Green retrofitting practices have critical importance in both the construction industry (CI) and healthcare industry (HI) due to the adverse effects of the existing healthcare buildings on both the environment and public health. Ironically, existing healthcare buildings consume critical amounts of energy, produce wastes, and CO2 emissions, which have considerable diverse harmful impacts on the health and well-being of the society as well as the environment. Especially, given the main goals of healthcare, green retrofitting is crucial to provide a healthy future for patients and staff of healthcare buildings. There is a sensitive link between providing sustainable healthcare buildings with improving health of the patients. Therefore, green retrofitting of healthcare buildings (GRHB) can be seen as one of the significant contributors that have a critical role in reducing the harmful impacts of the existing healthcare buildings. Nowadays, due to coronavirus pandemic, nations will focus on the physical conditions of their healthcare buildings more than ever for strengthening their infrastructure with appropriate retrofitting approaches. Therefore, the worldwide concerns put the prominence of the importance of patient safety and strong health infrastructure on the agenda of nations. Improvements in the health infrastructure are inevitable for the future, and with regarding this motivation, we looked at the benefits of GRHB in the first place. In the existing literature, there is a lack of comprehensive review associated with the GRHB. This paper focuses on conducting a systematic literature review to investigate the benefits of GRHB with selected academic studies. After the identification of healthcare and green retrofitting specific studies, the benefits of GRHB were determined by frequency analysis and classified under four dimensions, which are environmental, economic, social, and functional. Results demonstrated that reduced energy consumption, reduced costs, and improved energy performance of the building are the three major benefits. In terms of healthcare perspective, the critical outcomes of this study as the main benefits differ from other types of green retrofitting projects, which are improved infection control and improved recovery rate. The results of this systematic review will enhance the understanding of the importance of GRHB and its benefits, which will be useful for academics, green building professionals as well as healthcare building providers.
Introduction: Turkey has a history of various natural disasters. In architecture education, students need to be informed about natural disasters, produce information, and use the knowledge in their designs to play an essential role in shaping the built environment. The disaster awareness-education center and park aim to raise awareness and educate all segments of society about natural disasters and create practical solutions when necessary. Objectives: The research aims to systematically examine urban landscape design solutions to raise awareness of the architectural students about disasters through an exemplary disaster awareness park in Istanbul. The proposed landscapes are classified concerning disaster awareness level, education and training capacity and the potential to serve as a post-disaster meeting point and temporary management center. Methods: This research presents an architectural design process. The research uses landscape planning and design principles to evaluate student projects concerning the relationship between indoor spaces and disaster awareness and education parks in open areas. Results: Architecture graduate students have been successful in building outdoor-indoor connections, multi-purpose use of outdoor spaces, designing open space services, and solving services and meeting areas through their projects. However, their designs did not address planting, ecological and sustainable green space, and emergency water use.
The objective of this study is to examine the influence of building design on office occupants by analysing empirical data on their satisfaction levels and prevalent complaints. A methodology involving literature review, expert interviews, and a field survey with 308 office employees was adopted to acquire the empirical data. The findings reveal that office occupants think Amount of Space as the most important parameter, followed by Layout, and Furniture. On the other hand, occupants are least satisfied by Amount of Space, followed by Interior Design and Layout. Insufficient social areas, insufficient work space, and layout of the work environment, distraction caused by human circulation due to office layout, and ergonomics of the furniture are the most common complaints. The results show that average importance level in each building design parameter is higher than or equal to the average satisfaction level. The largest gap between the perceived importance and satisfaction appears in Amount of Space and Layout. The results are expected to provide insight to designers, facility managers, and renovators of office buildings on how office occupants perceive office building design and frequent complaints encountered in the offices.
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