Engineered Transparency 2021


Book Description

This book contains more than 70 articles and presents international trends in structural glazing and facade construction. Renowned authors from all over the world report on current research results and innovative construction projects.




Engineered Transparency


Book Description

Glass is one of the most ubiquitous and extensively researched building materials. Despite the critical role it has played inmodern architecture in the last century, we have yet to fully comprehend the cultural and technological effects of thiscomplex and sophisticated building material. Engineered Transparency brings together an extraordinary, multidisciplinary group of international architects, engineers, manufacturers, and critics to collectively reconsider glasswithin the context of recent engineering and structural achievements. In light of these advancements, glass hasreemerged as a novel architectural material, offering new and previously unimaginable modes of visual pleasure andspatial experience. Engineered Transparency presents a portfolio of projects featuring cutting-edge glass designs by todays most innovative architects, including SANAA's acclaimed Glass Pavilion at the Toledo Museum of Art, Yoshio Taniguchi's MoMA expansion in New York City, and Steven Holl's Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City. With contributions by foremost thinkers in the field of architecture and design including historians Kenneth Frampton, Antoine Picon, and DetlefMertins; cultural critics Beatriz Colomina, Joan Ockman, and Reinhold Martin; engineers Werner Sobek, Guy Nordenson,and Richard Tomasetti; and architects Kazuyo Sejima, Steve Holl, and Elizabeth Diller, Engineered Transparency redefines glass as a 21st century building material and challenges our assumptions about its aesthetic, structural, and spatial potential.




New Directions in Museum Ethics


Book Description

This book considers key ethical questions in museum policy and practice, particularly those related to issues of collection and display. What does a collection signify in the twenty-first century museum? How does an engagement with immateriality challenge museums’ concept of ownership, and how does that immateriality translate into the design of exhibitions and museum space? Are museums still about safeguarding objects, and what does safeguarding mean for diverse individuals and communities today? How does the notion of the museum as a performative space challenge our perceptions of the object? The scholarship represented in this volume is a testament to the range and significance of critical inquiry in museum ethics. Together, the chapters resist a legalistic interpretation, bound by codes and common practice, to advance an ethics discourse that is richly theorized, constantly changing and contingent on diverse external factors. Contributors take stock of innovative research to articulate a new museum ethics founded on the moral agency of museums, the concept that museums have both the capacity and the responsibility to create social change. This book is based on a special issue of Museum Management and Curatorship.




Current Perspectives and New Directions in Mechanics, Modelling and Design of Structural Systems


Book Description

Current Perspectives and New Directions in Mechanics, Modelling and Design of Structural Systems comprises 330 papers that were presented at the Eighth International Conference on Structural Engineering, Mechanics and Computation (SEMC 2022, Cape Town, South Africa, 5-7 September 2022). The topics featured may be clustered into six broad categories that span the themes of mechanics, modelling and engineering design: (i) mechanics of materials (elasticity, plasticity, porous media, fracture, fatigue, damage, delamination, viscosity, creep, shrinkage, etc); (ii) mechanics of structures (dynamics, vibration, seismic response, soil-structure interaction, fluid-structure interaction, response to blast and impact, response to fire, structural stability, buckling, collapse behaviour); (iii) numerical modelling and experimental testing (numerical methods, simulation techniques, multi-scale modelling, computational modelling, laboratory testing, field testing, experimental measurements); (iv) design in traditional engineering materials (steel, concrete, steel-concrete composite, aluminium, masonry, timber); (v) innovative concepts, sustainable engineering and special structures (nanostructures, adaptive structures, smart structures, composite structures, glass structures, bio-inspired structures, shells, membranes, space structures, lightweight structures, etc); (vi) the engineering process and life-cycle considerations (conceptualisation, planning, analysis, design, optimization, construction, assembly, manufacture, maintenance, monitoring, assessment, repair, strengthening, retrofitting, decommissioning). Two versions of the papers are available: full papers of length 6 pages are included in the e-book, while short papers of length 2 pages, intended to be concise but self-contained summaries of the full papers, are in the printed book. This work will be of interest to civil, structural, mechanical, marine and aerospace engineers, as well as planners and architects.




Translucent Building Skins


Book Description

Exploring the design of innovative building enclosure systems (or skins) in contemporary architecture and their precedents in earlier twentieth century modern architecture, this book examines the tectonics, the history and the influence of translucency as a defining characteristic in architecture. Highly illustrated throughout with drawings and full colour photographs, the book shows that translucency has been and continues to be a fertile ground for architectural experimentation. Each chapter presents a comparative analysis of two primary buildings: a recent project, paired with a historical precedent, highlighting how architects in different eras have realized the distinctive effects of translucency. The included buildings span a variety of program types, ranging from a single-family residence, to a factory, to a synagogue. Whether it is Pierre Chareau’s glass-lens curtain wall at the Maison de Verre, Frank Lloyd Wright’s wall of stacked glass tubes at the Johnson Wax Research Tower, or Peter Zumthor’s use of acid-etched glass in a double-skin envelope at the Kunsthaus Bregenz, the included projects each offer an exemplary case study of innovations in materiality and fabrication techniques. Today, among many contemporary architects, there is an engagement with new technologies, new material assemblies, and new priorities such as sustainability and energy-efficiency. A resurgent interest in translucency as a defining quality in buildings has been an important part of this recent dialogue and this book makes essential reading for any architect looking to incorporate aspects of translucency into their buildings.




Designing Constructionist Futures


Book Description

A diverse group of scholars redefine constructionism--introduced by Seymour Papert in 1980--in light of new technologies and theories. Constructionism, first introduced by Seymour Papert in 1980, is a framework for learning to understand something by making an artifact for and with other people. A core goal of constructionists is to respect learners as creators, to enable them to engage in making meaning for themselves through construction, and to do this by democratizing access to the world's most creative and powerful tools. In this volume, an international and diverse group of scholars examine, reconstruct, and evolve the constructionist paradigm in light of new technologies and theories.




Security, Privacy, and Applied Cryptography Engineering


Book Description

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Security, Privacy, and Applied Cryptography Engineering, SPACE 2015, held in Jaipur, India, in October 2015. The 17 full papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 57 submissions. The book also contains 4 invited talks in full-paper length. The papers are devoted to various aspects of security, privacy, applied cryptography, and cryptographic engineering.




Blurred Transparencies in Contemporary Glass Architecture


Book Description

Blurred Transparencies in Contemporary Glass Architecture brings to light complex readings of transparent glass through close observations of six pivotal works of architecture. Written from the perspectives of a practitioner, the six essays challenge assumptions about fragility and visual transparency of glass. A material imbued with idealism and utopic vision, glass has captured architects’ imagination, and glass’s fragility and difficulties in thermal control continue to present technical challenges. In recent decades, architecture has witnessed an emergence of technological advancements in chemical coating, structural engineering, and fabrication methods that resulted in new kinds of glass transparencies. Buildings examined in the book include a sanatorium with expansive windows delivering light and air to recovering tuberculosis patients, a pavilion with a crystal clear glass plenum circulating air for heating and cooling, a glass monument symbolizing the screen of personal devices that shortened the distance between machines and humans, and a glass building symbolizing the social and material intertwining in the glass ceiling metaphor. Connecting material glass to broader cultural and social contexts, Blurred Transparencies in Contemporary Glass Architecture enlightens students and practitioners of architecture as well as the general public with interest in design. The author demonstrates how glass is rarely crystal clear but is blurred both materially and metaphysically, revealing complex readings of ideas for which glass continues to stand.




Maintenance Architecture


Book Description

An inventive examination of a crucial but neglected aspect of architecture, by an architect writing to architects. Maintenance plays a crucial role in the production and endurance of architecture, yet architects for the most part treat maintenance with indifference. The discipline of architecture values the image of the new over the lived-in, the photogenic empty and stark building over a messy and labored one. But the fact is: homes need to be cleaned and buildings and cities need to be maintained, and architecture no matter its form cannot escape from such realities. In Maintenance Architecture, Hilary Sample offers an inventive examination of the architectural significance of maintenance through a series of short texts and images about specific buildings, materials, and projects. Although architects have seldom choose to represent maintenance—imagining their work only from conception to realization—artists have long explored subjects of endurance and permanence in iconic architecture. Sample explores a range of art projects—by artists including Gordon Matta-Clark, Jeff Wall, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles—to recast the problem of maintenance for architecture. How might architectural design and discourse change as a building cycle expands to include “post-occupancy”? Sample looks particularly at the private home, exhibition pavilion, and high-rise urban building, giving special attention to buildings constructed with novel and developing materials, technologies, and precise detailing in relation to endurance. These include Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion House (1929), the Lever House (1952), the U.S. Steel Building (1971), and the O-14 (2010). She considers the iconography of skyscrapers; maintenance workforces, both public and private; labor-saving technology and devices; and contemporary architectural projects and preservation techniques that encompass the afterlife of buildings. A selection of artworks make the usually invisible aspects of maintenance visible, from Martha Rosler's Cleaning the Drapes to Inigo Manglano-Ovalle's The Kiss.




Sealants in Construction


Book Description

Revised Bestseller Offers Broad-Based Knowledge to a Wide Range of Technical ProfessionalsThe definitive guide to sealing operations in construction, this latest edition of Sealants in Construction focuses on the most current technology, methods, applications, and standards relevant to sealant performance. Providing guided direction on how to choos