project carried out in Contrada Bricconi (Bergamo), or even the activities of the association Dolomiti Contemporanee (Belluno) – just to mention a few interesting cases in the Italian Alps, – show that the understanding of and care for a unique territory are the pillars on which any informed political, administrative, architectural or territorial project should be based. This approach is all the more important in the framework of those events envisaging the construction of large infrastructures (such as the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan-Cortina). After these events, such infrastructures are often abandoned because they are useless for the territory, economically unsustainable in the long-term, and not shared with the local community. In this perspective, the work of the association Architetti Arco Alpino (Alpine Arc Architects), whose activities range from architecture awards to photographic surveys, conferences and publications, aims to understand the complexity of mountain areas and to promote architectural quality. In this framework, they have successfully shown how the problems are often the same regardless of geographical and cultural distances. The solution to these problems is to be found primarily in the act of listening to the places and history of the local population; whether in the Alps or elsewhere, every good project based on a contemporary and conscious approach starts from there.

Process data properties matter: Introducing gated convolutional neural networks (GCNN) and key-value-predict attention networks (KVP) for next event prediction with deep learning

Predicting next events in predictive process monitoring enables companies to manage and control processes at an early stage and reduce their action distance. In recent years, approaches have steadily moved from classical statistical methods towards the application of deep neural network architectures, which outperform the former and enable analysis without explicit knowledge of the underlying process model. While the focus of prior research was on the long short-term memory network architecture, more deep learning architectures offer promising extensions that have proven useful for other applications of sequential data. In our work, we introduce a gated convolutional neural network and a key-value-predict attention network to the task of next event prediction. In a comprehensive evaluation study on 11 real-life benchmark datasets, we show that these two novel architectures surpass prior work in 34 out of 44 metric-dataset combinations. For our evaluation, we consider the effects of process data properties, such as sparsity, variation, and repetitiveness, and discuss their impact on the prediction quality of the different deep learning architectures. Similarly, we evaluate their classification properties in terms of generalization and handling class imbalance. Our results provide guidance for researchers and practitioners alike on how to select, validate, and comprehensively benchmark (novel) predictive process monitoring models. In particular, we highlight the importance of sufficiently diverse process data properties in event logs and the comprehensive reporting of multiple performance indicators to achieve meaningful results.

Are Connected and Automated Vehicles the Silver Bullet for Future Transportation Challenges? Benefits and Weaknesses on Safety, Consumption, and Traffic Congestion

With the growing development of Cooperative, Connected, and Automated Mobility (CCAM), questions arise about the real impact of this innovative mobility on our daily life. CCAM originally promised to improve road safety. It is now a holistic solution for future mobility: the CCAM is there to optimize traffic, which can translate into strategies for reducing energy consumption or polluting emissions, without compromising road safety. The capability of CCAM is dependent on the reliability and robustness of its components, as it will be making life-impacting decisions. It is therefore necessary to be able to guarantee a high-level quality of sensors, communication, software, and hardware architecture. In this mobility ecosystem, the infrastructure and data that it will be able to produce is at the heart of current research issues. This paper addresses the following question: Are the Connected and automated Vehicles (CAVs) the silver bullet solution with which to answer the issues of the current mobility systems? This question is discussed by investigating the technologies used, the digital infrastructures, its robustness to cyber-attack, and their relationship with the claimed benefits on safety, energy and pollution management, traffic optimization, deployment strategy, and a link with the new generation of road infrastructures.

ARCHITECTURAL PROBLEMS OF IMPLEMENTATION OF RESIDENTIAL DEVELOPMENT IN VORONEZH (ISSUES OF URBAN DEVELOPMENT)

Statement of the problem. Using the example of the leading construction organization in Voronezh, the article analyzes the shortcomings of the implementation of urban development projects and considers ways to solve them. Recently, the state of the natural environment of our cities has become a more urgent problem. This analysis will help designers in solving the problems of improving the architectural quality of the environment of new residential areas of the city of Voronezh. Results. As a result of the review and analysis of a number of implemented objects and the object planned for construction, ways to improve the architectural and artistic image of new districts are proposed, taking into account the features of the existing urban environment of Voronezh and current trends in advanced urban planning.Conclusions. Since any developer is primarily interested in the economic benefits of construction, he cannot express the true interests and needs of citizens, follow the historical traditions of the city. In the first stages of design, work should be performed on a competitive basis by order of the municipal authorities, even if the developer is the owner of the site intended for construction. The best project should be put up for auction among developers, providing the winner with the right to build in this territory.

Formation of visual comfort of small cities architectural environment

Statement of the problem. The aim of the study is to analyse the basic elements of creating visual comfort in the urban environment in the conditions of the renovation of the existing development of Russian small towns. Results. The main results of the research are the development of the syntactic context of architecture in urban space; the definition of the architectural language as the basis for the formation of compositional characteristics of visual comfort in urban space. Conclusions. The significance of the obtained results lies in the novelty of the approach to the mechanism of updating the architectural environment of cities based on the reform of the visual characteristics of the existing buildings; in the interpretation of architectural forms that reveal the original qualities of urban architecture. The use of the methodological basis of the mechanism of visual renewal of the architectural environment and the formation of urban space as a meaningful context that reveals individual characteristics to the viewer who is in the space of the city. At the same time, the visual-figurative context of the architectural environment of cities acquires a meaningful meaning, which allows us to comprehensively consider the process of renovation of existing buildings, including the tool for visual-spatial construction of architectural solutions.

Evaluation of Industrial Buildings within the Scope of Renewal, Alsancak Tekel Warehouses

Industrial structures are cultural legacy sites in need of protection that carry the social, cultural, historical and architectural properties of their respective eras into the present day. Due to the changing production demands and technology, these structures lost their usage value and have been rendered obsolete. The interventions implemented and new functions provided to ensure the continuity of industrial structures must be in accordance with the character of the building. Our study focuses on the renovation process of one of the first industrial premises of the city of İzmir Alsancak Tekel Storages located in Port Rear Area. Industrial building history in the region dates back to the 1900s, when industrial and storage structures have been built. A new master development plan that entered into force in 1989, conserning the fate of these industrial buildings. As the result of the passed legislation, old tekel storages have been transformed to offices and cultural centres. In the scope of this study the changes that occurred in order to refunction the Alsancak Tekel Storages have been inspected. As a method, a detailed literature review of the history of the region was made, and data on the buildings examined before and after restoration were collected.

Fuzzy production network model for quality assessment of an information system based on microservices

This article describes the analysis of the quality of microservice architectures, which are one of the main approaches to the creation and maintenance of modern information systems capable of quickly respond to changes in business demands. The implementation of continuous delivery of software components for dynamic business processes of information systems can be carried out by various sets of microservices, the optimal choice of which is a complex multi-alternative task. The paper presents a review of existing approaches to solving the problem, which showed that the development of models for assessing the quality of microservices of information systems requires further elaboration in terms of accounting for uncertainty in the initial data and modes of operation. The authors have proposed an approach to solving the problem of analyzing the quality of a microservice architecture which is implemented on the basis of a fuzzy production network model. The model allows for comprehensive accounting of various parameters (qualitative and quantitative). The article shows the implementation process of the fuzzy production network that was developed to analyze the functional quality of the microservice architecture for processing customer orders using fuzzy modeling software. The results of the analysis will allow managers and system architects to make an informed choice of the microservice architecture of the information system, as well as use it in their reports when arguing the need for scaling the system and increasing the availability of microservices.

ARCHITECTURE’S STRUGGLE WITH CONTROL: A DISCUSSION ABOUT “FRANKFURT KITCHEN” AND “FOOD DISPENSER” PROJECTS

It would be inadequate to understand Modern Architecture without mentioning the term “control”. The epistemology of scientific thinking pointed out establishing a systematic form of knowledge for modern architecture by providing an opportunity to create a system of standards. In this paper, the relation between science and architecture is evaluated by questioning the issue of “control”. It wouldn’t be assertive to claim that the term “control” recast architecture’s reflex of anticipation, as the discipline’s eager of borrowing scientific methods from modernity installed a veiled meaning of this term to design methodologies. Employment of scientific methods marked a difference at that term concerning the concept of anticipation in its elaboration as an experiment in architecture. This paper designates the elements of “control” in design in “Frankfurt Kitchen” and “Food Dispenser” Projects with different prosperities, which represented two different approaches ideally and methodologically in how scientific way of thinking informed material and immaterial qualities of architecture. Margarette Schutte Lihotzky’s “Frankfurt Kitchen” project is considered here particular for evaluating architecture’s anticipation with control, of which she applied an innovative method for design. The lesser known “Food Dispenser” project of David Greene, on the other hand, was an embodiment of individual creation or an autonomous remark (declaration) in synthesising technology and architecture by taking discipline’s boundaries as a motive force. Although they represented different aspects of control (mechanisms) ideally and experientially in design, both projects were emancipative in reflecting the scientific guidance of “control” for the development of anticipative role of architecture. Concepts that support to read the control issue in these projects’ material and immaterial qualities. In terms of material qualities, the terminology that would help to read both projects is “modular/machine” and “fitted cabinet/fitted plug”; yet for the immaterial qualities that is “abstraction of movement-diagram/machine-plug collage” , “ analytical thinking” and “human-labour/machine-labour” .

Systematic review on next-generation web-based software architecture clustering models

Software architecture is the heart of web-based software systems determining its components and their connections. These days, fast release and quick delivery of next-generation software, which is the primary goal of the software industry, triggers an occurring error in the software development process. Therefore, recovery and metric measurement techniques are essential tools to assess the quality and soundness of web-based software architecture and return the system to the earlier or original stable state. Reusability techniques could be used to decrease the time, effort, and cost of software development as well. Clustering is a commonly used data mining technique employed to achieve these goals. Therefore, this paper as a first survey presents a literature review for web-based software architecture clustering models that are categorized into software architecture recovery, software architecture metric measurement, and software architecture reusability. Most of the papers studied in this literature were published in 2017 and 2018. IEEE publication has the highest published papers. We classified 67 selected research studies in 3 classes where 42% of them were considered as software architecture recovery methods, 39% of them were reported for software architecture metric measurement methods, and 19% of them were considered for software architecture reusability methods.

Housing Flexibility: A Framework for a Quantitative Evaluation Method due to Turkish Designers

Purpose Flexibility became an important factor affecting the quality of housing projects in Turkey nowadays due to the requirement of the permanent mobile/dynamic lifestyle. Thus, a responsive housing design should be developed to allow modifications that respond to the changing demands of the tenants through time. Although it is a major debate in housing design for many years in western countries; the Turkish perspective of housing ignores the adjustment to changing needs and compensates it with big-sized dwellings, causing space consumption. This contradicts with the Turkish roots emerged from the nomadic lifestyle with the tent. Housing flexible design is an essential requirement in Turkish culture historically. This study aims to develop a quantitative evaluation method, in order to assess the level of flexibility, defining the indicators and the hierarchy to measure it. Design/Methodology/Approach In order to establish a Flexibility Assessment System, Value Engineering method is applied, a tool used in decision-making process to choose the ideal solutions. Additionally, this system will contribute to the improvement of the “architectural quality of housing” in Turkey, since now it is evaluated and commercialized merely by the calculations of the surface areas. Findings Despite that most of the experts have a different understanding and evaluation of flexibility, they concurred on some indicators to measure and evaluate flexibility. Moreover, this study has created a clearer definition of the terminology of flexibility from the point of view of Turkish society and provided basic guidelines for the implementation of flexible housing design. Research Limitations/Implications Quantifying a complex design parameter as flexibility using the Value engineering method requires the division and analyse the opinion of expert separately from the end users’ opinion. Originality/Value This study is the first study defining the criteria of flexibility, and their quantitative evaluation from Turkish cultural view. Moreover this study creates a more clear definition of the terminology of flexibility from the point of view of Turkish society and provides basic guidelines for the implementation of flexible housing design.

Bladder Semantic Segmentation

Obtaining information about the shape and volume of the bladder plays a significant role in determining the pathologies of this organ. To collect the relevant data, the first thing to do is to separate the bladder from the background on the ultrasound image. The article is devoted to automation this process using an algorithm based on the Unet architecture with a pretrained imagenet encoder (encoder – ResNet50). The article gives a comparative analysis of some well-known methods in the literature that improve the accuracy of the proposed algorithm. The quality of the basic architecture has been improved by more than 4 percent on the PR AUC metric (from 84.49% to 89.62%) in the series of experiments with the help of automatic annotation of previously unmarked data. In addition, there are two important results showing practical effectiveness of using the data from another medical task (which raised the accuracy to 88.50%) and using time-dependent sequence of frames inside the video (raised the quality to 88.19%).

Design tactics for enhancing the adaptability of primary and middle schools to the new needs of postpandemic reuse

PurposeThe aim of this study is to present design tactics (DTs) for supporting the adaptability of existing primary and middle school buildings into the emerging needs of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). The study introduces a novel algorithmic model for postoccupancy evaluation of the existing school buildings and provides solutions to enhance the adaptability of these buildings.Design/methodology/approachThis study employs the DTs defined by the authors, integration of DTs to the algorithmic model and tests the usability of the proposed model in the selected sample set. The sample set consists of four primary and middle school buildings with different architectural qualities. The degrees of flexibility of the existing sample set are evaluated depending on the outcomes of the implementation.FindingsThe degrees of flexibility are achieved as a result of execution of the algorithmic model for each selected school building. Initial results of the case studies show that the flexibility of a school building is highly related to affordances and design decisions of the plan layout which were considered in the initial phases of the design process. Architectural qualities such as open plan and having sufficient voids in the interior and exterior space become prominent factors for ensuring flexibility.Originality/valueDeveloping a systematic approach to the adaptation problem of primary and middle school buildings to postpandemic reuse is a novel research topic. Apart from this contextual originality, the proposed taxonomy for postpandemic reuse in terms of three levels of adaptation is a new conceptual framework. Moreover, the proposed algorithmic model itself can be considered as an original contribution, as well as a merge of qualitative values such as adaptation and flexibility with an algorithmic model.

A new approach to analyzing regenerated bone quality in the mouse digit amputation model using semi-automatic processing of microCT data.

Bone regeneration is a critical area of research impacting treatment of diseases such as osteoporosis, age-related decline, and orthopaedic implants. A crucial question in bone regeneration is that of bone architectural quality, or how "good" is the regenerated bone tissue structurally? Current methods address typical long bone architecture, however there exists a need for improved ability to quantify structurally relevant parameters of bone in non-standard bone shapes. Here we present a new analysis approach based on open-source semi-automatic methods combining image processing, solid modeling, and numerical calculations to analyze bone tissue at a more granular level using μCT image data from a mouse digit model of bone regeneration. Examining interior architecture, growth patterning, spatial mineral content, and mineral density distribution, these methods are then applied to two types of 6-month old mouse digits - 1) those prior to amputation injury (unamputated) and 2) those 42 days after amputation when bone has regenerated. Results show regenerated digits exhibit increased inner void fraction, decreased patterning, different patterns of spatial mineral distribution, and increased mineral density values when compared to unamputated bone. Our approach demonstrates the utility of this new analysis technique in assessment of non-standard bone models, such as the regenerated bone of the digit, and aims to bring a deeper level of analysis with an open-source, integrative platform to the greater bone community.

MICROECONOMICS OF ARCHITECTURE: BETWEEN MARKET AND PUBLIC

The position of architecture between market goods and public goods is addressed in this study. A transition of architectural objects of built environment from market goods towards public or nonmarket goods is presented in literature review. The real estate market value is highly influenced by concepts of externalities and public goods, therefore being highly spatially dependent and making the process of the real estate valuation more complex. The internalization of these externalities and public goods is impossible because of the nature of public space in the city. The concept of value and different types of value, like exchange, use, image, social, environmental, cultural value, are also presented in literature review. These different types of value are transferred to value in exchange when estimating market value. The aim of research is to calculate the amount of the real estate market value that is influenced by externalities, public or nonmarket goods. The process of value transfers between market and public is also discussed in this study. In the research part prices of similar apartments measure the coefficient of variance. Newly constructed apartment buildings with partial finishing interior within city boundaries are selected expecting their price to vary only because of different amount of externalities and public goods available inside district/region of selected building or provided by the actual building itself. The results show that up to 29% of the real estate market value is influenced by public or nonmarket goods. Implications of further research suggest controlling for market segmentation and architectural quality variables