Volume 16 (2020): Issue 1 (January 2020)

Although Japan, because of its long history of natural disasters, has always been one of the most prepared country, the 2011 Great East Japanese Earthquake and tsunami caused unprecedented damages to the country. This paper introduces public policies for urban resilience from international level to national level, analysing Tohoku’s reconstruction. First, we will introduce the United Nations frameworks and guidelines for “Build Back Better” before confronting this theory with its practical application. Concluding remarks suggest that Japanese reconstruction policies provoked some challenges in the local implementation of urban resilience.

the question of quality of modified landscape is critical for the client and the users and depends on the quality of projects. After theoretical and empirical research, the paper proposes the framework for quality assessment criteria and corresponding indicators for assessing landscape architecture projects. By thorough analysis of the recent international research and design and implementation practices in Lithuania, the paper gives the flexible and universal set of environmental, socio-economic, and aesthetic quality criteria and relevant indicators in the context of sustainable performance.

this research aims to explore the historical development, current situation, weaknesses and strengths of brownfield revitalization, as well as threats and possible solutions. Current situation in legislation and real life has been viewed, successful solutions globally and particularly in Latvia have been explored, innovation ideas, problems and recommendations for the improvement of the situations have been researched.

After three decades of socio-economic and political changes, participation in urban planning is still an emerging practice in post-socialist countries. Using Riga as a case study, the research aims to explore participatory planning practices in a post-socialist urban context since 1990. Employing meta-analysis as a methodological approach to combine information from various sources, the study identifies three phases of participatory planning in Riga characterized by changes in government-led participatory planning approaches, level of participation, outcomes as well as changes in the civic sector.

The article presents a theoretical model for evaluating architectural works artistic novelty of which is associated with concrete – the medium of the 20th century architecture. The theoretical model reflects the idea of autopoiesis and works as a network parameter system, which promotes the constant renewal of knowledge in the field of concrete architecture. The theoretical scheme consists of two levels: at Level I the object’s aesthetic-technological type is identified; at Level II – specific features of interaction between artistic forms and reinforced concrete technologies in architecture are revealed through the net of aspects and indicators. Vilnius Palace of Culture and Sports as one of the iconic examples and the representative of solid aesthetic-technological type of the Lithuanian concrete architecture has been chosen to test the theoretical model.

Orientation is a design parameter that plays a major role in climate responsive architecture and helps achieve comfort within the built environment. However, it is difficult to achieve an ideal orientation, especially in urban context. The main aim of this paper is to develop alternate strategies to overcome the challenges faced in designing as per preferred orientation and then derive a set of tools that can help decide the orientation of a building on site both under normal and congested site conditions. Thereafter, the inferences from the paper can act as references for choosing an optimum orientation for placement of buildings in warm humid climate. It can act as a significant pedagogical guideline for students of architecture in deciphering solutions for a climate responsive design in a simplified manner. The results can also be utilised for future research in formulating similar tools for other climatic regions.

For sustainable development, it is important to ensure healthy life and well-being for all ages, promote inclusive and sustainable economic growth, productive employment and decent work, take urgent action to combat climate change and its effects and protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems. Taking into account the negative effects of climate change, the degrading effects of contemporary conventional industrial scale agricultural practices, the declining everyday physical activity of the working age people in developed countries, and other problems related to indoor work, this research proposes the office concept entitled FO-AM (Forest-Office Administrative (function) Movement) that allows to gradually move from sitting to walking while working in purposefully created or adapted forest areas. Numerous studies have been conducted on the positive effects of the natural environment on human health and productivity. A study published by Australian researchers revealed that sitting time is directly linked to all-cause mortality. While research results call for effective innovations for reducing the amount of time spent sitting and encouraging people, especially urban residents, to connect with nature, no effective holistic solutions have been found yet. The article presents a literature review on the contemporary office-nature space integration trends and the existing technical and design solutions and contemporary re-naturalization practices of ex-urban areas and presents the conceptual idea of landscape technology FO-AM allowing to transfer the functions of administrative buildings to the semi-natural and natural environment, including partially anthropogenic environment, park, forest park and natural forest, and in this way to address public health and well-being, economic innovation and climate change issues, thus contributing to the long-term sustainability goals.

Sustainable development – development that meets the needs of the present-day societies without compromising the possibilities of the future societies to meet their needs – became the predominant paradigm of planning policies. This concept with its environmental, social, economic and cultural dimensions has been applied to the field of architecture since the end of the 20th century. However, numerous researchers still notice technological and ecological orientation of sustainable architecture and the lack of attention to its cultural, place-based and aesthetics aspects. The question may be asked if it is possible to distinguish the aesthetics of sustainable architecture. Thus, this research analyses the question of sustainability aesthetics and the ways that it is expressed in the field of architecture. In order to reach this aim: the quantitative and qualitative literature review on the questions of sustainability aesthetics and sustainability aesthetics in architecture was performed; the discussion of the notion of sustainability aesthetics and the aesthetic trends of sustainable architecture was developed based on the results of literature analysis.

For exploring and discovering the main knowledge, experience and practices, four main issues were analyzed: what were the goals of the involved participants regarding the community involvement in the spatial and community planning; what methods were used to extend the involvement of community members; what problems and obstacles did the project participants face, and what were the main lessons learned. This study provides reflections (analysis, comparison and evaluation) on community involvement in participatory process in coastal areas of the Baltic Sea Region by investigating the methods, which were used in community involvement in project participating countries; and its influence in improving local governance of the local territory development.

In the era of already spent utopias and ideas about the city the experience of the city is transformed into a new perceptual grammar that is a consequence of the new virtual reality. With the revolutionary computerization of architecture a new architectural discourse was created that enabled virtual one – cyberspace, producing a new experience of transposed reality. The concept of a digital city does not exist without a virtual community, which on the other hand problematizes the issue of digital city ethics, bearing in mind that its use is conditioned by technical and technological possibilities, which are still not available to everyone. Digitalization of space communicates the newly created virtual dialogue between the user and space, outside of his physical and sensory experience and interaction with space, thus agreeing to the digitalization of the experience of space. By creating a new reality and a new era of the utopia of virtual architecture and virtual city, a new, cyberidentity of city was produced. Identity digitization policies in this regard will consciously use methods to promote virtual values, digitizing all aspects of identity, heritage, and even memory, and memory values of the city, producing a new, virtual identity, which largely leads to mutation of its original – existing – built identity. In this way, cities are positioned and valued in relation to the degree of their digitized representation, i.e., the extent to which their digitized identity is present and visible in cyberspace. The digital transition is one of the priorities of the “smart city” concept, which indicates that the future of cities is directed towards their digital transformation.

With the increasing functionality and complexity of the material environment it is becoming important to universally improve the quality of its shape design for people with different knowledge. When the material environment shape does not match its value content or acquire unpredictable meaning, it creates disharmony between the function and user that requires intellectual and / or emotional effort for interaction. The intuitive design improves user’s interaction because the information is presented on the subconscious level, hence it is accepted as a natural part of our environment and demands less effort to grasp and evaluate it. In this study, the scientific context of intuition is examined to determine methods and values of shape intuitive expression modeling. The goal of the study is to assess the effectiveness of shape experimental intuitive harmonization methodology using qualitative and quantitative methods. Functional and interaction restrictions are integrated into the object’s shape by employing experimental modeling techniques. Surveys, controlled observations and MaxDiff analysis were used to monitor intuitive harmonization effects on car body split-line and box shape physical models. Experimental results show that the majority of participants consider conceptual shape models to be more intuitively attractive and informative. The study concludes that it is possible and viable to employ a proposed shape intuitive harmonization variable to achieve a universally positive effect.

Heritage connects the past and present, but at the same time it connects people with each other and with the place itself. The perception of heritage regarding the built heritage can be a problematic issue in the globalised world, since it might not be easy to relate to an artefact that is not necessarily one’s own, or an environment, which does not carry the characteristics that one is used to. This research aims to understand the constraints of the perception of built heritage by using the Modern Movement artefacts and tries to analyse the perception of different societies by a pilot survey. The pilot survey suggests that prior knowledge and public awareness has a colossal impact on the perception or evaluation of the built heritage.

City is a multi-layered structure of social, cultural, and economic aspects and their relationship through the physical space. Recognition of some patterns in those relationships is the essence for defining fragmentations in urban fabric and suggesting solutions on how those fragmentations could be solved.

The article analyses how different space syntax methods can be used to find patterns in the chosen urban environment. Space syntax allows to find urban relationships between physical environment and human behavior. Space syntax suggests a few different approaches on how these relationships could be simulated: Segment Analysis perceives environment as a network of paths or streets, visibility graph analysis concentrates on inter-visual relationships, while agent-based analysis uses simple artificial intelligence for modeling movement in open space. Consequentially, the aim of this research is to find out what human behaviour aspects each of these space syntax methods are able to simulate.

The aim of the study is to find out to what extent dominant ideologies of post-war decades shaped modern mass housing and to engage a discussion about potential heritage of the phenomenon. Analysis is based on the district of Lazdynai (Vilnius). The paper is committed to demonstrate that transition, considered by Tunbridge & Ashworth as a factor of dissonance in heritage, made messages and meanings embedded in mass housing obsolete, and in some cases even undesirable.