No abstract

Cities are a complex mass of morphological properties of many city fragments, which play a major role in energy consumption. Urban form, urban patterns, or city fragments can also be seen as defined by algorithms or form generators.  Cities are designed taking into account infrastructure, city standards and land use regulations. Energy efficiency of the urban form may be understood as the balance between gains and losses of energy, which may depend on a set of parameters mostly defined by the geometrical shape of the buildings and the distance between them. The study starts from the development and analysis of 60 hypothetical models in order to evaluate their energy efficiency potential. The Galapagos Evolutionary Solver is used as a tool in order to find the set of parameters, which brings to the morphological properties the optimal combination of density and surface-to-volume ratio. At the final stage morphological properties of 64 Prague’s patterns were selected.  Computer simulation and analysis is performed using the models extracted from the virtual Google Earth model of Prague. During the process of evaluation of the samples, the relationship between the urban form and such parameters as plot coverage, surface-to-volume ratio and the incident solar radiation was established and potentially higher energy efficient structures were indicated. As the result of analysis the interrelation between urban form and energy efficiency was established, which allowed to identify the urban patterns with the higher potential of energy efficiency.

During the last decade, there has been massive growth in the construction of large residential complexes and apartment blocks in Tirana. Urban density is increasing due to the fact that traditional low-story villas are demolished, and the space of the former private gardens is used for the new construction with high built ratio. The public areas which are adequate for such dense cities are not provided and therefore residents have a tendency to spend more time indoors. This research aims to evaluate the spatial qualities of the newly constructed 3+1 apartments using the Space Syntax visibility graph analysis (VGA). VGA allows to compare the overall exposure of the room, to estimate its level of privacy and control and to check if it is suitable for the assigned function. Analysis is performed for the apartments of different price levels in order to find the influence of price to the design quality and residential comfort. The results show that the degree of separation of the public and private domains corresponds to an increase in the price of the apartment. The visual exposure of the hall is higher in comparison with the living room, which facilitates the movement towards the individual rooms without interaction with the other family members.