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As an emerging visualization technology, virtual reality (VR) falls into the dilemma of having great potential but a low adoption degree in the architectural, engineering and construction (AEC) industry. However, few studies paid attention to studying barriers affecting VR’s adoption and their inner mechanisms. This makes AEC users hard to catch the key points for VR’s implementations. This study aims to get a clear structure of these barriers and provide insights for the improvement.

First, 12 major VR-AEC adoption barriers were identified by a systematic literature review and expert interviews (EI). Second, EI and similarity aggregation method were conducted to achieve reliable barrier relationships. Third, interpretive structural modeling was used to establish a multi-level model for barriers. Finally, ten crucial barriers were targeted with a comprehensive strategy framework.

The findings help AEC stakeholders get a thorough understanding of the VR-AEC adoption barriers. Besides, the inner mechanism among barriers is revealed and analyzed, followed by a systematic strategy framework. It is anticipated that users could conduct more effective VR-AEC promotions in the future.

This paper is the first to propose a comprehensive literature review on the VR-AEC adoption barriers. In addition, this paper is novel in building a hierarchy model that explores barriers’ inner mechanism, where structural strategies are proposed.

This paper examines the relationship between traditional timber frame structure and the diasporic identity of the Southern Fujianese Chinese community in West Malaysia. It analyses the cultural semiotics of Southern Fujianese traditional Chinese temple timber frame structure architectural language. This study addresses the under-examined domain of Chinese cultural identity representation through the architecture of traditional Chinese temples in Malaysia. It seeks to understand its underlying structure and process involved in revealing its disposition within the cultural phenomena from the perspective of Chinese cultural semiotics.

Selected Southern Fujianese traditional Chinese temples in West Malaysia built between the 18th to the 19th century that retain the traditional timber frame structure were investigated through field survey and focused publication review. Historical interpretive analysis and typological analysis supplement the cultural semiotics analysis to assess the timber frame structure attributes concerning architectural language expressions.

Findings reveal that the architectural language signifiers of the structural disposition of the timber framework and its corresponding formal articulation establish a clear statement of the Southern Fujian Chinese cultural identity.

The evaluation of the cultural identity signifiers helps to understand the underlying structure and process of the Chinese cultural semiotics in architecture. Results of this research substantiate the significance of timber frame structure in preserving the architectural heritage of the Southern Fujianese traditional Chinese temples. They provide important references for conservation and cultural studies of such building typology.

This chapter explores how architecture is used as a signifier in the development and promotion of urban megaprojects (UMPs). It argues that these projects rely on architecture to gain visibility. First, UMPs need to be highly visible in order to justify their exceptional status and second, they have to be visibly new and different in order to initiate the desired symbolic transformations with which they are attributed. Drawing on the case studies of HafenCity in Hamburg and Donau City in Vienna the chapter traces the logics of using architecture as a signifier and means of legitimizing the UMP. Data on the planning history of the two case studies, their administrative and institutional frameworks and the overall urban development strategies is combined with a qualitative text and image centered analysis of marketing material, planning documents, and press articles. The discussion shows how visibility is achieved by very different means. The question of how to distinguish the UMP from other projects and of how to make it uniquely identified with the particular city guides the debate in both cases. However, the lines of argument are not predictable or easily comparable from city to city and “global architecture” emerges as a contradictory and relative concept. Based on a succinct review of the related literature the chapter disputes the alleged uniformity of UMPs and argues for a meaning and discourse-oriented approach to the analysis of architecture as vehicle of urban change and political legitimation.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the performance impact of supplier involvement, based on the knowing processes and contingencies of knowledge-based view. Ambidextrous innovations (i.e. exploitative innovation and exploratory innovation) are taken as intermediary processes. Furthermore, product smartness is considered to clarify boundary conditions.

The ordinary least squares regression was conducted, based on the two-source data collected from 125 high-tech firms in China.

Ambidextrous innovations positively mediate the relationship between supplier involvement and financial performance. Product smartness weakens the indirect impact via exploratory innovation but not exploitative innovation.

This study reveals the knowledge application and recombination mechanisms of ambidextrous innovations to mediate between supplier involvement and financial performance. It also highlights digital encapsulation function of product smartness as a contingent factor.

By comparing urban regeneration mechanisms implemented in two declining urban centers, this paper attempts to examine the usefulness of hybrid planning strategies over a more traditional statutory land-use plan, considering their respective effectiveness for introducing urban change. The paper compares the planning and implementation methods used to generate urban revitalization in Lev Ha-Ir (City Heart) in Tel Aviv and Hadar in Haifa. In reviewing these two case studies, the paper considers the role of the residents in each area and various bottom-up local initiatives. The paper examines how these initiatives were met and utilized by the planners and by the municipality, and how they acheived the goal of urban revitalization. The approch towards and the use of local assetes of each locality is considered, as well as the way they were implemented in the revitelazing plan. The paper draws attention to official enterprises and planning mechanisms that utilize and even encourage unofficial residents' actions and activities. The findings from the two case studies suggest the importance of mediating between bottom-up initiatives of individual residents, community organizations, and local institutions, and top-down institutional municipal systems, as early in the process as possible, in order to make both the statutory land-use plan and the hybrid planning strategies more effective.

This systematic literature review focusses on original research that examines the effect of persuasive architectural interventions on stimulating health behaviour. This paper gives an overview of the empirical evidence and aims to examine the evidence for health behaviour change through architectural interventions and the underlying theoretical pathways and mechanisms using social cognitive theory.

This paper reviewed 40 peer-reviewed articles found through Scopus, Google Scholar, Web of Science, PubMed and a supplementary hand search and examined for effect, type of interventions, type of behaviour and underlying mechanisms using social cognitive theory.

This review shows that architectural interventions can stimulate healthy behaviour. However, much of the research focusses on specific health behaviours (physical activity), in specific target groups (children or older adults) and with specific types of interventions (supplying provisions). Furthermore, the effect of the physical environment on cognitive factors should be taken into consideration.

Hardly any research on smart architectural interventions for health behaviour change exists, but combining insights from product design and built environment has the potential to impact designing for health behaviour change.

Stimulating certain types of health behaviour can positively contribute to health goals and has been the focus of many health promotion practitioners over the years. The focus of health promotion interventions has primarily been on social and psychological factors. However, current research shows the importance of the physical environment as an influence on health behaviour. Potentially, with the use of smart technology, this effect could be enhanced.

The purpose of this paper is to identify and characterise bioclimatic strategies of traditional earthen architecture in a specific territory, the Valencian region of La Serranía. These constructions were built in relation to their surrounding geography or climate through several mechanisms facing the action of solar radiation, water, wind, etc.

The research methodology is based on a comparative analysis of selected case studies representing the constructions and typologies of traditional earthen heritage in a territory with similar geography and climate, albeit with certain zonal limitations.

The results show that these constructions built with earth offer a global solution to environmental conditioning factors of the region by a series of strategies formalised at urban, architectural and constructive level, either independently or jointly. Although climate variations affect its behaviour, traditional earthen architecture seeks compactness to reach indoor comfort.

Traditional earthen architecture is a valuable heritage in danger which has been devaluated until several years in this remote region. Therefore, prior knowledge of its bioclimatic strategies and formal constitution is essential to establishing heritage intervention criteria and proposals adapted to its geographical, socio-cultural and socio-economic context.

This study examines the built environment in the preserved historic settlements of the Najd region of Saudi Arabia, providing insight into shared core concepts and forms that were commonly shared across the settlement's dwellings before the Kingdom's period of modernization.

Space syntax convex mapping and the justified access graphing as the main techniques to examine several internal elements at the building level. The study created elements such as connectivity, access graphs and depth graphs to understand the integration and placement of these elements to overcome surrounding forces. Also, the author combined graphical architectural analysis with space syntax techniques to understand the spatial and physical integration in three-dimensional space. This helped to establish a link between what is two-dimensional (the building layout) with what is three-dimensional (the physical form).

The paper found that the hierarchical order of internal spaces and the order's role in shaping the physical form served to satisfy the social behavior and environmental conditions. As a result, all building elements generated with the guidance of the main culturally rooted in support with internal spaces order. This order of spaces inside the house led the urban spatial hierarchy to connect but not conflict, as the whole process of generating the physical forms is to complement each other and to produce a unified built environment.

This study is limited to Najdi dwelling form and culture, the author believes expanding the number of study samples in the five traditional settlements or expanding the scope of the study to examine other Saudi regions may result in new findings and insights.

The paper offers and discusses two mechanisms on how to enhance the process of designing modern houses in similar cultures or elsewhere in the world. Also, how traditional dwelling elements generated with the guidance of the main, culturally rooted values and beliefs, in support of the internal spatial order.

This study aims to explore the relationship between folk religious place-making and the development of urban public spaces and summarize its influence on community network construction and daily behavior to discover the authentic practices and role of folk faith culture in social space.

Taking Macau's Shi Gandang Temple and its belief culture as an example, on-site research, historical evidence and interviews were used to elaborate and analyze the processes of place-making, social functions, management mechanisms and folk culture to establish a new perception of folk religious place-making in contemporary urban spaces.

The article argues that the culture of folk beliefs profoundly influences urban spaces and the social management system of Macau and has a positive significance in building the local community and geopolitical relations. In addition, it suggests that the participation of folk religious places in local practices is important as key nodes and emotional hubs of local networks, reconciling conflicts between communities of different backgrounds and driving urban spaces toward diversity while forming a positive interaction and friendly cooperation between regional development and self-contained management mechanisms, governance models and cultural orientations.

This study takes an architectural and anthropological perspective of the impact of faith on urban spaces and local governance, using the Shi Gandang Temple in Macau as an example, to complement related studies.

This paper highlights the importance of transdisciplinary studies in times of crisis. In the first part, the study shows the benefits of the introduction of literature on biology to better understand the evolutionary dynamics of architecture.

The focus of the research concerns architectural exaptation. In biology, exaptation is a functional shift of a structure that already had a prior but different function. We will also learn that, in biology, all creative systems are redundant and involve variability and diversity.

As a conclusion, through the comparison between biology and architecture, we will, therefore, try to build an architectural taxonomy that demonstrates how indeterminism is not a subcategory of design. Instead, design paradigms in which redundancy and variable diversity of structures reflect functionalism constitute an equivalent and essential complement with respect to design determinism.

It demonstrates how architectural exaptation, intended as an indeterministic and radical mode of design, can contribute to overcoming the current global crisis because structural redundancy is frequently functional, mostly in ever-changing and unstable environments. For instance, the failure of a planned function of a city can be an opportunity to re-use a structure designed for an obsolete function to respond to unexpected constraints.