With the emergence of Architecture 4.0 and the occurrence of the COVID-19 pandemic, extended reality (XR) technology has been increasingly applied in architectural education. This study aims to systematically organize and analyze the applications and outcomes of XR technology in construction education over the past five years, provide a theoretical framework for its future widespread use, and highlight its drawbacks as well as future research directions. The paper employs content analysis to summarize and analyze the findings. The report reveals that more institutions are integrating XR technology into their architectural education programs and that it has a significant impact on teacher effectiveness, student motivation, reflection and improvement, and teacher–student communication. The study suggests that XR technology will increasingly replace conventional teaching techniques in classrooms.

The growing concerns over climate change and energy scarcity have highlighted the need for building energy conservation. Windcatchers, renowned for their effective ventilation capabilities, have emerged as a pivotal solution for saving energy and improving indoor thermal comfort. Serving as rooftop installations, windcatchers harness high-altitude airflow to provide fresh indoor air while expelling stale air. This comprehensive review encompasses over 96 studies published between 2000 and 2024, examining the performance of various types of windcatchers. The review reviews previous articles and concludes that using different types of wind catchers in hot and arid areas can increase indoor air velocity by about 10–50%, reduce building energy consumption by about 20–50%, and increase thermal comfort duration by about 25–50%. The article combines the perspectives of multiple disciplines such as architecture, environmental engineering, and sustainable design, providing a new perspective for the study of windcatchers. The article not only summarizes the design and performance of existing wind catchers, but also provides 13 suggestions for the design of wind capture towers, while also identifying areas for future research, such as combining wind capture machines with other passive cooling technologies and evaluating their performance under different climate and urban conditions.

A combined cooling, heating, and power (CCHP) system is a complex and repairable system containing a large number of components and series of subsystems. When a failure occurs in one component, it might cause a failure of a subsystem or whole system. Traditional maintenance methods might lead to the waste of maintenance resources and a high cost of maintenance. The reliability and maintenance prioritization analyses can help managers optimize maintenance strategies and reduce the total cost. A reliability importance index is one of the factors in maintenance prioritization analysis. This paper aims at selecting the component reliability importance indices to identify the priority of component maintenance of a CCHP system from the perspective of maintenance cost. Failure cost importance index (FCI) and Potential failure cost importance index (PI) are developed for the maintenance prioritization analysis of a CCHP system. A Markov model based on the state–space method (SSM) is used to analyze the reliability and availability of a CCHP system. A set of actual survey reliability data of CCHP systems is used to support the validity of the reliability importance indices. The results indicate that the FCI and PI might lead to different rankings of maintenance prioritization. The FCI and PI will help managers make a reasonable decision for maintenance on a cost basis.

In this paper, the thermal performance of a sunspace attached to a house with a central air conditioning system was experimentally investigated. The house with a south-facing sunspace is located in Miyazaki, Japan, where heating is required in winter. In order to reduce the heating energy in winter, the hot air from the attached sunspace is sent to the central air conditioning room, from where it is then distributed and stored throughout the house by way of air circulation. Only when the temperature in the sunspace exceeds 24 °C is the hot air in the sunspace sent to the central air conditioning room. The air circulation between the attached sunspace and central air conditioning room is 500 m³/h. The temperature of the attached sunspace and each room were measured. The results showed that a house with a sunspace can save about 12.2% of energy compared to a house without a sunspace.

Sponge city construction strategies (SCCSs) have gradually attracted increased attention because of the strong shocks to society and economies caused by extreme weather and global climate change. The development of sponge cities is consistent with the national goal, and China must support environmental sustainability. Rainwater trading (RWT) plays a key role in promoting the efficient allocation and use of rainwater resources in sponge cities. In this study, we built an evolutionary game model on the basis of 13 parameters influencing the strategy selection of game players of environmental protection enterprises (EPEs) and municipal enterprises (MEs)’ in promoting sponge city construction. Next, we discussed the interaction effect of the two players’ behaviors in the 16 cases. Finally, we used the first RWT project in an empirical simulation to analyze the critical parameters influencing the game; we provide regulation policy suggestions to achieve the final goal. The results show that sufficient financial subsidies, the reduction in additional sales, the increase in taxes, and the participation of more EPEs can accelerate the realization of the evolutionary stable strategy (ESS) between EPEs and MEs. Incentive measures should focus not only on economic measures but also on reputation incentives and industry regulations. The proposed model can be used as a tool to promote the development and application of sponge cities, thus enriching the literature on promoting the communication of SCCSs. Moreover, our findings are valuable for the promotion of the use of rainwater resources, the marketization of the ecological value of rainwater resources, and the further construction of sponge cities.