This report is primarily limited to the development of smaller houses in the County of Rutlandshire between 1550 and 1750, but since this county lies astride two territories showing different structural patterns, some areas lying beyond the county boundary have been investigated. The "low-land" type of timber frame, found in Mediaeval small houses and barns in south-east En~land is described ~, in this work as a "box-frame". In the eastern part of our region it is the type of structure commonly found in varying degrees of purity. To the west, in Leicestershire, the earliest timber frames show "cruck" origins which spring from a different source from the box-frame.

This thesis is concerned with occupier behaviour within new homes and how behaviour can interact with design features to lead to an increased risk of injury or ill-health. Unintentional home injuries are a significant problem within the UK and reducing the incidence and severity of such injuries is a public health priority. Preventative measures targeting risk factors for unintentional injury in the home have tended to focus on either primary efforts to reduce hazards within the environment or behaviour change strategies. It is important however, to also recognise the potential contribution of the interactions that arise between dwelling design and occupier behaviour and how these may influence safety and well-being. This research comprised four studies, adopting a multi-methodological approach. The first three studies used triangulated investigations to examine occupier experiences of inhabiting a new home. The final study offered an exploration of the attitudes of professionals responsible for the design of new dwellings in relation to occupier safety and the factors which shape current dwelling design. In the initial stage of the research 40 in-depth, semi-structured interviews and home inspections were conducted with new build occupiers. A range of unsafe interactions were reported in relation to building features including self-closing fire doors, loft access and service pipes and cabling. A number of features were also identified which occupiers felt presented a risk to their health and safety. These features included fire egress windows, sloped access thresholds and descending newel posts, for example. To assess how home interactions develop over time a diary-based study was undertaken, allowing a temporal assessment of occupier behaviour. In total, 9 usable diaries were completed by participants over durations varying from 9 days to 211 days. Similar unsafe interactions were reported during the course of this diary study and a range of features were reported as presenting a risk of unintentional injury or ill-health. These features included high hot water temperatures, sloped internal ceilings and loft access. A temporal analysis of interactions identified that occupiers are initially proactive in seeking solutions to problems within their homes but these attempts are not always successful. The information gathered during these first two studies was used to design a questionnaire which was distributed to 794 new homes in the Midlands area. The aim of this questionnaire was to establish the prevalence of the reported interactions amongst a wider population. Quantitative data from this study suggested that many of the unsafe interactions reported during the previous studies are commonplace in new homes. The final study examined the attitudes of professionals responsible for the design of new dwellings in relation to occupier safety and sought to identify the factors which shape current dwelling design. Semi-structured interviews were undertaken with 14 architects and designers. This study revealed that some of those responsible for dwelling design have an unsympathetic attitude towards occupier safety and well-being and rely almost entirely on building regulations to ensure a level of health and safety within the home. The design professional participants described a number of factors which influence current dwelling design, sometimes these being at variance with each other, for example developer needs can sometimes conflict with Local Authority planning requirements. The research has established that many of the interactions that arise within the domestic setting are influenced by environmental, behavioural and social factors. The thesis argues that prevention strategies adopting an ecological systems approach to injury prevention present an opportunity to address the complex set of factors affecting safety in the home.

There is an increasing drive to achieve sustainability agenda, as well as climate change challenges. The construction industry is facing increasing pressure to address environmental performance earlier in the design process. For UK buildings, design is believed to be the key in delivering the low carbon agenda. Hence, a fundamental change to designers’ approach in designing for low impact buildings is needed. The ways design decisions are made can greatly influence the outcomes of design. Fundamental design decisions taken early in the design process have far-reaching environmental impacts later on. Better informed design, from the earliest conceptual stage, will improve the design of individual buildings, and help achieve low impact buildings. For this reason, tools have become a necessity for the early and on-going consideration of environmental performance and an important delivery mechanism to aid architects’ design and decision making to deliver the low impact buildings. However, the existing decision support tools had not addressed in full the expectation of architects. Design-decision support tools, specifically the Building Performance Energy Simulation (BPES) are not fully integrated into the design process, to enable UK architects to make informed decision especially at the early stage of the design process. Thus, the study seeks to provide a decision support framework for architects to achieve low carbon housing (LCHs) design in the United Kingdom (UK). It sets out to determine how UK architects can achieve the design; what the needs of architects are in BPES tools characteristics to deliver the design and what design decision tasks are required, towards development of the decision support framework. Consequently, the research examined low carbon housing design. Existing statutory and non-statutory regulations, as well as design and decision support tools, which relate to low carbon housing design and delivery, were identified. These were used to frame the questions for the qualitative semi structured, face-to-face and in-depth interviews with practicing architects and academics. Online questionnaires were also administered to a representative sample of UK architectural practices to investigate the fitness of purpose between decision-support tools and design decision-making to achieve low carbon housing. Data analysis revealed that there is a lack of fitness between existing decision support tools, in the form of Building Performance Energy Simulation (BPES) tools, and the various stages of the design process. It emerged that architects use BPES tools, primarily at the later stage of the process. Support for the early design stage remains poor, especially at the conceptual stage of the design process. The findings confirmed that design decisions for LCHs vary significantly in terms of level of accuracy, flexibility, and detail. At the early stages of the process, as relatively little information is available, flexibility and approximation in BPES tools is more relevant to support design decisions. As the design develops, and more information becomes available, precision and higher level of detail in BPES tools is required. Thus, the research developed a decision support framework which defines the characteristics of BPES tools fit for architects design and decision making; it also maps out an integrated building design process (IBDP) that includes the use of BPES tools. Implications of the study on research, software development and design practice are finally examined.

No description available.

Cultural transition is a significant phenomenon in urban dwellings in Denpasar, the capital of Bali. House values, functions, meanings, and spatial configurations are changing in parallel with the process of socio-cultural transition. Through time traditional space configurations no longer fit with the new values and lifestyles. Meanwhile, cultural transition has also occurred in low-cost housing. Many occupants are dissatisfied because traditional values of the local society are perceived as relatively unimportant by the developers. As well as cultural transition, these occupants also have to cope with physical, spatial, and social issues. Therefore, the urban Balinese who live in these houses tend to continually adapt their dwellings to meet their current situation. In a study in 2003, Sueca used quantitative and qualitative methods to analyse the characteristics of the occupants in urban dwellings. These included socio-economic issues, education, demographic factors and occupation, in order to see how they contribute to the housing transformation phenomenon. Thus, comparisons of these characteristics were used to discover contributory factors, motives of transformation, and the processes and effects of this phenomenon. The conclusions of his research were made available for further work and to serve as a starting point for this current study. Over ten years later, a valuable study of this phenomenon can be accomplished to identify and investigate change through time. Systematically revisiting the dwellings and households of the previous study is a way of understanding this phenomenon, through a detailed analysis of documents, household interviews and spatial surveys. Covering over ten years, this allows a focus on the socio-cultural changes over time and produces information and evidence about this phenomenon and how the dynamics of the socio-cultural life of the occupants order and articulate the process of housing transformation. It is necessary to identify and differentiate between the core elements and the peripheral elements of the socio-cultural lives of the occupants, which can disappear or be replaced by new, highly valued elements. In terms of data, previously accumulated information was integrated with more recently collected fieldwork data in 2011. In this sense, the approach emphasises the need for a time series perspective of home environments and the importance of historical data for theory development in Environmental-Behaviour Studies. This study ultimately provides an understanding of the interconnection between occupants and urban dwellings in the process of housing transformation from a spatio-temporal perspective. Dialectic processes describe an essential dynamism in the process of becoming at home in the socio-cultural lives of this specific group. The study also explores the importance of the socio-cultural lives of urban dwellers in helping to define the nature of the Balinese, in terms of their lifestyles, values, preferences, and the nature of good or better settings for them. Finally, it aims to contribute to supportive housing design and policies in Indonesia.

No description available.

For almost 200 years, rental tenure and an original type of small tenement-like buildings have dominated housing in Montreal. This pattern is poorly explained by the existing literature, and has attracted severe criticism for not reflecting the North American preference for home-ownership and single-family houses. From an initial effort to describe the evolution of this residential building type through morphological analysis, this thesis has shifted to a more comprehensive exploration of the city's economic and cultural frameworks, as well as the architectural sources of the housing tradition, through the analysis of building plans. The thesis takes an interdisciplinary approach to the relationship between architecture and society. It presents a hypothesis about Montreal's real estate strategy, as a reflection of the conditions that shape housing production and the expectations of architectural design. Morphological analysis reveals how changes to the French and British colonial and cultural context directly affected the composition and configuration of buildings and dwellings. The extent of hybridisation, as displayed in the composition or imbedded in the configuration, suggests a complex exchange of patterns between two cultural traditions. Montreal's dwellings reflect a unique constellation of cultural references, class aspirations and spatial strategies. Their flexibility and adaptability have permitted them to balance formal concerns of stylistic correctness with an incremental design process, open to innovation and governed by an additive and often opportunistic design procedure. The thesis makes a case for design as encompassing three fields of decision: architectural Order, spatial Structure and construction System. It disputes the typical interpretation of the architect and the architect's designs as agents of novelty, advocating instead a more conciliatory and practical role that brings together figurative patterns, spatial tactics and available means.

No description available.

Home, which is accepted as a centre for human life, can hold diverse significance and bear various meanings for each person depending on a variety of issues, such as personal characteristics and experiences that have been collected throughout a lifetime. The bond between a person and a home and the meaning of home can be transformed over time and as a result of the various events to which the person has been subjected. In this study, internal displacement is identified as an event which has a major impact on the key attitudes and feelings towards home attachment and perception. The aim of this research is to critically examine the impact of displacement on one’s attachment towards one’s former and current places of residence and one’s perception of home. The study takes Cyprus, in particular its northern part, as a case study. Therefore, the study contributes to the fields of home, place attachment and internal displacement studies in general, as well as to the context of Cyprus in particular. The study has investigated using qualitative and quantitative research approaches within a case study methodology. As a part of this, fieldwork research was conducted in four rural settlements located in northern Cyprus. The primary data was gathered during the fieldwork and constitutes the core of the study. Qualitative content analysis, including coding and categorisation, was used for analysing the qualitative data, while descriptive statistics, cross tabulation and the chi-square test were conducted for quantitative data analysis. The study focuses on two groups: locals and internally displaced persons (IDPs). Locals are identified as people who have always lived in northern Cyprus, while IDPs are defined as people who were displaced from southern Cyprus as an outcome of the conflict between Greek and Turkish Cypriots. The study has identified the nature of local Turkish Cypriots’ attachment to their homes and villages, as well as the nature of internally displaced Turkish Cypriots’ attachment to their former and current houses and villages. In addition to this, perceptions of home for both locals and IDPs have been investigated in order to examine the extent to which IDPs have been affected by the displacement. The findings of the study show that displacement has a strong impact on the place attachment of IDPs. At the end of longstanding displacement they developed multiple attachments: attachment to the places where they used to live before displacement, as well as attachment to the places where they lived after displacement. However, compared to people who have not experienced displacement, IDPs have relatively low attachments; as a result, it may be argued that they are lost between two worlds. The study also shows that low attachment does not fully impact the meaning of home for IDPs in a long-term displacement situation. The study indicates that IDPs may feel attached to a place and give similar meanings to home as non-displaced people, but this does not mean that they completely perceive the houses where they live as their homes even after they have lived there for a long time. Length of displacement, political uncertainty and ownership issues which are directly related with perception of a house as one’s home, emerge as key determinants for attachment to and perception of home.

This research investigates the concept of privacy in the context of Eastern region houses of Saudi Arabia. This concept had been explored in numerous fields in literature, such as psychology and internet security, where literature referred back to individual’s personal preferences that translated social and cultural needs. As a concept, privacy is one of the social elements that needed to be considered within the scope of spatial design, an element that filled some of the gap between architects and clients’ needs as expressed by literature. This research investigated the factors that shaped privacy inside the environment of the ‘house’ from the perspective of female users. Also, it looks at female perspective because of their role inside the house, interior spatial patterns in the house that reflect social patterns. For that, a qualitative ethnographic methodology was employed to help in the investigation process of the concept of privacy. Observation and interviews were the methods selected to communicate with a selected sample to get an insight of what privacy means to female users and the way they represented that meaning in the house design and patterns of use. The investigation was to study and analyse designs from traditional and contemporary houses supported with ethnographic data to document privacy interpretation inside the Saudi house. From that, spatial design elements were addressed in both traditional and contemporary houses that led to the developed design tool. The design tool, functional and spatial relationship guide, aimed to assist interior architects and interior designers in their design process of houses that respect social needs of privacy. That tool was evaluated by multiple focus groups taken by professionals from the field. The research contribution lies in identifying the meaning and boundaries of privacy in the perspective of Saudi female users of contemporary houses in the Eastern region. Moreover, the development of the design tool which helps produce house designs that are socially acceptable and respect privacy needs of users.