Journal of Architectural Engineering

The expansion and advancement of businesses, cities, municipalities, and populations in Canada are increasingly demanding the effective usage of land and resources in building development. Companies, organizations, and individuals are seeking to construct more environmentally responsible buildings to help minimize the negative effects that structures place on the natural environment, as well as on the people that have either direct or indirect contact with them. In an effort to set a benchmark for what constitutes a green building, the Canada Green Building Council provides a certification system called Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED), which is a point scheme that seeks to measure sustainability. Many stakeholders in the construction industry in Canada are increasingly employing this system to validate their achievement in sustainable development. This paper reviews the usage of the LEED system in Canadian building construction and the potential challenges and barriers associated with LEED implementation that specifically pertain to Canadian circumstances. Information from 42 new construction projects across Canada that achieved LEED certification were collected and analyzed. The points most often awarded, as well as those that are granted the least frequently, were tabulated. The percentages of points obtained were compared to American projects. Credit frequency indicators (CFIs), which were used to depict the achievement of credits by each project, can provide decision makers with information on credits awarded in the past and insight into credit implementation in future projects with similar goals. The energy and atmosphere and materials and resources categories proved to have the lowest CFIs, whereas the innovation and design process and water efficiency categories yielded the highest CFIs. The study also found that there were differences in the points obtained by LEED projects in Canada and the United States as some credits are influenced by climate, such as weather and temperature, as well as regional location.

To reduce operating costs, cold storage buildings are being designed with increasing levels of thermal roof insulation. This paper examines the current state of the art in order to estimate average roof insulation requirements in modern cold storage buildings. This research includes both economic and environmental considerations. The added environmental impact of manufacturing thermal insulation is compared to the reduced environmental impact of the building’s cooling load. The cost of purchasing and installing additional roof insulation is also compared to the annual energy savings associated with the increase to establish the most economic insulating level given today’s cost of energy. This paper shows that, from an economic, as well as from an environmental performance perspective, there is a need to design more efficient, sustainable cold storage buildings now.

The technical note describes a proposal to roof two internal courtyards of the main building of the Engineering Faculty at the University of Pisa by means of thin flat shells made of a quadrilateral mesh of steel bars supporting plane glass plates stiffened by a grid of steel cables. An exposure of the structural design concepts and of the geometrical genesis of the shells is presented accompanied by a stability analysis and a description of the technological solutions found to solve some crucial constructional problems.

Performance-based design is commonly applied to projects that have difficulties in complying with prescriptive fire codes in the Far East. There are procedures for evaluating fire resisting construction and structural elements with fire resistance ratings lower than the values specified in the fire codes. The equal temperature-time exposure concept or $t$ -equivalent rule is commonly applied to support the argument. This paper will discuss whether installing two fire shutters each of a $2\text{-}\text{hour}$ fire resistance period is equivalent to one $4\text{-}\text{hour}$ shutter. The standard temperature-time curve under ASTM E119 was applied to show they are not equivalent and to illustrate the inadequacy. Further, there are concerns in applying such an approach for bigger fires as the radiative heat flux acting on the construction element is not included. Fire hazard assessment on fire resisting construction with lower ratings under postflashover fires should be evaluated with caution. Full-scale burning tests with bigger fires are suggested as a means to support the argument or demonstrate that the equal temperature-time concept would work as expected.