Recent ucb_ced_arch_oapdeposits items

Salvage Salvation Counterculture Trash as a Cultural Resource

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Salvage Salvation Counterculture Trash as a Cultural Resource

Sequential Multimaterial Additive Manufacturing of Functionally Graded Biopolymer Composites

Mon, 7 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Cellulose, chitin, and pectin are three of the most abundant natural materials on Earth. Despite this, large-scale additive manufacturing with these biopolymers is used only in limited applications and frequently relies on extensive refinement processes or plastic additives. We present novel developments in a digital fabrication and design approach for multimaterial three-dimensional printing of biopolymers. Specifically, our computational and digital fabrication workflow-sequential multimaterial additive manufacturing-enables the construction of biopolymer composites with continuously graded transitional zones using only a single extruder. We apply this method to fabricate structures on length scales ranging from millimeters to meters. Transitional regions between materials created using these methods demonstrated comparable mechanical properties with homogenous mixtures of the same composition. We present a computational workflow and physical system support a novel and flexible...

Solar exoskeletons – An integrated building system combining solar gain control with structural efficiency

Mon, 7 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We propose the use of solar exoskeletons, an integrated building system that combines material efficiency in structural load transfer with passive solar gain control. This offers an impactful way to respond to the UN climate goals, as the architecture and engineering disciplines face the challenge of delivering low carbon buildings. While reducing operational and embodied emissions is often considered independently, we can show how approaching them in tandem, through a novel building system, can offer significant savings. With large spans for maximum spatial flexibility and full glazing maximizing daylight, high-rise buildings are often suboptimal in terms of their material usage from steel frame construction and cooling demand from uncontrolled solar gains. We view solar exoskeletons as a sustainable pathway for future high-rise structures – combining solar gain control through external shading with a highly efficient structural system optimized for lateral loads in tall buildings....

Automated floorplan generation in architectural design: A review of methods and applications

Mon, 7 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Accommodating predicted population growth and urbanization within the UN Climate Goals poses a significant challenge for disciplines that engage with the built environment. High performing buildings of the future should offer spatial quality for their users while utilizing resources as efficiently as possible for both construction and operation. In this review, we survey the value proposition of automatic floorplan layout generation methods and their opportunities for design guidance, feedback, and optimization in the creation of new buildings, in addition to applications for inventory characterization to survey existing housing stock and guide building policy and code. We divide existing methods into three categories: bottom-up methods, top-down methods, and referential methods. We explore advantages and challenges for each approach and propose a hybrid method for future building layout automation that utilizes a new set of metrics to create sustainable buildings of the future.

Cold War Modernism

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Chapter 4 examines how politically driven interpretations of modernism during the 1930s facilitated its utilization in the context of the Cold War. While the Stalinist cultural revolution in the USSR rejected modernity as bourgeois, two exhibitions by New York’s Museum of Modern Art celebrated the American and international potential of the “International Style” modernism. The influx of Bauhaus masters to the US further reinforced these claims. Following the defeat of the Third Reich, West German designers employed International Style modernism as a means of visual denazification. In the Soviet Union, architectural modernity was selectively embraced as a symbol of socialist progress under Khrushchev’s leadership. Mass-produced housing using Western construction methods addressed the housing crisis, while bespoke monuments showcased the achievements of state socialism. International expositions served as platforms for showcasing the architectural prowess of the First and Second...

Historicizing the U.S. Model Home

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Historicizing the U.S. Model Home

Sharing in a setting + Promoting community through territorial sharing

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Sharing in a setting + Promoting community through territorial sharing

Informing dwelling (The dialogue between practice and place)

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Informing dwelling (The dialogue between practice and place)

No evidence that short-term exposure to window views improved final exam performance: A three-year randomized controlled trial in a university lecture course

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

No evidence that short-term exposure to window views improved final exam performance: A three-year randomized controlled trial in a university lecture course

Mechanics-Guided Member Grouping for Cross-Section Optimization with Heterogeneous Graphs

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Structural member sizing directly influences material consumption, embodied carbon, and overall structural efficiency. Recent advances in graph representations have opened new possibilities for structural optimization, with applications such as topology optimization and surrogate modeling. We propose a graph-based representation learning and clustering pipeline that uses structural simulation results to support member sizing and cross-section optimization. In this representation, connection points and linear members in the structural system are modeled as two node types in a heterogeneous graph. Mechanical responses, geometric properties, and topological information are encoded as features, and structural context is propagated through message passing. We then train a Heterogeneous Graph Attention Network (HeteroGAT) encoder with a contrastive objective constructed from mechanically similar and topologically adjacent member pairs. Finally, we cluster the learned embeddings with Gaussian...

Capturing structural intuition: Human-gated imitation learning for structural design with flow matching

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Structural design is deeply expertise-driven: engineers rely on intuition, experience, and both explicit and tacit knowledge of load paths, structural typologies, first principles and in-depth calculations to arrive at a design solution. Current computational workflows in structural design largely focus on optimization, form-finding and dimensioning of members, where the design space is predefined and algorithms iteratively refine a solution. Machine learning, however, opens the possibility to explore broader design spaces in which geometry and topology are not fixed in advance. Imitation learning (IL), a paradigm closely related to reinforcement learning, offers a pathway to integrate skills from design examples, rather than explicit rulesets. Recently, flow matching, a generative framework that learns a vector field transporting noise toward data over time, has emerged as a prominent method for modeling complex, multimodal action distributions that standard one-shot predictors...

Collective Comfort: Airing on the Side of Possibilities in a Time of Warming

Mon, 6 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

“Collective Comfort” reimagines cooling centers as dynamic community spaces that move beyond air conditioning to foster collective well-being through enriched architectural programming and opportunistic material thinking.

Of Envelopes and Air

Mon, 6 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Of Envelopes and Air

Demonstrating the reliability of randomized measurement and verification for switchable control retrofits using a large open-source dataset

Fri, 5 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Conventional measurement and verification (M&V) methods for estimating energy savings rely on comparing pre- and post-retrofit performance. They are often time-consuming and unreliable, especially when non-routine events, such as step changes or more gradual changes in building operation, occur during the M&V process. When those events are unrelated to the retrofit intervention and significantly affect building energy consumption, the results will be confounded when the analyst applies the conventional M&V method. In this study, we demonstrated that switchable interventions, such as most HVAC control retrofits, can benefit from a new M&V method that randomly samples whether to implement the baseline or the intervention strategy at a fixed interval (e.g., daily). We tested this novel randomized M&V method on a large public dataset (hourly energy data over 2 years for 639 buildings) covering various climate zones and commercial building types, using a virtual...

Envelope-Driven Comfort Risk in Residential Demand Response

Fri, 5 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Residential demand response (DR) is a valuable resource for grid reliability, but remains challenging because the highly heterogeneous residential building stock leads to widely varying and hard-to-predict load and comfort responses during DR events. Although prior research has estimated the technical potential of DR-capable technologies for achieving energy demand savings, little is known about how they affect thermal comfort. In particular, it remains unclear how indoor thermal conditions due to DR depend on the thermal envelope characteristics of the housing stock. To address this gap, this study provides a systematic, location-specific assessment of indoor thermal performance during DR-events across the US housing stock using both typical DR weather data and detailed building metadata. We evaluate how envelope characteristics influence indoor temperatures during realistic simulated summer and winter DR events across 37 US locations, applying both temperature threshold and...

Personal comfort systems for adults with intellectual disabilities

Fri, 5 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This study examines how personal comfort systems (PCS) support thermal adaptation among adults with intellectual disabilities living in energy-poor households in Chile. Participants (n = 8) in two identical social-housing units completed two in-home field campaigns: winter (June–August 2023; 10 weeks) and summer (December 2023–March 2024; 14 weeks). The study combined an adapted daily point-in-time thermal comfort questionnaire, continuous indoor dry-bulb temperature monitoring (15 min), and pre-/post-season interviews. Indoor conditions frequently fell outside reference comfort thresholds (92.6% of winter temperatures < 21.5°C; 64.1% of summer temperatures > 26°C). Using participant-level paired comparisons with thermal preference ‘No change’ as a comfort proxy, PCS use showed no systematic winter increase (median Δ = –0.014; p = 0.944) but a consistent summer increase (median Δ = 0.126; p = 0.014). Interview accounts indicated that PCS supported everyday adaptation, while...

From ‘What-is’ to ‘What-if’ in human-factor analysis: A post-occupancy evaluation case

Fri, 5 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Human-factor analysis typically employs correlation analysis and significance testing to identify relationships between variables. However, these descriptive (‘what-is’) methods, while effective for identifying associations, are often insufficient for answering causal (‘what-if’) questions. Their application in such contexts often overlooks confounding and colliding variables, potentially leading to bias and suboptimal or incorrect decisions. We advocate for explicitly distinguishing descriptive from interventional questions in human-factor analysis, and applying causal inference frameworks specifically to these problems to prevent methodological mismatches. This approach disentangles complex variable relationships and enables counterfactual reasoning. Using post-occupancy evaluation (POE) data from the Center for the Built Environment’s (CBE) Occupant Survey as a demonstration case, we show how causal discovery generates testable hypotheses about intervention hierarchies and...

Conformal 3D printing on bending-active formwork - exploring a new approach to the fabrication of wide-spanning structures

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This study introduces a novel methodological framework that combines bending-active structures with conformal 3D printing to address current limitations in architectural-scale additive manufacturing. Traditional horizontal slicing and planar layer deposition present inherent constraints for fabricating large-span elements such as roofs and floor slabs, while conventional approaches to curved forms typically require resource-intensive formwork. We propose an integrated approach that utilizes bending-active structures as material-efficient substrates for 3D printing, potentially serving dual roles as both formwork and supplementary reinforcement. The methodology incorporates a multi-axis robotic platform alongside preliminary design, software, and hardware adaptations to enable material deposition that follows structural force vectors. Through initial experimental studies at various scales, we examine the fundamental aspects of this approach – including material testing, formwork...

Automatic Simplification Of Complex Building Geometry For Whole-building Energy Simulations.

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Automatic Simplification Of Complex Building Geometry For Whole-building Energy Simulations.

Earthquake Loss Estimates and Policy Implications for Nonductile Concrete Buildings in Los Angeles

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The collapse potential of nonductile concrete buildings represents a substantial life safety hazard globally that can be mitigated through carefully crafted policy. Mitigation policy should be approached incrementally by (1) understanding problem scale, (2) screening for low‐ and high‐risk buildings, (3) performing engineering analysis for potentially vulnerable buildings, and (4) retrofit or replacement of high‐risk structures. This research addresses initial stages of this sequence for Los Angeles, California. The intent was to investigate approaches for informing mitigation priorities by: characterizing the inventory of approximately 1,500 pre‐1976 concrete buildings; estimating risk, including identification of building types that contribute most substantially to the risk; and investigating the impact of retrofit policy alternatives. Loss estimates for scenario events are based on the HAZUS™ Advanced Engineering Building Module. Depending on model assumptions, losses range...

Rethinking resilience policy and practice

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The concept of resilience has become a part of the larger discourse not only for the engineering professions involved in the design of buildings and infrastructure, but also for disaster researchers in many academic fields as well as policymakers in governments at the local and national levels. The concept has evolved significantly over the past 10–20 years. In the early 2000s, the engineering community was coming to grips with the two paradigms of resilience: (1) a more technical approach to design that focused on predictability and stability in a steady state; and (2) a broader definition originating in systems theory and ecology that focused on the ability to reorganize while undergoing change. The concept of resilience continues to be redefined, in part because of the human and community impacts highlighted by the COVID pandemic, and natural and climate-induced disasters. Recent experience suggests that there are gaps in the narrower technical/engineering framing of resilience...

Influence of overhead HVAC and aerosol control strategies on coarse mode particle dispersion and exposure in a full-scale room experiment

Thu, 2 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Coarse mode respiratory aerosols can carry viral loads over long distances and have very different dynamics than submicron particles, but experimental studies under realistic conditions remain limited. To study the differential impacts on exposure under different mixing conditions, we co-released 7–10 µm particles and carbon dioxide (CO2)—which served as an indicator of gas and submicron particle dynamics—in a 158 m3 room at LBNL’s FLEXLAB facility with an overhead heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) system. The room was arranged as a distanced meeting then a classroom with eight heated manikins and a researcher. Spatial variability was measured using 16 particle counters and 22–26 CO2 sensors throughout the space. Conditions included: HVAC off or supply air at 1000-1060 m3 h-1 at neutral, cooling, or heating temperatures; with and without 20% outdoor air; and added HVAC filtration, portable air cleaners (PACs), or a physical barrier between the speaker and occupants....

Enduring empire: U.S. statecraft and race-making in the Philippines

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Enduring empire: U.S. statecraft and race-making in the Philippines

A hypergraph model shows the carbon reduction potential of effective space use in housing

Thu, 11 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Humans spend over 90% of their time in buildings, which account for 40% of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and are a leading driver of climate change. Incentivizing more sustainable construction, building codes are used to enforce indoor comfort standards and minimum energy efficiency requirements. However, they currently only reward measures such as equipment or envelope upgrades and disregard the actual spatial configuration and usage. Using a new hypergraph model that encodes building floorplan organization and facilitates automatic geometry creation, we demonstrate that space efficiency outperforms envelope upgrades in terms of operational carbon emissions in 72%, 61% and 33% of surveyed buildings in Zurich, New York, and Singapore. Using automatically generated floorplans in a case study in Zurich further increased access to daylight by up to 24%, revealing that auto-generated floorplans have the potential to improve the quality of residential spaces in terms of environmental...

Structural design as a cost competitive and scalable carbon mitigation strategy

Wed, 10 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The built environment is responsible for a large percentage of the global carbon footprint. Many generations of structural designers have developed material and structural systems for the efficient use of natural resources and low-carbon designs. The accumulated present knowledge we have today around material efficiency would be sufficient to design and build with a much lower carbon footprint, if it weren’t for a major constraint: cost. However, current construction economics do not account for the real costs of materials, including their environmental externalities. Considering the actual societal costs associated with embodied carbon emissions could suddenly make material efficiency and low carbon materials more economical. In this paper, we compare the cost of carbon avoidance or storage in the built environment through structural design with other carbon capture technologies. We show how financial incentives for low-carbon design could support carbon reduction targets and...

Measuring What Matters: A Benchmarking System for Occupant Satisfaction with Workspace Environments

Mon, 27 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Occupant satisfaction with the physical environment of the workplace is a key metric of office building performance. To date, no clear consensus exists on how to fairly compare satisfaction levels between buildings or benchmark workspace designs. This study analyses 93,153 Post-Occupancy Evaluation (POE) survey responses from the United States, Australia, Japan, and Singapore to identify systematic differences between countries and establish empirical benchmarks across key aspects of office workspaces. Results show that Singaporean offices achieve the highest overall workspace satisfaction (79%), followed by the United States (68%), Australia (65%) and Japan (39%). The United States and Australian databases display broadly comparable patterns across workspace aspects, with only minor differences in temperature, acoustics, and privacy. In contrast, significant differences are observed in the Japanese and Singaporean datasets compared with Western counterparts. Rather than applying...

Structures and Architecture

Thu, 31 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

From Wood to Tree explores designing with wood’s natural degradation processes. This case-study proposes a sustainable approach for reintegrating processed preprocessed lumber into forest ecosystems, highlighting the importance of deadwood in supporting nutrient cycling, fostering fungal growth, enhancing soil health and providing habitats for saplings, animals, seeds, and other living organisms essential to local forest ecologies. This design-research study establishes a framework for re-evaluating conventional approaches to material circularity, which predominantly emphasize material preservation. Instead, it proposes an alternative perspective that integrates biodegradation as a fundamental process in ecological and architectural design.

Window View Quality: Why It Matters and What We Should Do

Thu, 3 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Window View Quality: Why It Matters and What We Should Do

Improving Air Quality using Smart Thermostats: Minimizing Indoor Exposure to Wildfire-Generated Fine Particulate Matter (PM2.5)

Thu, 3 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Fine particulate matter (PM2.5) contributes to millions of excess deaths worldwide each year. Wildfires are a major source of PM2.5 and sheltering indoors using central air filtration is effective in reducing indoor PM2.5 levels during an event. We analyzed smart thermostat usage in California homes during the 2020 wildfire season and found that central air is not generally utilized for air filtration. We evaluated the effectiveness of operating central air systems to reduce indoor PM2.5 levels using a mass balance model. Simulation results showed up to a 56% reduction in indoor PM2.5 during wildfire days from central air filtration. Installing a MERV 13 filter, as opposed to a MERV 10 filter, can further lower indoor PM2.5 concentrations by up to 31%. Using central air systems for filtration can match the efficiency of four portable air cleaners in an average Californian home. These results may serve as the basis for an automated control logic to utilize central air filtration...

Cooked Air

Thu, 22 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Since 1996, ASHRAE Standard 62.2 has provided guidelines for residential ventilation. As ventilation becomes increasingly scientised, quantifiable, and reliant on hyper-specific equipment, technical literacy on ventilation has narrowed. The relationship between architecture, inhabitants and air management has become increasingly reliant on ventilation standards, in turn increasing reliance on technical specialists, and creating a gap in ventilation knowledge. Through an examination of ASHRAE Standard 62.2, this essay asks why is it that, as ventilation processes become increasingly measurable, there is an equal tendency to reverse awareness in relation to the human sensation, when the standard itself underlines the reality of both phenomenal and intellectual knowledge towards air quality assessment. Furthermore, if architecture’s domain centres on formal, aesthetic, and material logics, is an expanded literacy on air management necessary to address mechanical equipment within...

Collective Comfort: A Public Program for Heat Resilience

Thu, 22 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

American desert cities designed and built at the turn of the century, in collaboration with the advent of air-conditioning technologies, have been able to house millions of Americans by relying primarily on fossil-fuels to supply relief from extreme hot weather. The Phoenix Metro Area, or The Valley of The Sun as it is known to locals, experienced 145 days reaching tempera-tures over 100˚F in 2020 according to the National Weather Service. In July of 2023, Phoenix set a new record with 31 days straight of over 110-degree heat. The increased probability of a longer-lasting heat-wave, combined with the over demand of electrical power supply during extreme weather events can be catastrophic, especially to the most vulnerable communities.2 As climate change intensifies, desert cities like Phoenix must innovate and adapt, ensuring the safety and well-being of all residents, particularly those in high-risk areas.

From Exigent to Adaptive

Thu, 22 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The divorce between the disciplines of architectural design and systems engineering in conjunction with the scientisation of comfort-standards encourages a year-round and day-round comfort routine to the contemporary human. In his proposal for Air Architecture, French artist Yves Klein proposes the opposite: an architecture devoid of the responsibility to temper human environs. Mechanical machinery enables an architecture to come, while Klein’s proposal for an Architecture of Air imagines a future adaptive-human. Before the popularisation of interior weather, Native populations employed adaptations, or experience a ‘change of human sensitivity’, much like native plants and animals do in order to survive their environment, much like the transformation that Klein describes. In a world where resource reduction and scaremongering tactics regarding climate change do not accomplish enough, we must think towards a more enriched human existence, for a thriving, strengthened human race....

The Unbearable Tightness of Building

Thu, 22 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Unbearable Tightness of Building

Embodied carbon in mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems: A critical literature review

Thu, 27 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The environmental impacts of mechanical, electrical and plumbing (MEP) systems have been largely overlooked and are commonly excluded from building-scale life cycle assessments (LCAs). Understanding the impacts and reduction potential of these systems is crucial for decarbonizing retrofits and new buildings. Therefore, we have conducted a critical review of LCA studies on MEP systems in buildings, selected using a systematic method, to identify: 1) estimates for upfront embodied [A1-A5] and replacement [B4] carbon impacts; 2) LCA reporting fundamentals needed to ensure transparency and interpretability of results; 3) future research directions. Since 2016, 54 studies presented sufficient information to investigate presented methodologies and LCA results of MEP systems. The review reinforces the need to report environmental impacts by individual life cycle stages and building or system elements to interpret influencing factors and enable further utility of results. Two studies...

Effectiveness of triethylene glycol disinfection on airborne MS2 bacteriophage under diverse building operational parameters

Tue, 27 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Effectiveness of triethylene glycol disinfection on airborne MS2 bacteriophage under diverse building operational parameters

A case-control study of behavioural and built environment determinants of COVID-19 transmission in sheltered markets

Tue, 27 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

A case-control study of behavioural and built environment determinants of COVID-19 transmission in sheltered markets

Cozie Apple: An iOS mobile and smartwatch application for environmental quality satisfaction and physiological data collection