How can Hong Kong's housing development escape its unrelenting uniformity? How might architects and developers bypass strict planning and building regulations? How might they add more value by creative design? How might they realize innovative and attractive housing towers, towers that would radically change Hong Kong?Hong Kong's notoriously strict building regulations impose a relentless uniformity on the city. This book aims to propose new indicators to achieve a proper balance between popu...

At the main point of intersection between the railway and the city, stations are key elements in the organization of the intermodal transport as well as catalysts of urban developments in metropolises, medium and small cities. The focus of this publication is to explore the enrichment of a renewed approach of railway stations as intermodal nodes, therefore acting as breeding grounds for both urban and social developments.

In this publication, invited experts from practice and knowledge instit...

This research aimed at understanding how occupants use energy in their homes to make themselves feel more comfortable. This was done to propose customized environmental characteristics that could improve the occupants’ comfort while reducing energy consumption. To conceptualize such bespoke environmental features, occupant archetypes were produced based on the occupants’ intentions and motivations behind comfort behaviours.

A mixed-methods human-centered design approach was developed for ...

In this brief, accessible volume, the authors – an urban philosopher and a mathematician-physicist – explain the surprising new findings from the sciences that are beginning to transform environmental design in the modern era. Michael Mehaffy and Nikos Salingaros explore fractals, networks, self-organization, dynamical systems and other revolutionary ideas, describing them to non-science readers in a direct and engaging way. The book also examines fascinating new topics of design, includi...

Urban Megaprojects – here referred to as Grands Projets – are increasing in number all over the world. They have become major drivers for urban intensification and oftentimes set out to take a city’s expansion to the next level. As such, Grands Projets can be read as manifestations of the larger economic and political agenda of their city and they offer a productive moment to investigate current urban trends in a globally connected form of concentrated urbanization.

The book looks into ...

Anchored by Hüppauf and Umbach’s notion of Vernacular Modernism and focusing on architecture and urbanism during Franco’s dictatorship from 1939 to 1975, this thesis challenges the hegemonic and Northern-oriented narrative of urban modernity. It develops arguments about the reciprocal influences between the urban and the rural that characterize Spanish modernity, and analyzes the intense architectural and urban debates that resulted from the crisis of 1898, as they focused on the importa...

This publication presents a selection of design proposals submitted for the 14th session of Europan, the Netherlands. Europan is an urban-architectural competition for design professionals (architects, urban planners, landscape architects, artists, ecologists, and social geographers) under the age of 40. The competition is organized every two years in several European countries, around a common theme, and involving sites provided by cities and/or developers. Europan NL has partnered with the ...

Spring 1934. In a boggy clay polder south of Amsterdam, the first sods are cut for what would become the largest urban forest in the world: Amsterdamse Bos. Over the next decades, the so-called Boschplan expanded into a unique project. Creating woodland in the polder was a technological tour de force, and Cornelis van Eesteren and Jakoba Mulder’s modern design caused a sensation at home and abroad. Equally unique were the conditions that surrounded the Bos’ birth. Amidst the hardships of ...