Editor's Note

I hope you will agree with me that the Journal of Architectural Engineering has been growing and evolving, thanks to the efforts of many scholars who submit articles, a very hard-working team of associate editors, the Architectural Engineering Institute, and the ASCE publications department.

It is with great pleasure that I announce the start of an exciting initiative to continue our growth: beginning with this issue, we will host a Special Section on Housing and Residential Building Construction. To publish your papers as part of this special section, the papers should be submitted to the Journal of Architectural Engineering using normal online procedures. A note should be placed next to the related question at submittal (Is this manuscript part of a special issue?) with either the name of the section (Housing and Residential Building Construction) or its editor (Dr. Ali Memari).

Dr. Ali Memari of Pennsylvania State University has been leading this effort, and he has put together an outstanding team of leaders in this field as the associate editors and reviewers of the special section. I would like to thank everyone who worked very hard to make the special section possible, and I am certainly looking forward to reading the exciting articles that will be published in it.

As part of this inaugural issue of the special section, we have a state-of-the-art paper summarizing the wide array of related topics, latest trends, and research needs. The paper is prepared by Dr. Memari and other top scholars who are prominent in the field of residential construction through research, practice, or both. The paper covers various disciplines and points of view that relate to residential construction: architectural design, structural design, construction management, energy efficiency, prefabrication, new technologies, different construction systems, need for interdisciplinary education in building science, and so forth. The paper clearly portrays the multidimensional aspect of housing and residential construction that may not be the same as in commercial building construction. One piece of eye-opening information given in this paper about residential construction is that home sizes between 1950 and 2000 have more than doubled and the floor area per person has tripled. This highlights the ever-increasing demand for more and better housing solutions. The authors further summarize the need in the field by stating that everything is at stake with poor-performing homes and much work is needed to meet the demand for high-performing homes. Therefore, it seems that the importance of the study and application of building science to the country's housing stock will continue to grow, with all the excitement and challenges such growth brings.

I believe that this state-of-the-art paper, with its well-organized subsections on various related topics and highlights of the latest research trends, will be a resource to all of us for years to come in our interdisciplinary Architectural Engineering research, practice, and education. It also provides a good array of topics that would fit well into our new special section, and therefore it will hopefully spark your interest and creativity for new articles and projects!

I hope you will enjoy following our new Special Section on Housing and Residential Building Construction hosted in the Journal of Architectural Engineering and submit your related articles to enrich our collective knowledge in the field.