Architecture, Building and Planning - Theses
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ItemWriting at closer quarters: Melbourne in the novel and literary criticism, 1940 - 1971( 2016)In the postwar years, a number of literary critics, commentators and novelists complained of an undersupply of urban novels and an under-representation of the cities that housed the bulk of the Australian population. This thesis tests that assessment by reconsidering the diversity of novels published in the middle decades of the 20th Century, with a focus on one Australian city, Melbourne. Evidently, postwar critics underappreciated the diversity of Melbourne’s novels, and many credible works have long fallen out of sight of literary historians. By recovering that work, the thesis aims to reconstruct a complex picture of the imagined metropolis that those novels collectively provided. The thesis gathers up more than seventy novels published in the three decades after 1940 that located their settings in metropolitan Melbourne. Those novels form the primary research material for the thesis. The analysis of that material proceeds first by recovering the relationship of the novels with Australian literary history, considering to what extent literary historiography has been selective in its approach to Melbourne’s fiction. This provides the prelude to an exploration of the metropolis as represented in those novels: if some of those novels have been excluded from Melbourne’s literary history, how might their recovery alter our understanding of fictional Melbourne? To explore that question, techniques in literary cartography are adapted to the analysis of the Melbourne novels’ topographic content through metropolitan scale maps. Those maps reveal a rich variety of topographic detail dispersed through city centre, inner suburbs, and the middle and outer suburbs. Ultimately, the thesis reveals how the functional differences available in the everyday sites of the imagined metropolis, and the patterns in their topographic distribution, provided a source of rich environmental meaning for the novelist. The middle chapters of the thesis read mid-Century literary criticism to decipher its perspectives on the Australian city and the responsibilities of literature towards that increasingly modernising context. That discussion focuses on three influential, yet highly combative critical movements in the mid-Century literary field. Models of the city provided by those movements enable the thesis to contrast the critics’ theoretical models of the modern city, and the images of the city revealed by the topographic analyses of the novels.
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ItemDevelopment of an optimal control strategy for hybrid ventilation of office buildings( 2016)Hybrid ventilation can save operational building energy, if it is designed and controlled appropriately. Peak electricity demand during summer time can also be reduced. It is important that the control strategy should be developed together with the ventilation system at the design stage of the buildings. However, it is not known how to develop the control strategy before buildings are built. Current practice is that the required data needs to be obtained from the actual building. This research proposes a method to develop control strategies for hybrid ventilation at the design stage. The research method was devised by combining the advantages and two modelling techniques: phenomenological modelling, and data-driven modelling. First, the hybrid ventilation system is modelled using phenomenological simulation software tools. The phenomenological model developed was used to generate data. Then the simulated data was used to develop the thermal network model and the simplified airflow model which could be used for identifying the optimal control strategies. Through literature review, computer simulation, and the three experimental case studies, it was found that TRNSYS Type 56 & COMIS were reliable transient simulation software tools which could simulate an acceptable representative of the actual building behaviour. The most suitable simplified model for hybrid ventilation system was the thermal network model. The investigation was carried out on Shed D, a small single room building located at the Burnley Campus, The University of Melbourne. The thermal network model could provide reasonable accuracy, and used less computing time than the phenomenological model. Most importantly the thermal network model offered physical insight into building’s thermal characteristics. In other words, the building’s physical parameters could be incorporated into the model coefficients. With the known properties of building components, the air change rate for natural ventilation in the building can be estimated in term of the ventilation heat loss, one of the lumped parameters of the thermal network model. In addition to single zone stand alone buildings, multi-zone buildings can also be modelled by the thermal network technique. The research showed that the thermal network model worked for actual multi-zone buildings through the case study, the ATC building, Swinburne University of Technology. The clear correlation between the results of TRNSYS Type 56 & COMIS and the thermal network model was also demonstrated. The simplified air flow model was created from TRNFLOW results which were verified with the measured air flow rate. Air exchange measurement was implemented on the Doug McDonell building, University of Melbourne using CO2 as the tracer gas. The coupling between the simplified airflow model and the thermal network model was developed. This technique could handle the variation of the air flow rate over time. The air flow rate is in the form of Infiltration/ventilation heat loss conductivity which is a parameter of the thermal network. The coupling between the two models could improve the accuracy of the predictions. When there was high fluctuating wind speed, the improvement in fit between the measured data and the simulated data was approximately 20%. Based on the concept originally proposed by Spindle (2004) [Spindle, HC 2004, ‘System Identification and Optimal Control of Mixed Mode Cooling’, PhD thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Massachusetts], the optimal control program was developed using MATLAB, 2012b. The crucial part of the models for switching between modes was discovered, which is the disturbance of the model. This needed to be identified because it contains the previous time step output information, enabling the previous output to be used for calculating the next time step output. The simulation results showed that the optimal control strategy offered 20% saving in energy consumption compared to the Static mode (windows are closed all times). The computational time was approximately one minute per day of simulation time. With this computing time, it is possible to practically apply this technique for a real building management control system. The research presents a seven-step procedure for a hybrid ventilation system: TRNFLOW modelling; Data selection; Air flow modelling; Thermal network modelling; Integration of airflow model and thermal network model; Mechanical ventilation modelling, and Optimal control strategy. The seven-step procedure enables the optimal control strategy of a hybrid ventilation system can be identified at the design stage.
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ItemPlanning for dogs in urban environments( 2016)Dogs are the most common pet in Australia and increasingly occupy both social and cultural norms. There is a growing interest in more-than-human geography and my thesis extends this critical concern to the planning of urban environments as a human habitat. Contemporary literature in more-than-human geography typically and unconsciously anthropomorphises the experience of those other species and in turn accounts for other species from a human perspective. My thesis recognises this gap and endeavours to provide a critical account of planning for dogs through a lens of justice for animals. My research problem is predicated on the basis that Australian society lacks consensus on the appropriate treatment of dogs in urban environments, reflecting in local differentiation of opportunities available to dogs and yielding different outcomes of justice for dogs. My thesis accordingly examines how institutions and planners affect such freedoms through their language and actions. My thesis comprises a similar systems case study design that examines the phenomenon of planning for dogs using the case of Melbourne, a city of four million people and the capital of the state of Victoria, Australia, through the institutional discourse of eight representative councils (local government authorities). In order to critically address the fundamental uncertainty of anthropomorphism introduced by the dependent companion relationship, I elect to examine the discourse of government institutions as a credible, consistent and comparable reflection of society. Themes and theory emerge from the data through a disciplined application of qualitative content analysis underpinning a grounded theorisation of planning for dogs in cities. An operational framework describing justice for dogs is developed from first principles, suggesting the importance of animal management, open space planning and urban planning professions in planning for dogs. These roles demonstrate a clear ontological distinction, with the dominance of ontology shown to be exceedingly important to understanding planning for dogs. In operationalising a justice for dogs, I capture the pervasive anthropocentrism of planning which manifests in the animal management practices of councils and in how human agency is defined and exercised in the process and outcomes of planning for dogs. Whilst my thesis is ostensibly about planning urban environments and the role of local government, it also contributes to the social sciences more broadly. My approach distinguishes from what may be typical to other more-than-human geography literature through its treatment of planning for dogs as attending to underlying considerations of justice for dogs. A natural concordance with the justice as capabilities (derived from the Capabilities Approach espoused by Sen and Nussbaum) emerges, suggesting more authentic and just outcomes for dogs than in the utilitarian anthropocentric tradition where actions are guided by the demarcation of humans from animals. My thesis is a valuable contribution to this growing body of more-than-human geography literature and advances the philosophy of planning of urban environments beyond humanity, in doing so strengthening the bonds which connect the broader social sciences.
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ItemBehaviour of prefabricated modular buildings subjected to lateral loads( 2016)Prefabricated Modular Buildings are increasingly becoming a highly sort after technology to achieve cost effective and speedy construction in the construction industry. This increasing trend for prefabricated modular buildings has now spread into multi-storey applications since they can provide a much faster output for the ever increasing urban construction demand. In this regard the effect of lateral loads become critical as the height of the buildings increase. Therefore, the design of lateral load resisting systems is vital for these structures to perform effectively. However, there is an absence of detailed scientific research or case studies that investigate into the structural performance of modular buildings. This knowledge gap has resulted in a lack of confidence in Structural Engineers to optimise the designs of modular buildings. This has resulted in modular buildings being uneconomically over-designed in order to ensure structural stability and safety. This thesis will therefore formulate a methodology for modular buildings to be analysed and designed against lateral loads according to globally accepted methods. The knowledge gained about the structural behaviour and performance against lateral loads of modular buildings will be used to propose key design principals that Engineers can use in designing modular buildings. It will also lead to an understanding on how modular structures can be optimised to achieve a more economical solution without compromising the structural stability and safety at the expected performance levels. In order to achieve these objectives global analysis of multi storey modular buildings is conducted with a newly proposed structural system that successfully addresses many shortcomings of modular structural systems that are presently being used. This new structural system is first analysed using global analysis models using nonlinear static pushover analysis and nonlinear time history analysis techniques. The module to module connections that are critical in transferring the lateral loads to stiffer members of the structure are then studied in detail using finite element modelling and laboratory experiments. The results of these analyses and experiments are critically evaluated in order to present a better understanding of the behaviour of multi-storey modular buildings under lateral loads. The thesis introduces the critical modes of failure that were identified for the module to module connections through the aforementioned analyses and explains how the structural design of the connections as well as the overall structure shall be approached. In addition to the design methodology, practising Engineers would also require a solid technique to analyse these structures using commercially available analysis software. In this regard, this thesis produces a methodology that can be used to estimate the overall stiffness of the module to module connections so that these values of stiffness can be used in modelling the connection as spring or link elements in a global model. This information would be quite useful for engineering applications as many of the commercially available software provide this capability in modelling connections as spring or link elements but lack guidance on how the value of stiffness needs to be estimated. Therefore, this thesis provides a preliminary knowledge-base for a new modular structural system to be established with a sound understanding on how it behaves under lateral loads and how the analysis and design of the overall structure can be approached confidently. Additionally recommendations are provided to take this research forward in developing the technology further with a much broader understanding on various loading conditions and applications.
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ItemDesign-by-dialogue: the architectural programming of the Royal Melbourne Hospital 1935-1945( 2016)This dissertation argues that the dialogue between expert clients and expert architects is critical to the creation of a general hospital – arguably the most programmatically complex of all building types. Using the third realisation of the Royal Melbourne Hospital (RMH), the initial structure on the Parkville site, 1935-45, as an historical example, this dissertation provides significant insights into rarely recorded programming interaction between the clients, the RMH, and the architects, Stephenson Meldrum/Turner (SM/T). The RMH was (and still is) a premier health, teaching and research facility within Australia. In 1935, the RMH’s goal for the new hospital was to create a modern teaching hospital on a par with the world’s best. This clearly was achieved as, in 1945, the hospital buildings had gained significance within the Australian hospital architectural milieu for being the first general public hospital to be completed in the vertical typology and implementing the modernist principles of functionality and the minimalist aesthetic. It was also particularly significant within the hospital oeuvre of SM/T as it was their first general hospital and one which became the exemplar for their later hospital work. These facts are well recognised by architectural historians but this is the first time the programming methodology implemented to achieve this important building complex has been explored. Architectural Programming officially emerged as a professional discipline in the 1960s. In doing so, it replaced the traditional briefing process and, ostensibly for the first time, recognised and advocated the role of the client in the Programming process. However, documentary evidence clearly reveals that SM/T not only practiced programming, they were using the relevant terminology in the 1930s for the new RMH – 30 years prior to its formalisation. The expertise of both the client and the architects has been established in order to examine their roles within programming process for the new RMH. In 1935, the RMH was a composite of three major institutions: a general public hospital; the University of Melbourne Faculty of Medicine and Surgery Clinical School; and the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Research, Pathology and Medicine. The fact that the RMH was a public hospital meant it was under the jurisdiction of the Victorian State Government and its appointed body, the Charities Board of Victoria. Hence the client comprised of five entities. The RMH Committee of Management was the principal authority and therefore all the decisions were ultimately their responsibility. They appointed three committees for the new building: the Organisers – to organise the requirement lists from Heads of Departments and the Medical Staff; the Special Advisory and New Building Committee (NBC) to act as their ‘working client’; and the Board of Reference to act as the quick decision making committee. The standing Honorary Medical Officers Committee (HMOs) was also to play a major role in the programming process. Most of the committee members were medical professionals whose expertise lay in the knowledge of their individual discipline, the requirements for their departments and in the general operation of the hospital. By 1935, SM/T had ten years experience as specialist hospital architects. They operated their practice on a business-like footing with three principals, Arthur Stephenson, Percy Meldrum and Donald Turner and a staff of thirty-seven including seven qualified senior associates. However, the RMH presented a challenge to SM/T as they had not previously undertaken a project of this magnitude or complexity. The architects implemented the methodology of Design-by-Dialogue where programming and design were interlinked. It was the client’s responsibility to furnish the architects with a detailed list of their requirements. By developing schematic sketches which were presented at meetings with the client committees, the architects were able to closely interact with them throughout the protracted and difficult process of six iterative schemes, A, B, C, D, G and J for the six buildings: the Main Block, Outpatients Department, Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, Nurses Home, Resident Medical Officers Quarters and the Service Block. This dissertation is an empirical study of the RMH’s development 1935-45. It was possible as all the meetings between the client committees and the architects had been diligently minuted and preserved – along with correspondence, reports and architectural drawings – in archival repositories. Consequently, this work has provided new knowledge into rarely recorded programming interaction between clients and the architects. This dissertation is grounded in history and contributes significantly in the disciplines of architectural history and the history of architectural programming.
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ItemAn investigation into planning for urban resilience through niche interventions( 2016)This thesis investigated how planning for urban resilience is informed by niche interventions. This was done by tracking the trajectory of live/work as a niche intervention in San Francisco, Oakland, and Vancouver. The trajectories were used to contribute to understandings of urban resilience by providing insights into each city’s governance structures, approaches to planning, and key stakeholders, and identifying challenges and success factors. Resilience planning was more successful with collaborative and experimental planning, compared to rigid, top-down political approache
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ItemA mass personalisation model to enhance added residential value in social housing( 2016)It is a major challenge in developing countries to ensure access to quality social housing. Standardised mass housing is still ubiquitously used when addressing pressing shortages, regardless of well-documented problems with this form of provision. Although strategies based upon participation and self-help action may offer significant benefits, these delivery approaches are difficult to scale up and thus offer a feasible alternative to mass housing. There might be many reasons for this, but one is readily evident: mass production simplifies design and development, thus a more efficient housing delivery system. This thesis acknowledges the challenge and explores mass personalisation as an alternative approach to reconciling quality and quantity within the constraints of current social housing regulation and mainstream production systems. Mass personalisation is a particular approach to mass customisation in which the attributes of a product or service are tailored towards the implicit requirements of individual users. If mass customisation seeks to offer enhanced variability with costs close those of mass production, mass personalisation seeks to meet the requirements of individual users more closely than is possible through traditional product specification approaches. This thesis demonstrates that mass personalisation can inform the delivery of cost-effective dwellings capable of facilitating the changing residential requirements of individual households and thus enhance their residential value throughout their life cycles. The Chilean social housing program is used here as a case study context to explore current qualitative problems and to propose a mass personalisation model focused on the co-creation of residential value. A significant factor in household satisfaction is identified as the ability of occupants to personalise their home, influencing both user expectations and their perceived quality of the residential environment. Data gathered revealed that thermal performance was a key factor, reflecting expectations of the relationship between occupants and providers (i.e., personalisation as a service) as well as the impact that self-construction (i.e., personalisation of the product) can have on energy consumption for space heating. These insights are formalised and used as a conceptual foundation to structure a mass personalisation model that represents housing delivery as an ecosystem of users, products, and services in which the continuous provision of personalised user experiences is enabled. In support of the co-creation process, the proposed model draws upon on web personalisation and data mining techniques to profile household requirements using public datasets and direct user input, to automate the generation of housing alternatives using modular housing components, and to identify discrete solution sets of enhanced residential value. This model has been implemented as a proof-of-concept configurator with a particular focus on the provision of energy efficient dwellings and then evaluated under the Chilean program using simulation and scenario-based testing. Overall, the main contribution of this thesis is in introducing mass personalisation principles to social housing as well as in demonstrating its potential and limitations when used as a strategy to enhance added residential value under current mass production-oriented regulation and production systems.
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ItemTransit-oriented urban design assemblages( 2016)Transit-oriented urbanism is a fundamental concept in contemporary urban design and planning. Both theory and practice show that transit-orientated development produces a more diverse, equitable, effective and low-carbon city. This study aims to develop urban design strategies for transit-oriented development of low-density, car-dependent cities. Case study research of effective transit-oriented urbanism in Japan, USA and Sweden represents the empirical grounding of this study. These cases will be analysed across three urban design themes—concentration, co-functioning and connectivity—within the framework of assemblage thinking and complexity theory. Three urban design strategies for a low-density Melbourne case study will derive from case study data analyses. Empirical and theoretical research will in this sense be intersected to provide a framework for different urban intensification scenarios. The outcome of this research contributes to the theory of sustainable urban intensification and refines the practices of efficient transit-orientated urban design for low-density car-based cities.
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ItemLegislative control and the quality of housing in Victoria( 2016)The quest to improve the quality of new house construction has been ongoing worldwide. To achieve an improvement in quality, varying approaches have been adopted. For example, the United Kingdom has relied on industry sponsored standards through the National House Building Council (NHBC). In Australia, the State of Victoria trialed and discarded industry sponsored voluntary schemes and adopted Builder Registration as the preferred method of improving new house quality. The House Contracts Guarantee Act (HCGA) 1987 was an important step in that quest. This was deemed inadequate and was replaced by the Domestic Contracts Act 1995 (DBCTA). This was widely seen as a progression towards improving the quality of house construction. It follows that if the DBCA is purportedly an improvement on the HCGA 1987, then the research question becomes: “Can government legislation alone improve the quality of house construction?” This thesis builds on previous work (Georgiou et al. 1999) and reports on the results of a study of 631 houses constructed under the auspices of the DBCA 1995 and compares them to 770 houses constructed under the auspices of the HCGA 1987.
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ItemTowards more comprehensive urban environmental assessments: exploring the complex relationship between urban and metabolic profiles( 2016)Urban areas cover 2% of the Earth’s land surface, host more than 50% of global population and are estimated to account for around 75% of CO2 emissions from global energy use. In order to mitigate existing and future direct and indirect environmental pressures resulting from urban resource use, it is necessary to investigate and better understand resource and pollution flows associated with urban systems. Current urban environmental assessment methodologies enable the quantification of resource use and pollution emissions flows entering, becoming stocked and exiting urban areas. While these methodologies enable to estimate the environmental effect of cities, they often consider urban areas as being static and homogeneous systems. This partial and simplistic representation shadows the complex spatio-temporal interrelationships between the local context and its associated local and global environmental pressures. This characterisation of urban systems is a significant limitation, not only for the urban environmental assessments, but also for the identification of their drivers as it may lead to inadequate urban environmental policies. To overcome this limitation and effectively reduce glocal urban environmental pressures, it is necessary to better understand the complex functioning of cities and identify their drivers. This research developed a comprehensive urban environmental assessment framework that helps to better explicit and understand the complex relationship between an urban system and its environmental profile in a systemic and systematic way. This framework was applied to the case study of Brussels Capital Region (BCR). Results from the application of this framework show that urban systems are neither static nor homogeneous. In fact, different relationships between the urban and metabolic profiles appear when considering different spatial scales and temporal intervals as well as different urban and metabolic metrics. The establishment of BCR’s urban profile showed that components that shape the urban system evolve in an organic way over time. Moreover, the spatial expression of an urban system portrays its heterogeneous aspect and how different metrics of the same urban indicator can reveal distinct facets and challenges for an urban area or a neighbourhood. Finally, it was demonstrated that the relationship between urban indicators is different for each spatial scale and therefore knowledge from one spatial scale is not necessarily transferable from one scale to another. The establishment and analysis of BCR’s metabolic profile also underlined the complex functioning of cities as each flow has a different temporal evolution and spatial expression. Due to the multifaceted and intertwined aspect of metabolic flows it becomes clear that no single parameter enables to explain or predict their behaviour. This leads to the conclusion that a great number of questions still need to be considered, understood and answered before effectively and coherently reducing environmental pressures from cities. The developed framework proposes a number of concrete steps that enable existing and new cities to better understand their metabolic functioning and ultimately transition towards less environmentally harmful futures.