Publications associées à From Marshall Plan to “Hilton in the wild”: The Transnational History of a Cooperative Housing Block in Esat, Ankara

Frihet, sikkerhet, forstaden: Brev fra Amerika

Why have countries formerly leading public policies of housing – Norway, the U.K., France, etc. – shifted towards privatizing accommodation from the late 1970s? Have these States merely let go of housing and handed it over to private interests in the name ...

2024

FLO:RE – A new floor system made of reused reinforced concrete and steel elements

Maléna Bastien Masse, Numa Joy Bertola, Célia Marine Küpfer, Corentin Jean Dominique Fivet

Carefully extracting reinforced concrete (RC) elements from soon-to-be demolished structures and reusing them as load-bearing components is an emerging circular low-carbon alternative to building new structures. As floor construction typically accounts for ...

IABSE2024

Rising from rubble - Leveraging existing construction tools for upcycling concrete waste into slender walls

Katrin Beyer, Maxence Grangeot, Corentin Jean Dominique Fivet, Qianqing Wang, Stefana Parascho

In this paper, we present a new method for upcycling concrete rubble waste into slender walls through the lightweight digital augmentation of mainstream construction machines. By using such method, the environmental impact of concrete construction and demo ...

Springer2024

Teaching Not To

Charlotte Malterre-Barthes

Two design studios were successively taught in two schools of architecture: one at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) and the other at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) in Lausanne, Switzerland, based on "A Global Morato ...

Taylor & Francis Inc2024

Reuse of cut concrete slabs in new buildings for circular ultra-low-carbon floor designs

Numa Joy Bertola, Célia Marine Küpfer, Corentin Jean Dominique Fivet

The study explores an original idea that responds to the urgent need to reduce the detrimental environmental impacts of load-bearing floor construction in new buildings by reusing saw-cut reinforced concrete (RC) pieces salvaged from soon-to-be demolished ...

2024

An explorative method to support design decisions based on carbon constraints and daylight sufficiency needs

Nazanin Rezaei Oghazi

The global construction industry contributes to 37% of carbon emissions associated to both building operations and construction. To help achieve the net-zero targets set by 2050, it is mandated to achieve a 50% reduction in carbon emissions by 2030. As we ...

EPFL2024

Subaltern housing policies: Accommodating migrant workers in wealthy Geneva

Luca Giovanni Pattaroni, Maxime Carl Felder

In the wealthy and orderly city of Geneva, Switzerland, accommodation centres built in haste between the 1950s and the 1980s to house seasonal guestworkers from southern Europe are still standing and still inhabited. Today's residents are precarious worker ...

2023

Lessons learned from a prediction and postdiction of a shake table test on an unreinforced masonry aggregate

Katrin Beyer, Igor Tomic

Historical centers of Europe and Croatia are often formed by unreinforced masonry building aggregates that developed as the layout of the city or village was densified. In these aggregates, adjacent buildings can share structural walls with an older and a ...

2023

Low-tech methods for the reuse of reinforced concrete structural elements

Maléna Bastien Masse, Julie Rachel Devènes, Corentin Jean Dominique Fivet, Nicole Widmer

Most of existing buildings are made of concrete, new buildings are being built with it and others are demolished when still in good structural condition. This drives increased demands for raw materials, greenhouse gas emissions, and an accumulation of demo ...

2023

Reusability Assessment of Obsolete Reinforced Concrete Structural Components

Maléna Bastien Masse, Célia Marine Küpfer, Julie Rachel Devènes, Corentin Jean Dominique Fivet

The production of concrete, the most widely used construction material, detrimentally affects the environment. Obsolete reinforced concrete (RC) load-bearing structures, even when still in good condition, are today prematurely crushed and landfilled or rec ...

Springer2023

Energy dissipation in fiber-polymer composites adhesive joints under cyclic loading

Ghazaleh Eslami

Sustainable development has emerged as a paramount consideration in various fields of industry, including construction, to preserve the environment and its finite resources. Lightweight structures, such as fiber-polymer composite structures, address both s ...

EPFL2023

From Automated Bootstrapping to Collaborative Editing: A Framework for 4D City Reconstruction

Didier Louis Dupertuis, Rémi Guillaume Petitpierre, Paul Robert Guhennec, Beatrice Vaienti

We propose a framework for the construction of 4D scientific models for cities of the past. It leverages both the use of computational methods for bootstrapping, and a collaborative interface for visualisation and edition. This permits to continuously enri ...

Zenodo2023

Design of New Low-Carbon Floor Systems by Reusing Cut Cast-in-Place Concrete Pieces

Numa Joy Bertola, Célia Marine Küpfer, Corentin Jean Dominique Fivet

As floors typically account for the largest share of a building embodied carbon footprint, new strategies to build low-carbon floors must be developed and implemented. Among these strategies, the reuse of existing components is a promising circular approac ...

Novus Press2023

Représenter l'invention : Étude de l'évolution du dessin d'objet technique en Angleterre (ca. 1750-1850)

Yohann Michel Franck Guffroy

This thesis focuses on English invention drawings between 1750 and 1850. These visual documents offer a perspective on a technical aesthetic linked to the rise of English machinery at the turn of the 19th century. In this work, I focus on two specific corp ...

EPFL2023

Appropriations and Uses of Travel Time

Ludy Juliana González Villamizar

Time has always been a central factor in understanding the challenges of daily mobility. For a long time, and still today, methods of economic evaluation of transport projects have monetized time savings so that they can be included in the cost–benefit ana ...

ISTE Wiley2023