Suchergebnisse

As an antidote to the substandard tenement apartment, the ideal of the "small house" (Kleinhaus) was ubiquitous in housing debates in Germany before World War One. Denoting a modestly sized two-story family house aligned with the street, it had its origins in the Middle Ages, during which it was constructed to serve the humble domestic needs of urban craftsmen who lived and worked in thriving trade cities including Lübeck, Bremen, Hamburg, Augsburg, Nuremberg, and Ulm. For modern promoters of low-density alternatives to the tenement, the Kleinhaus was an ideal model for mass appropriation. Unlike foreign and untranslatable dwelling models like the "villa" and the "cottage", the Kleinhaus conveyed something that was both urban and quintessentially Germanic. It was thus enlisted by housing reformers to strengthen local cultural identity whilst raising the standards of the nation's housing stock. This article examines the significance of the Kleinhaus in fostering dialogue between the fields of architecture and planning, and considers its embeddedness in a wider project of cultural nationalism in pre-war Germany.

During the Cold War, architecture became a crucial signifier of competing concepts of modernization and new national identities in the "Global South". This book explores the networks and interactions in the field of architecture and construction between actors from and within socialist countries and from countries of the Global South. The authors reveal the maniforld forms of cooperation between the East, the South and the West, including the cross-border entanglements within the South and the East. Using approaches from the history of planning, construction and architectural design, they analyze many building projects against the background of economic interests, political strategies and conflicts. The scope of projects focused on involve actors from Yugoslavia, USSR and GDR to projects in Cuba, Ghana, China and Vietnam.

The European Union is pushing to achieve a sustainable, competitive and secure energy supply in Europe. This has translated into significant long-term renewable energy targets towards 2050, and the ambition to improve the European grid. A large share of this development is expected to occur in the North Sea. This paper investigates which transmission architecture is the most beneficial to integrate large shares of renewable energy in the North Sea region, and the consequences of the planning horizon when planning such a system towards 2050 are analysed. This is achieved by performing investment optimisation of generation and transmission for different scenarios. It is found that: 1) an integrated offshore grid configuration planned over a long planning horizon leads to cost minimization; 2) the grid topology is not likely to influence the penetration of variable renewable energy, but it will affect the contribution of each variable renewable energy type and the system costs; and 3) not taking the future into account when developing the energy system is likely to lead to a more expensive system. These results remark the importance of long-term planning horizon for energy systems and grid expansion and calls for a political focus on planning and international cooperation.

Egypt has been experiencing challenging economic, social and political disturbance during the end of the twentieth century and towards the beginning of the twenty-first. With its fast expanding population, high consumption rate and economic deficit, the Egyptian community continues to experience a low quality of living. These issues contributed greatly to the uprising, following the Tunisian model, in January, 2011. However, the political change that followed did not help a lot, as development strategies are still far from being sustainable. In the beginning of the millennium, Egypt experienced an 8.6% energy deficit, followed by a growing energy crisis [1]. Knowing that almost 50% of the energy produced in Egypt is consumed inside buildings [2], environmentally conscious architecture can be a very powerful tool in development plans, as it can reasonably reduce the consumption of energy and other resources and enhance the quality of living for people. This work analyzes the supposed role of environmentally conscious architecture and, hence, evaluates its importance as a major component of national development plans in the near future. The analysis encompasses a review of the status quo in terms of consumption patterns and required services and, then, compares it with the case in which environmentally conscious architecture is adopted.