Slab Block Research Articles

Rethinking Shanghai's urban housing

Since the 1980s, Shanghai saw the massive growth of residential development in the city core, with the imminent erasure of the historical urban fabric, especially of the form of urban housing known as the lilong. As new developments take on limited typologies of towers and slab blocks, it becomes important to ask whether there are sustainable alternatives to urban housing in such a historically rich city. The paper discusses a design studio experiment at the Department of Architecture at the National University of Singapore, to see whether urban housing can take into account the urban transformation of the surrounding urban fabric and propose alternatives to the mega-superblocks favoured in the residential development of Shanghai.

Additional improvement of airborne and impact sound insulation of ceilings in prefabricated standard house-buildings

Earlier studies for the improvement on airborne and impact noise insulation of ceilings in prefabricated standard house-buildings has been continued by the support of the German Ministery of Building. The investigated slab blocks were erected in 1987 in Potsdam. The raw ceilings made of solid concrete have a thickness of 140 mm. These realized ceilings have a weighted airborne sound insulation of Rw′=49 dB and a normalized impact-sound pressure level of Ln,w′=77 dB (averaged over nine measurements). A selection of floating floor materials were built in and measured: dry laser constructions (with plaster and compound cement slabs), asphalt applied by melting, and anhydrite layers. The aim of the project was to fulfill the requirements (Rw′=54 dB, Ln,w′=53 dB) of German Standard DIN 4109 from 1989, minimizing construction height and cost. Based on earlier studies (Scholze, DAGA ’94) all floating floors with a height larger than 45 mm (asphalt floor 40 mm) have been improved to reach the requirements of DIN 4109. Using mineral wool as sound insulation material below the floating floor gave results up to Rw′=56 dB (maximum value) and Ln,w′=48 dB.