A tale of the new and the old: renovation of Yong’an Warehouse at Yangpu waterfront, Shanghai

The urban riverside space of Shanghai is transforming. How to renovate industrial heritage buildings to renew their vitality while retaining their historical memories and integrate them into the contemporary cityscape and today’s urban lifestyle is a common challenge encountered by contemporary architects. This article takes the renovation of Yong’an Warehouse as an example to showcase a typical heritage conservation project’s design process. The architects took different approaches to accommodate the different statuses of the twin buildings of the Yong’an Warehouse, seeking to create a symbiotic twin relationship between the past and the present. This project adopted a conservation and utilisation approach that involves multilateral participation, emphasising value-oriented mythology, and providing an alternative thread for the renovation of historical architecture.

RegARD: Symmetry-Based Coarse Registration of Smartphone’s Colorful Point Clouds with CAD Drawings for Low-Cost Digital Twin Buildings

Coarse registration of 3D point clouds plays an indispensable role for parametric, semantically rich, and realistic digital twin buildings (DTBs) in the practice of GIScience, manufacturing, robotics, architecture, engineering, and construction. However, the existing methods have prominently been challenged by (i) the high cost of data collection for numerous existing buildings and (ii) the computational complexity from self-similar layout patterns. This paper studies the registration of two low-cost data sets, i.e., colorful 3D point clouds captured by smartphones and 2D CAD drawings, for resolving the first challenge. We propose a novel method named `Registration based on Architectural Reflection Detection’ (RegARD) for transforming the self-symmetries in the second challenge from a barrier of coarse registration to a facilitator. First, RegARD detects the innate architectural reflection symmetries to constrain the rotations and reduce degrees of freedom. Then, a nonlinear optimization formulation together with advanced optimization algorithms can overcome the second challenge. As a result, high-quality coarse registration and subsequent low-cost DTBs can be created with semantic components and realistic appearances. Experiments showed that the proposed method outperformed existing methods considerably in both effectiveness and efficiency, i.e., 49.88% less error and 73.13% less time, on average. The RegARD presented in this paper first contributes to coarse registration theories and exploitation of symmetries and textures in 3D point clouds and 2D CAD drawings. For practitioners in the industries, RegARD offers a new automatic solution to utilize ubiquitous smartphone sensors for massive low-cost DTBs.

Hybrid optimization design approach of asymmetric base-isolation coupling system for twin buildings

This study proposes a new configuration of asymmetric base-isolation coupling system for the vibration control of twin buildings, and also presents an efficient design method of using a hybrid optimization technique integrated with preference-based dimensionality reduction technique. The purpose of the proposed optimization approach is to guarantee the compromise optimal solution of well-balancing the mutually conflicting design objectives. In order to demonstrate the proposed approach, the adjacent 20-story twin buildings subjected to earthquake excitations were adopted as target buildings and it was verified through numerical examples that the proposed optimization technique can successfully find the optimal solution to achieve various design objectives in a balanced manner. The seismic performance was also compared with the existing different-story connection system with uniform distribution of dampers. The comparative results of the seismic performances between two systems clearly demonstrate that the proposed system can achieve great performance improvement over the existing system while maintaining balanced design preferences. Thus, it can be concluded that the proposed system can be a very effective system for the vibration control problem of the twin buildings.

On isometries of twin buildings

A twin building consists of two buildings that are twinned by a codistance function. We prove that the local structure of a twin building uniquely determines the two buildings up to isomorphism. This has been known for twin buildings satisfying a technical condition (co).

Tuned mass damper asymmetric coupling system for vibration control of adjacent twin buildings

It is widely known that, in the vibration control problem of two adjacent structures, an inter-building coupling approach with the connecting damper is more efficient than an independent control approach with the bracing damper. However, the inter-building coupling approach is only valid for two different structures. When the two structures are twin, the existing inter-building coupling approach does not work properly due to the response symmetry of the twin structures. To overcome such limitations, this study proposes a new control approach based on the asymmetric coupling system where the twin buildings are coupled with the connecting damper and the additional damper is installed asymmetrically to perturb the symmetry of the twin structures. Under this intentional asymmetric condition, the proposed system can fully maintain the control efficiency of the conventional inter-building coupling approach. The tuned mass damper–based asymmetric coupling system is considered as a numerical example, and the independent control system with tuned mass damper is further taken into account for comparison purpose. For the optimal design of the proposed system, a multi-objective optimization technique was introduced, and the efficiency of the proposed approach has been investigated through the numerical simulations of the 10-story twin structures. By comparing the control performances of the optimal solutions between the proposed asymmetric coupling systems and the independent control system, it was verified that the proposed asymmetric coupling system can be a new efficient system for the vibration control of adjacent twin structures.

Full-Scale Measurements of Wind-Pressure Coefficients in Twin Medium-Rise Buildings

Wind pressure coefficients (Cp) are important values for building engineering applications, such as calculation of wind loads or wind-induced air infiltration and especially for tall buildings that are more susceptible to wind forces. Wind pressure coefficients are influenced by a plethora of parameters, such as building geometry, position on the façade, exposure or sheltering degree, and wind direction. On-site measurements have been performed on a twin medium-rise building complex. Differential pressure measurements have been employed in order to determine the wind pressure coefficients at various positions along the windward façades of the twin buildings. The measurements show that one building provides substantial wind shelter to its twin and the microclimatic effect is captured by the measured wind pressure coefficients. They also showed that the wind pressure coefficients vary significantly spatially along the windward façades of the medium-rise buildings. Furthermore, the pressure measurements showed that the wind pressure coefficients fluctuate significantly during the measuring period. The use of the fluctuating Cp values by means of probability distribution function (pdf) for the calculation of air infiltration has been evaluated. The results indicate that the air flows deriving using fluctuating Cp values are more accurate than the ones calculated by the conventional method of using mean Cp values.

Wind Power Generation Utilizing a Special Buildings Layout Design to Enhance the Wind Speed

There is a high growing interest for the use of wind power utilizing the building's layout design. The main objective of this work is to accelerate the wind speed before reaching the turbines by using spatial design of twin's buildings; this will generate more electric power. The variables which are affecting the wind speed directed to turbines are the angle between the twin buildings, the height and the length of buildings. The results have shown that the wind speed was accelerated in the intervening space between the buildings irrespective of the distance between the walls of adjacent buildings. Nine wind turbines were installed in three rows and three columns on the wall between the two buildings to generate the electricity. These turbines were located at the top of the wall to face higher wind speed because wind speed depends on height. Also the results showed that the wind speed was accelerated by about five times for the building layout design of the present study; while the generated power was about 125 times in comparison with the buildings do not have a spatial layout design (i.e. they do not enclose an angle between them). Finally the average power generated for the present work buildings dimensions with normal consumption of electricity will cover about 13% of the total normal consumption demand of the buildings (the power generated of the present work buildings layout design is about 0.23 GWh/year).