Browsing by Subject "Historic buildings"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3

Battle Hall : restoring natural ventilation in the Reading Room
(2011-05) Yen, Daniel Ka Kei; Holleran, Michael; Garrison, Michael; O'Connell, Tere
Battle Hall, located at the heart of the University of Texas at Austin’s campus since 1911, has been serving the University for a century. It was designed for cooling with natural ventilation prior to being fully air conditioned in the mid-1960s. The mechanical system currently installed in Battle Hall is over 40 years old. While it provides reasonable environment for the collections, it struggles to achieve stable conditions for various zones in the building. The purpose of this study is to consider isolating the Reading Room as an individual zone and explore the possibility of restoring natural ventilation as it was originally designed. There are various benefits in restoring natural ventilation to the hundred-year old Reading Room, including psychological benefits, indoor air quality, and energy savings. However, various concerns, such as environmental conditions, air pollutants, acoustic, and potential light damages, also exist. This study focuses on investigating the possibility of restoring natural ventilation by examining existing conditions, collection care requirements for library collections and historic architectural elements. Two data-loggers were placed in the Reading Room to record temperature and relative humidity readings for approximately five months. Through analysis of these readings of existing collection care settings and existing architectural settings, potential solutions and alternatives were considered and examined. These included non-action, hybrid natural ventilation, Johnson Controls Personal Environmental System, and HVAC shut-off. This study is the first of its kind for Battle Hall. As a Historic Structures Report of Battle Hall is commissioned by the University, this study provides a better understanding of potential solutions and alternatives to restore natural ventilation to Battle Hall. This may also serve as a platform to stimulate ideas and research on natural ventilation restoration to other buildings in the University.
Preservation under the crescent and star : using new sources for examining the historic development of the Balat District in Istanbul and its meanings for historic preservation
(2004-12) Uluengin, Mehmet Bengü, 1974-; Chusid, Jeffrey M.
The purpose of this dissertation is to identify various sources hitherto neglected by the field of historic preservation in Turkey, and to seek possible ways in which they can be incorporation into this field. As demonstrated by the case study chosen for this dissertation--the Balat District in Istanbul--the use of these sources fosters a richness of perception which today is lacking in historic preservation in Turkey. The dissertation begins with the hypothesis that historic preservation in Turkey was used to legitimize the constructed reality of the new Turkish Republic. Since the Republic represented everything the Ottoman Empire was not, it had to be purged of its Ottoman inheritance, including the Empire's institutions and its diverse, non-Muslim population. Istanbul's urban fabric, however, bore unmistakable marks of both. While the eradication of these marks was never a declared policy, the net effect of the Republic's actions was essentially to have that result. A heightened awareness of the neglected sources mentioned above may help obviate the ways in which history has been rewritten, and may also help us develop preservation policies which provide a richer, more complex and multi-ethnic reading of Balat's--and ultimately Istanbul's--past. In the case of Balat, in contrast to the relatively few sources used by preservation authorities (mainly old photographs and historic maps) stand a vast array of sources that typically go unnoticed. Among these are Byzantine records, Ottoman governmental records, Islamic court records, rabbinical records, church records, etc. In practice, a neighborhood preservation project would ideally use most of these sources. To make the current study manageable, however, I will focus specifically on Islamic court records. During my fieldwork in Istanbul, I scanned roughly 4,300 court records (covering the period from 1800 to 1839) to identify cases pertinent to the built environment. The 1198 cases that I identified provide a wealth of information related to building types, ownership patterns, commercial activity, demographics, mobility, etc.--information which helps us reconstruct the lifestyle of Balat's residents, and ultimately aids in the rendering of a multi-faceted narrative of the District's urban history.
Two crises, one stone : using existing building stock to help combat the housing and sustainability crises
(2023-05) Gilk, Samantha; Holleran, Michael
Housing has been and most likely will continue to be a complicated and existing topic as long as the population continues to grow as it does. Historically middle density housing has been used as infill in neighborhoods or close to historic downtowns. In recent decades, however, this middle density housing has been greatly ignored for high- and mid-rise apartment complexes and sprawling suburban single family homes. The topic of housing has also entered a contradictory circle. On one hand cities across the United States are in desperate need of housing, especially affordable housing. But on the other hand, the existing natural resources across the world are in desperate need of less building and less sprawl. How do you balance these two conflicting needs? Enter adaptive reuse. By combining adaptive reuse projects and housing projects we can add to the middle density stock while maintaining important cultural fabric in the preservation of vernacular buildings. This paper is going to discuss the benefits that are inherent in both adaptive reuse and middle density housing as separate entities as well as how these two ideas naturally fit together and how more projects of this nature can be promoted. Lastly, several case studies will be examined to see how these types of projects already exist and how they have achieved their current states.