engleski

Sustainable Redesign of Existing Buildings in the Context of a Graduate Course / Improvement of Life Quality of Inhabitants

Sustainable architecture has positive impacts on health, comfort, physical well-being and emotions for inhabitants. People spend 90% of their time indoors. It is important to explore all aspects of housing with the goal of understanding and subsequently improving the living conditions. The well-being and productivity of the inhabitants depend on the quality of the spaces. In order to limit their environmental impact, existing buildings must define the way in which the people, who inhabit them, live not only in their own neighborhoods but in the entire city. Living quality is not only about buildings and the homes they contain, but also the experiences offered to residents by the development as a whole. The graduate course 'Architecture and Technology' at the Faculty of Architecture, University of Zagreb, attempts to educate students on assessing the environmental performance of existing buildings. Learning from own experiences of occupation of different houses and apartments and assessing the overall energy savings and indoor thermal comfort of the building, this paper discusses possibilities of life quality improvement by using simple based solutions. Showing examples of different existing housing architecture, this paper discusses methods, technical solutions, as well as architectural approaches for variety of interventions: from upgrading the existing facilities to basic architectural redesign designed in accordance with principles of sustainable development. The results involve primarily the teaching outcome of the course and secondarily the assessment of low-cost interventions to existing buildings' energy performance and thermal comfort conditions. The paper ends with important lessons we can learn for improvement of conceptual system redesign, materials to use, use and reuse of the units, and in particular, how future houses can be developed to be more sustainable.

Architectural education, Graduate course, Sustainable architecture, Life quality, Inhabitant

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