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\"It is probably fair to say that Andrea Palladio, who died in 1580, is the patron saint of every McMansion that has ever cluttered the American landscape, because it was he who brought architectural aspiration to the houses of the moderately wealthy. Before Palladio, serious architecture was for churches, public buildings, and the palaces of the richest nobles. Palladio studied the architecture of ancient Rome, codified its elements in a famous treatise, and started putting porticoes and pediments and domes on the houses of the landed gentry, conferring on them a feeling of classical pedigree.\" (New Yorker) Palladio, \"the most influential architect in Western history,\" is profiled.

To evaluate the impact of a novel design \"Star Home\" on the incidence of malaria, respiratory tract infections and diarrheal diseases among children, randomly selected households in Mtwara, Tanzania were offered a free, new Star Home. Drawing on longitudinal qualitative research that accompanied the Star Homes study, this article describes the experiences of residents and the wider community of living with these buildings. A total of four rounds of face-to-face interviews were undertaken with residents of Star Homes (n = 37), control (wattle/daub) homes (n = 21), neighboring households n = 6), community members (n = 17) and community leaders (n = 6). The use of Star Homes was also observed over these four time periods between 2021 and 2023. Interviews were conducted in Swahili, transcribed, and translated into English for thematic analysis. Star Homes residents appreciated several aspects of the Star Homes, including overall comfort, access to water and electricity, and clean toilets. There were concerns about some design elements, such as poorly closing doors, stoves perceived as inefficient, and the façade, which was susceptible to rainwater ingress. The houses were not always used as intended by their developers, for example, residents were sleeping downstairs instead of upstairs because of cold floors or difficulties using the stairs. Star Homes residents described how the structures triggered praise but also envy from other community members. The findings highlight the need for close attention to the use of novel design houses and careful sensitization around the potential benefits of dwellings to ensure that the intended health impacts of interventions are achieved.

\"In the 1920s, an unprecedented program of architectural and cultural renewal was established in the German city of Frankfurt am Main. This scheme became inscribed in cultural history under the name \"The New Frankfurt.\" Under the city's lord mayor, Ludwig Landmann, and the head of the municipal planning and building control office, Ernst May, modernity as a way of life took shape there: As part of the housing and urban development initiative decided in 1925, more than 10,000 new residential units were planned. The Building Ministry's architects, recruited from home and abroad, created pioneering work in many areas. Examples include the typification of family oriented flats, plans for affordable apartments for those on low incomes, the first standard kitchen, the industrial prefabrication of building shells, the construction of schools designed around children's needs, and integrated urban and green planning. In this book, four essays delve into the cultural background of the scheme and provide illuminating insights into the context of the work of its many actors. Richly illustrated short texts highlight the most important topics, settlements, and buildings, and provide an overview of the New Frankfurt phenomenon. Each featured object includes the address and information on public transport links, inviting readers on a tour of the New Frankfurt\"-- Provided by publisher.

Background In the UK, unique and unforeseen factors, including COVID-19, Brexit, and Ukraine-Russia war, have resulted in an unprecedented cost of living crisis, creating a second health emergency. We present, one of the first rapid reviews with the aim of examining the impact of this current crisis, at a population level. We reviewed published literature, as well as grey literature, examining a broad range of physical and mental impacts on health in the short, mid, and long term, identifying those most at risk, impacts on system partners, including emergency services and the third sector, as well as mitigation strategies. Methods We conducted a rapid review by searching PubMed, Embase, MEDLINE, and HMIC (2020 to 2023). We searched for grey literature on Google and hand-searched the reports of relevant public health organisations. We included interventional and observational studies that reported outcomes of interventions aimed at mitigating against the impacts of cost of living at a population level. Results We found that the strongest evidence was for the impact of cold and mouldy homes on respiratory-related infections and respiratory conditions. Those at an increased risk were young children (0–4 years), the elderly (aged 75 and over), as well as those already vulnerable, including those with long-term multimorbidity. Further short-term impacts include an increased risk of physical pain including musculoskeletal and chest pain, and increased risk of enteric infections and malnutrition. In the mid-term, we could see increases in hypertension, transient ischaemic attacks, and myocardial infarctions, and respiratory illnesses. In the long term we could see an increase in mortality and morbidity rates from respiratory and cardiovascular disease, as well as increase rates of suicide and self-harm and infectious disease outcomes. Changes in behaviour are likely particularly around changes in food buying patterns and the ability to heat a home. System partners are also impacted, with voluntary sectors seeing fewer volunteers, an increase in petty crime and theft, alternative heating appliances causing fires, and an increase in burns and burn-related admissions. To mitigate against these impacts, support should be provided, to the most vulnerable, to help increase disposable income, reduce energy bills, and encourage home improvements linked with energy efficiency. Stronger links to bridge voluntary, community, charity and faith groups are needed to help provide additional aid and support. Conclusion Although the CoL crisis affects the entire population, the impacts are exacerbated in those that are most vulnerable, particularly young children, single parents, multigenerational families. More can be done at a community and societal level to support the most vulnerable, and those living with long-term multimorbidity. This review consolidates the current evidence on the impacts of the cost of living crisis and may enable decision makers to target limited resources more effectively.

With its distinctive gables and arches, Tudor-style architecture is recognized around the world as a symbol of British culture; it represents the idea of home to British citizens in the United Kingdom and abroad. Some love it, others hate it, but the Tudoresque is still being built—to give a house an old-fashioned air or to create a sense of exotica. Yet few people know anything about how Tudor Revival buildings came to be. To fill this gap is Tudoresque, an insightful book that explores the origin of the style, tracing its roots to the antiquarian enthusiasms of the eighteenth century. It looks at the Tudoresque cottage style, which later influenced 1930s architecture, and the Tudor-style manor house, particularly favored in the nineteenth century. While the style has been discouraged since the 1920s (and is especially reviled by modernists) it continues to be a popular choice—particularly when the architect doesn't have the upper hand. The authors here show how the style is the mainstream of twentieth-century British architecture and explore how it has travelled abroad. From Tudor Village in Queens to Stan Hywet Hall in Akron to Malaysia, Shanghai, and Singapore, Tudor Revival has found a comfortable home across the globe. These black and white gabled buildings are important not so much because they are great architecture, but because they are everywhere. Illustrated with images from more than 200 years of the Tudor Revival, and including examples from Britain, America, India and East Asia, this knowledgable and entertaining book will be an indispensable guide to the one of the world's most iconic architectural styles.

Forecasting is of utmost importance for the Tourism Industry. The development of models to predict visitation demand to specific places is essential to formulate adequate tourism development plans and policies. Yet, only a handful of models deal with the hard problem of fine-grained (per attraction) tourism demand prediction. In this paper, we argue that three key requirements of this type of application should be fulfilled: (i) recency—forecasting models should consider the impact of recent events (e.g. weather change, epidemics and pandemics); (ii) seasonality—tourism behavior is inherently seasonal; and (iii) model specialization—individual attractions may have very specific idiosyncratic patterns of visitations that should be taken into account. These three key requirements should be considered explicitly and in conjunction to advance the state-of-the-art in tourism prediction models. In our experiments, considering a rich set of indoor and outdoor attractions with environmental and social data, the explicit incorporation of such requirements as features into the models improved the rate of highly accurate predictions by more than 320% when compared to the current state-of-the-art in the field. Moreover, they also help to solve very difficult prediction cases, previously poorly solved by the current models. We also investigate the performance of the models in the (simulated) scenarios in which it is impossible to fulfill all three requirements—for instance, when there is not enough historical data for an attraction to capture seasonality. All in all, the main contributions of this paper are the proposal and evaluation of a new information architecture for fine-grained tourism demand prediction models as well as a quantification of the impact of each of the three aforementioned factors on the accuracy of the learned models. Our results have both theoretical and practical implications towards solving important touristic business demands.

Background In sub-Saharan Africa, house design and ventilation affects the number of malaria mosquito vectors entering houses. This study hypothesized that indoor light from a CDC-light trap, visible from outside a hut, would increase entry of Anopheles arabiensis , an important malaria vector, and examined whether ventilation modifies this effect. Methods Four inhabited experimental huts, each situated within a large chamber, were used to assess how light and ventilation affect the number of hut-entering mosquitoes in Tanzania. Each night, 300 female laboratory-reared An. arabiensis were released inside each chamber for 72 nights. Nightly mosquito collections were made using light traps placed indoors. Temperature and carbon dioxide concentrations were measured using data loggers. Treatments and sleepers were rotated between huts using a randomized block design. Results When indoor light was visible outside the huts, there was an 84% increase in the odds of collecting mosquitoes indoors (Odds ratio, OR = 1.84, 95% confidence intervals, 95% CI 1.74–1.95, p < 0.001) compared with when it was not. Although the odds of collecting mosquitoes in huts with closed eaves (OR = 0.54, 95% CI 0.41–0.72, p < 0.001) was less than those with open eaves, few mosquitoes entered either type of well-ventilated hut. The odds of collecting mosquitoes was 99% less in well-ventilated huts, compared with poorly-ventilated traditional huts (OR = 0.01, 95% CI 0.01–0.03, p < 0.001). In well-ventilated huts, indoor temperatures were 1.3 °C (95% CI 0.9–1.7, p < 0.001) cooler, with lower carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) levels (mean difference = 97 ppm, 77.8–116.2, p < 0.001) than in poorly-ventilated huts. Conclusion Although light visible from outside a hut increased mosquito house entry, good natural ventilation reduces indoor carbon dioxide concentrations, a major mosquito attractant, thereby reducing mosquito-hut entry.

Context The wildland–urban interface (WUI) is a landscape where buildings and wildland vegetation meet or mix, and is usually regarded as a high risk region because of the high impact of human activities. The expansion of the wildland–urban interface (WUI) could exacerbate environmental risks such as wildfire risk at the landscape scale. China’s dryland landscape provides an ideal case study for assessing WUI dynamics, as they are experiencing rapid urbanization and increasing vegetation cover. However, the morphological features, which is essential in landscape planning, are few recorded in the rapid increase in WUI landscape in China’s dryland. Methods We produced a set of WUI datasets for the five-year period of 1990–2020 in the drylands of China, and introduced landscape configuration metrics, such as Landscape Shape Index (LSI), Largest Patch Index (LPI), to analyze morphological changes in four WUI types across China’s dryland from 1990 to 2020, and correlated them with population and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) among 486 counties. Results We identified the WUI area in China’s dryland was spatially accounted for approximately one-tenth of the total area and was concentrated around big cities, exhibited a growth rate of 15% during the 30 years. WUI landscape heterogeneity showed substantial increases, with the LSI increased by 81.1%, and LPI decreased by 38.3%. The WUI area changes were significantly correlated with GDP and population changes; while some landscape configuration metrics showed significant correlations with GDP, but none with population. Conclusions The WUI fragmentation tendency implies greater exposure of homes and infrastructure to wildfire-prone areas and harder efforts on controlled burns and firefighting in dryland landscape management, especially around big cities. Furthermore, GDP growth may correspond to continued WUI expansion and fragmentation, even if population urbanization will be stagnating.