One of the most important considerations in housing design is flexibility, which refers to the idea of including change over time. In looking at recent residential architecture of Cyprus, especially in real estate housing as a subset of mass housing, unfortunately, flexibility is not considered enough as a leading concept. The aim of this research is to evaluate notions and stages of flexibility in real estate housing projects in a recently developed residential context on the Salamis coastal line between the cities of Famagusta and Trikomo. The first step is flexibility assessment from an architectural perspective, through analyzing the architectural drawings of the projects to find out the potential for long term flexibility in terms of 'structural', 'functional' and 'cultural' notions; whereas, the second step is evaluating flexibility in three phases as 'design', 'construction' and 'usage' stages through questionnaire surveys with both construction companies and users. The results indicate the flexibility from the company's perspective and defragment the inhabitants' external and interior flexibility needs in three different stages, highlighting the role of companies and architects in designing flexible housing that can adapt to various users and their changing needs and preferences.
The building sector has a major economic, environmental and social impact on society; hence, it is crucial to promote sustainable construction practice. The facade is one of the largest main components of a building, which could strongly contribute to the sustainability performance for the whole building. Previous studies started defining tools to assess facade sustainability, although relevant indicators were dismissed or, if considered, they were rather subjectively quantified. Likewise, most existing tools omit stakeholder satisfaction in the assessment process for optimal facade systems. In this regard, this paper presents a new systematic approach based on MIVES (The Integrated Value Model for Sustainable Assessment) for holistic sustainability assessment of building facade systems by integrating stakeholders' satisfaction in the decision-making process. To this end, for the first time to the authors' best knowledge, the most representative and discriminative indicators for quantifying facade sustainability were identified to define a new approach to minimise subjectivity in the decision-making process and, consequently, to ease the task of decision-makers when choosing and designing facade alternatives for new buildings and rehabilitation. This approach is validated and initially applied to assess the six most common residential facade systems in Barcelona. Results indicate that these building elements have low to medium sustainability performance.
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