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Obsolescence is a decline or loss of utility of an object, building or product. Different types of building obsolescence decrease buildings’ utility and shorten their service life. The purpose of this paper is identification of building obsolescence types and the relevant factors that affect buildings to become obsolete. It is also intended to categorise building obsolescence types to provide a contribution towards increasing building service life and delivering sustainability.

A systematic literature review is applied to conduct this research. It follows five steps: (1) formulating the research question; (2) locating studies; (3) selecting and evaluating relevant studies; (4) analysing the findings; (5) reporting and making use of the results.

Via this study, it is revealed that there are 33 types of building obsolescence. They are clustered in 10 categories regarding their conceptual and causing aspects and are presented based on their recurrence in the literature. According to the findings, economic obsolescence (including economic, financial and market obsolescence types) and functional obsolescence (including functional, use and utility obsolescence types) are the most remarkable categories.

Investigating the literature makes it clear that building obsolescence types have been studied intermittently with infrequent profound exploration of the relationship between them. This paper presents a comprehensive identification of building obsolescence types and introduces obsolescence categories that classify connected obsolescence types. It is a new framework for further studies on building obsolescence to find more effective prevention strategies to mitigate social, economic and environmental consequences of building obsolescence.

This paper aims to interpret the workers’ perception of combined cycle power plants through visual qualities.

In this qualitative research landscape image, the sketching technique is applied as a data collection method to extract participants’ mental images by asking them to draw sketches. The resulted sketches besides obtained verbal and written data were analyzed and coded in three stages to explain the workers’ perception. Visual qualities were studied as a mean which made it possible to interpret the workers’ perception of their workplace.

Careful analysis of the gathered data and the emerged concepts via open coding identify four axial categories of the concepts forming the workers’ perception of the power plants: “inconsistency with nature,” “emphasis on function and product,” “health and environmental threats” and “interpretation of the built form as a mass instead of space.” These four categories support the core category of the proposed theory which is “perceiving building as the machine.” This phrase explains how workers perceive power plants as machines, not as supportive and lively environments. This is followed by consequences, “precedence of building over human” is prominent among them.

In the relevant body of literature, visual impact and visual perception of conventional thermal power plants are largely missed, as well as visual relation to environment focusing on a single building or groups of adjacent buildings. This paper covers both areas via asking for sketches as a data collection method, in addition, to interview the participants to clarify their mental image of the work environment.