Alterations and extensions to commercial buildings in the Melbourne CBD: The relationship between adaptation and building attributes

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Alterations and extensions to commercial
buildings in the Melbourne CBD The relationship
between adaptation and building attributes

• Sara Wilkinson Richard Reed
• Faculty of Business Law
• Deakin University
• Melbourne Australia

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overview

• Introduction
• Rationale for the research
• Factors influencing building adaptation
• Research Method
• Principal Components Analysis
• Results and discussion
• Conclusions

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Introduction

• Significance of buildings to greenhouse gas
  emissions
• 1200 buildings program / carbon neutral 2020
• 1-2 added to total stock per annum
• We need to adapt existing buildings
• what is the relationship between building
  adaptation event, classified as alterations and
  extensions in the CBD and building attributes?

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Factors influencing building adaptation

• Definitions
• Previous research grouped factors into
• Economic
• Social
• Environmental
• Technological
• Legal
• Physical

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Research Methodology

• Case study approach favoured
• Stage 1 - factors identified from previous
  studies
• Stage 2 analysed relationship between
  adaptation criteria and building adaptation
  events
• Building Attribute Database
• Building Adaptation Event Database levels of
  adaptations identified
• 13,222 events 1998 to 2008
• Geographical area defined

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Principal Component Analysis (PCA).

• What PCA does - uncover, disentangles and
  summarises patterns of correlation within a data
  set
• How - condenses information contained in a number
  of original variables into a smaller set of new
  composite factors with a minimum loss of
  information
• Series of steps
• Step 1 enter all variables into PCA
• Step 2 number of factors to retain
• Based on Kaiser criterion, only Eigenvalues
  exceeding 1 are retained,
• Interpret factor loadings
• 5290 events categorised as alterations and
  extensions

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Factor 1 physical / size

• No. of storeys, GFA, PCA Grade, site boundaries.
  typical floor area and site access are strongly
  to very strongly loaded on factor one.
• Six attributes explain 44.86 of the original
  variance.
• Three relate to the physical dimensions/size of
  the property in terms of floor area and height
  (i.e. physical attributes).
• Two relate to site boundaries (degree of
  attachment to other buildings) and site access
  (number of access/entry/exit points)
• These attributes are physical - size related.
• The final variable PCA Grade is strongly and
  negatively loaded and relates to building
  quality.
• With a loading of .427 Parking is too weak to be
  included in the final interpretation

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Factor 2 land

• three variables loaded very strongly to strongly
  on factor 2 are street frontage, vertical
  services location and location
• explain 19.78 of the variance.
• may be described as influenced by land/design
  factors.
• street frontage or width of the land parcel and
  the location of the property relate to land
  attributes.
• vertical services location - a design attribute
  that influencing flexibility of the space plan to
  adapt to different configurations of the floor
  plate.

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Factor 3 social

• historic listing and age are very strongly and
  moderately loaded on factor 3
• explain 9.33 of the variance
• age is negatively loaded - as buildings age they
  are more likely to be adapted.
• can be described as social attributes.
• aesthetics is weakly loaded, relates to building
  appearance (buildings having a poor appearance
  outmoded or outdated are less likely to be
  adapted).
• aesthetics is the related to age and historic
  listing.

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Conclusions

• Two primary findings from the PCA.
• Three defined and readily interpreted factors
  (table 4).
• The PCA has correlated variables that previous
  studies identified as being separate and distinct
  (Blakstad 2001 Kucik 2004 Arge 2005) which
  indicates that the relationship between building
  adaptation and building attributes is more
  complex than previously considered.

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Final comments

• No research has investigated such a large number
  of events
• The research questions have been answered
• The importance of a small number of building
  attributes is found to influence adaptation to a
  high degree (73.98 of adaptation is explained by
  12 attributes).
• These findings begin to place important parts of
  the adaptation jigsaw in place.
• Through the enhanced understanding of the
  patterns of commercial building adaptation, it is
  possible to strategically plan and target policy
  making to optimise efforts to deliver the 38
  reductions in building related greenhouse gas
  emissions and the objectives of the 1200
  buildings program.