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The soiling of the external façades of buildings caused by air pollution has economic costs that are generally not borne entirely by the polluters but by society in general. The present paper attempts to estimate the maintenance costs attributable to the soiling of the façades of residential buildings exposed to ambient air pollution in Italy. In this study, dose-response functions were used to link the environmental concentrations of pollutants to the soiling rate of the opaque and transparent surfaces of the building façades. It was assumed that the spatial distribution of façade materials follows the distribution of population. The basic assumption was that maintenance is performed when critical levels, 35% loss of reflectance for opaque surfaces and 1% haze for glass surfaces, are reached. Several important elements seem to emerge from the analysis carried out. The cost of damage to opaque surfaces due to air pollution appears to be a non-negligible fraction of the total maintenance costs of building façades incurred in Italy. Moreover, the cost of soiling damage to residential buildings from particulate matter has the potential to significantly increase total external costs due to air pollution. The costs of cleaning window panes due to air pollution also appear significant. Finally, if the levels of atmospheric pollution in the most populated areas become similar to the concentrations currently present in the most remote areas in Italy, the overall cost at national level due to the soiling of the building façades could be reduced by about 50%.

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Collecting 3D point cloud data of buildings is important for many applications such as urban mapping, renovation, preservation, and energy simulation. However, laser-scanned point clouds are often difficult to analyze, visualize, and interpret due to incompletely scanned building facades caused by numerous sources of defects such as noise, occlusions, and moving objects. Several point cloud scene completion algorithms have been proposed in the literature, but they have been mostly applied to individual objects or small-scale indoor environments and not on large-scale scans of building facades. This paper introduces a method of performing point cloud scene completion of building facades using orthographic projection and generative adversarial inpainting methods. The point cloud is first converted into the 2D structured representation of depth and color images using an orthographic projection approach. Then, a data-driven 2D inpainting approach is used to predict the complete version of the scene, given the incomplete scene in the image domain. The 2D inpainting process is fully automated and uses a customized generative-adversarial network based on Pix2Pix that is trainable end-to-end. The inpainted 2D image is finally converted back into a 3D point cloud using depth remapping. The proposed method is compared against several baseline methods, including geometric methods such as Poisson reconstruction and hole-filling, as well as learning-based methods such as the point completion network (PCN) and TopNet. Performance evaluation is carried out based on the task of reconstructing real-world building facades from partial laser-scanned point clouds. Experimental results using the performance metrics of voxel precision, voxel recall, position error, and color error showed that the proposed method has the best performance overall.

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The evaluation of building facades is one of the most important elements in built environments for helping architects and professionals to develop future designs. The form or shape of windows in building facades has direct impacts on perceivers' affective state and emotions. To understand the impacts of geometric windows on the subject's feedback and cortical activity, psychophysics experiments and electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings were measured from the participants. Our behavioral results show a distinguished categorization of the window shapes as pleasant and unpleasant stimuli. The rectangular, square, circular and semi-circular arch were determined as the pleasant window shapes, while the triangular and triangular arch window shapes were distinguished as unpleasant. Furthermore, event-related potential (ERP) components (N1, P2 and P3) were investigated to determine the influence of window shapes on the local brain activity. To measure reliable cortical responses, a Butterworth notch filter (50 Hz), band pass filter (0.1-60 Hz) and ADJUST filter were employed to remove the artifacts. The electrophysiological results show increased activity for the unpleasant in comparison to the pleasant windows (p < 0.05, Rank-Sum test) in both frontal (for P2 component) and posterio-occipital (ERP amplitudes; the N1 through to the P3 peak) channels. The ERP amplitudes of the right hemisphere were significantly larger than in the left hemisphere, not only in response to the unpleasant (p < 0.001) but also to the pleasant window stimuli (p < 0.001, Signed-Rank test). However, the unpleasant stimuli evoked significantly larger ERP amplitude than the pleasant stimuli. Moreover, the significant ERPP2 amplitude was more distinguished for unpleasant (p = 0.01, Signed-Rank test) than pleasant windows (p = 0.01, Rank-Sum test) between frontal and central cortical lobes. Overall, our behavioral and electrophysiological studies demonstrate a distinguished categorization of pleasant and unpleasant window shapes and more significant ERP modulations in the right than left hemisphere for unpleasant windows compared to pleasant ones.

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The use of biocides as additives for building materials has gained importance in the recent years. These biocides are applied, e.g., to renders and paints to prevent them from microbial spoilage. However, these biocides can leach out into the environment. In order to better understand this leaching, the partition of biocides between water and inorganic phases of render with organic binder was investigated. The partition constants of carbendazim, diuron, iodocarb, isoproturon, cybutryn (irgarol), octylisothiazolinone, terbutryn, and tebuconazole towards minerals typically used in renders, e.g. barite, calcium carbonate, marble, kaolinite, and talc were determined. Partition constants for calcium carbonate varied between 0.2mLg-1 (diuron) and 5.2mLg-1 (iodocarb), respectively. The results for barite and kaolinite were in a similar range and usually the compounds with high partition constants for one mineral also had high values for the other mineral. No sorption to marble at all was found. From all minerals investigated, only talc showed high partition for all studied biocides. Partition constants for talc varied from 21.3mLg-1 (iodocarb) to 683.7mLg-1 (tebuconazole), respectively. The comparison with render-water distribution constants of two artificially made renders showed that the distribution constants can be estimated based on partition constants of compounds for individual components of the render.

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In recent years, exterior thermal insulation systems became more and more important leading to an increasing amount of houses equipped with biocide-containing organic façade coatings or fungicide treated wood. It is known that these biocides, e.g. terbutryn, carbendazim, and diuron, as well as wood preservatives as propiconazole, leach out of the material through contact with wind driven rain. Hence, they are present in combined sewage during rain events in concentrations up to several hundred ng L(-1). The present study focused on the occurrence of these biocides in five wastewater treatment plants in Denmark and Sweden during dry and wet weather. It was discovered, that biocides are detectable not only during wet weather but also during dry weather when leaching from façade coatings can be excluded as source. In most cases, the concentrations during dry weather were in the same range as during wet weather (up to 100 ng L(-1)); however, for propiconazole noteworthy high concentrations were detected in one catchment (4.5 µg L(-1)). Time resolved sampling (12 × 2 h) enabled assessments about possible sources. The highest mass loads during wet weather were detected when the rain was heaviest (e.g. up to 116 mg h(-1) carbendazim or 73 mg h(-1) mecoprop) supporting the hypothesis that the biocides were washed off by wind driven rain. Contrary, the biocide emissions during dry weather were rather related to household activities than with emissions from buildings, i.e., emissions were highest during morning and evening hours (up to 50 mg h(-1)). Emissions during night were significantly lower than during daytime. Only for propiconazole a different emission behaviour during dry weather was observed: the mass load peaked in the late afternoon (3 g h(-1)) and declined slowly afterwards. Most likely this emission was caused by a point source, possibly from inappropriate cleaning of spray equipment for agriculture or gardening.

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