Search results

Single-family houses in Vancouver that were built prior to 1940 are a cache of wood from British Columbia (BC) old-growth forests. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the environmental and heritage values of maintaining this finite resource, assess the current policy and regulatory efforts of the City of Vancouver to save this resource and recommend further opportunities to improve and expedite these efforts.

Using the City of Vancouver as a case study, this paper identifies effective policy practices to encourage and facilitate salvaging and reusing old wood resources. Additionally, the paper discusses the key challenges and risks that need to be addressed for these policy approaches to succeed.

Pre-1940 houses constitute about 40 percent of single-family houses that have been demolished in Vancouver in the past few years. The City of Vancouver enacted the Green Demolition Bylaw in 2014 requiring a minimum of 75 percent diversion of demolition waste. However, wood from these houses has been mainly chipped and recycled as biomass fuel or landscape mulch rather than reused. The result shows that regulatory enforcement along with support for infrastructure development may be crucial to protect the remainder of this valuable heritage resource.

This paper considers the environmental and heritage values of wood elements used in old houses and recommends further policy and regulatory interventions to maximize wood salvaging and reuse. Since protecting entire houses may not be always feasible, retention of wood elements is proposed as an alternative path for maintaining and cherishing this ancient and irreplaceable heritage.

The purpose of this paper is to present research on vulnerability and service life indexes applied to cultural heritage buildings. The construction and rehabilitation industry is concerned with the maintenance of monuments and reducing the economic costs of urgent interventions by taking preventive conservation action in historic cities. By applying a vulnerability index or analyzing the service life of buildings, it is possible to reduce risk and optimize the identification, evaluation and prioritization of urgent monument restoration tasks in a city or a region to establish preventive conservation policies.

This research sets out the concepts of vulnerability and service life, focusing on their methodologies in comparison with other techniques for building diagnosis, discussing the differences between indexes that measure the vulnerability and service life of buildings.

The vulnerability of three churches in Seville (Spain) was studied by means of their vulnerability index, based on Delphi analysis, and the service life of these buildings was also assessed, based on artificial intelligence tools. Delphi and artificial intelligence tools allow us to compare and dovetail different scenarios and expert opinions. The degree of each monument’s conservation is defined as its vulnerability index, which is an indirect function of deterioration levels. The service life of buildings, on the other hand, includes the assessment of vulnerability and hazards.

This study is useful for stakeholders, including small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and policymakers, as an important reference on diagnosis, including updated, inexpensive and sustainable methodologies to manage the conservation of monuments, which are easy to implement in developed and developing countries. The application of vulnerability and/or service life indicators is crucial to ensuring the sustainability and improvement of maintenance carried out on cultural heritage buildings.

This study details new approaches based on artificial intelligence and Delphi analysis to prioritize preventive conservation actions in a city or region.

The paper aims to describe the positive and negative effects of night lights in historical sites, as well as the most salient challenges faced by the visitors of these sites and determine ways to address them. The study aims to suggest several light-and-shadow approaches and designs to enhance the experience of visiting historical sites.

This study identifies problems of nightlife in historical sites with an online international questionnaire to determine the preferences and difficulties faced by visitors of historical sites during day and night. After that Egypt was determined as a sample case of a developing country; its archaeological sites need to be improved. The main problems of historical Egyptian sites were investigated and approaches in developing historical sites with interactive lighting design were presented after an online questionnaire to the Egyptian society.

The paper shows that archaeological sites need some development, especially in their technological and lighting aspects, to overcome visitors’ low night-time interest in archaeological sites. Research has found certain limitations in the effects of constructing artificial illumination. The study provides modern sustainable solution for some light challenges in historical sites with approaches and solutions to solve it.

The results of that research could be applied in developing countries, but with larger specific studies to the historical urban locations according to the politics of the country.

The paper includes sustainable approaches in developing historical sites with technological lighting design required to enhance historical sites at night-time and make visits more interactive and interesting.

This paper presents an identified need of historical sites visitors’ to study applying modern approaches in enhancing urban historical sites.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how safeguarding intangible cultural heritage contributes to environmental conservation and favours sustainable development of natural landscapes. To do so, the authors will focus on a study of dry stone constructions, which have been recognised by United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as Intangible Cultural Heritage.

The research has been carried out through three methodologies: the search and review of archives (historical and administrative documents), ethnographic methodology (field work and interviews) and case studies.

The abandonment of dry stone constructions is placing rural zones at risk, as they assume a strategic role in environmental conservation efforts. This article seeks to highlight the importance of safeguarding this cultural heritage.

The art of dry stone walling has its origins in ancient times and can be found in numerous regions around the world. The main ideas of this paper may be applied to many of the places where this vernacular architecture can be found.

Some stakeholders may apply the results of this study to identify new uses for heritage resources that allow maintenance of ecosystems while at the same time safeguarding intangible cultural heritage.

This paper stresses the importance of raising public awareness of cultural heritage and vernacular architecture, its link with traditional activities such as farming and livestock raising, the rural landscape and reinforcement of cultural identity and historical memory.

This study illustrates the actions taken by UNESCO to safeguard intangible cultural heritage and the effects of those actions. It also considers dry stone constructions from the perspective of environmental sustainability, an area that has been subject to limited study.

The paper seeks to bridge the already familiar benefits of 3D printing (3DP) to the rehabilitation of cultural heritage, still based on the use of complex and expensive handcrafted techniques and scarce materials.

A compilation of different information on frequent anomalies in cultural heritage buildings and commonly used materials is conducted; subsequently, some innovative techniques used in the construction sector (3DP and 3D scanning) are addressed, as well as some case studies related to the rehabilitation of cultural heritage building elements, leading to a reflection on the opportunities and challenges of this application within these types of buildings.

The compilation of information summarised in the paper provided a clear reflection on the great potential of 3DP for cultural heritage rehabilitation, requiring the development of new mixtures (lime mortars, for example) compatible with the existing surface and, eventually, incorporating some residues that may improve interesting properties; the design of different extruders, compatible with the new mixtures developed and the articulation of 3D printers with the available mapping tools (photogrammetry and laser scanning) to reproduce the component as accurately as possible.

This paper sets the path for a new application of 3DP in construction, namely in the field of cultural heritage rehabilitation, by identifying some key opportunities, challenges and for designing the process flow associated with the different technologies involved.

This research aims to highlight the values, principles and recommendations for conservation in order to establish valid strategies for the conservation of earthen built heritage. This is done following a methodology which uses indirect (bibliography) and direct (case study) sources systematically analysed from different perspectives: the values of Earth as a material and of architectural and vernacular heritage; the heritage conservation principles found in international documents; and the analysis of over 3,000 case studies from which good practices in earthen architecture conservation are extracted.

Earthen built architectural heritage is found widely in all parts of the world, in archaeological sites and monumental and vernacular architecture, which research centres and researchers are increasingly studying and cataloguing. However, despite its richness and historic and cultural values, as well as its many merits in environmental sustainability, sociocultural and socio-economic terms, the value of this heritage has not been fully recognized in fields with major repercussions in conservation.

Finally, these data are cross-referenced to establish the broadest possible strategies to guarantee all aspects to be taken into account in the conservation of earthen built architectural heritage.

The text provides an overview of the different methodologies in order to extract specific strategies applicable to the conservation of this heritage, both locally and globally.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the intersection of building material reuse and heritage value, and raises questions about how “preservation” has traditionally been defined and conceptualized. With a grounding in the realities of global climate change, the paper argues for further research on the topic and for the active engagement of the preservation field in reuse efforts.

After a review of existing literature, this study takes a descriptive and conceptual approach to explore the heritage values generated through material reuse.

This paper finds that processes of material reuse are richly embedded with heritage value and offer a conceptual challenge to established modes of heritage practice.

The findings of this paper suggest that heritage practitioners should actively engage with material reuse efforts to better understand the heritage values generated from such processes. Areas of future research and collaboration are identified.

Despite their intrinsic interaction with aged and existing infrastructure, there has been limited engagement in the heritage and preservation field with the topics of deconstruction, building material reuse, or construction and demolition waste practices more generally. This paper thus provides descriptive research on a topic that has been unevenly explored.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the relation between building conservation and circular economy (CE), which are often erroneously seen as inherently contradictory to one another.

The work draws from a comparative approach. The paper reviews a body of literature on architectural conservation and CE to establish an understanding on the state-of-the-art for both disciplines separately. Then, the relation between thereof is developed through a theoretical discourse.

Both architectural conservation and CE aim at safeguarding value, although they define “value” differently. Fabric-focused conservation and CE favor minimal intervention to material, albeit they arrive at this conclusion from different bases. Consequently, both approaches struggle with the low cost of virgin resource extraction and waste production and the high cost of human labor in contemporary Western societies. CE could be harnessed for building conservation by adopting its vocabulary and methodology, such as lifecycle assessment and material flow analysis. Transitioning toward CE can help increase the preservation of built heritage while redefining what is meant by “heritage” and “waste.”

Prior to this paper, there have been no articles addressing the relationship of the concepts explicitly and to this extent. The paper provides a theoretical basis for further discourse and outlines some implications of CE for the construction and built heritage disciplines.

The purpose of this paper is to identify factors affecting performance of heritage conservation projects in terms of project management parameters of time, cost, and quality.

An exploratory study was conducted in India, wherein 41 conservation professionals were interviewed. The method adopted for the study was unstructured interviews, wherein the respondents were asked open-ended questions about the issues faced in such projects and factors affecting project performance.

The interview recordings and notes, made during the exploratory study, have been manually coded to identify the most frequently mentioned problems, group them into categories, and assess their relative importance.

This paper has presented a broad overview of the challenges faced by heritage conservation projects in general. Further research is necessary to analyse if the challenges depend on factors like type of heritage, project delivery model, and stakeholders involved, and to develop mitigation strategies for these challenges.

The findings from this study can be used by practitioners to improve performance of heritage conservation projects in terms of time, cost, and quality.

The findings of the exploratory study help to better understand the reasons of poor performance of heritage conservation projects in terms of time, cost, and quality. The paper has identified major challenges of the sector, and assessed their relative importance, which can help in developing project management strategy for future projects.

Sustainability encapsulates economic, environmental and societal domains. In order to conform to these domains, the efficiency of maintenance and repair of heritage buildings is no exception. Emergently, environmental considerations for sustainable heritage buildings repair have become increasingly important. The purpose of this paper is to present a decision-making process based on “Green Maintenance Model” – an appraisal approach based on life cycle assessment (LCA) of paint repair options for heritage buildings.

Calculation procedures of Green Maintenance model within selected boundaries of LCA enable evaluation of carbon emissions, in terms of embodied carbon expenditure, expended from paint repair for heritage buildings during maintenance phase.

“Green Maintenance” model could be understood as a carbon LCA of paint repair and has been recognized in reducing carbon emissions. Significantly, the model underpins decision-making for repair options for heritage buildings.

It must be emphasized that the calculation procedures of Green Maintenance model is not limited to heritage buildings and can be applied to any repair types, materials used and building forms. More importantly, this model practically supports environmentally focused conservation and promotes sustainable repair approach.

The implementation of Green Maintenance model highlights the efficiency of repairs options that may be adopted.

Green Maintenance shows that generated environmental maintenance impact from repair options relays the “true” embodied carbon expenditure contextualized within the longevity of repair and its embodied carbon. This will consequently allow rationale in appraisal of repair options.