Type? What Type? Further Reflections on the Extended Threshold

Michael Hensel draws a parallel between the present and a moment in the early 1990s when typology seemed poised to come to the fore. He highlights how despite a promising start this interest slipped away and was supplanted by an obsession with topography and highly complex surfaces, leading to a primacy of the individual built form over the urban.     

Networked Space

Dennis Shelden , Chief Technology Officer at Gehry Technologies, asserts ‘a networked spatial approach to design informatics’ that brings together a spatial understanding with a current knowledge of geometry, the digital and modern communications. This emphasises the connections between not only forms and objects in space, but also among disciplines in a collaborative practice context and of the Web itself. It is a connectedness that has been further facilitated by the adoption of 3-D building information modelling (BIM) that helps to streamline processes and facilitate better communication among disparate members of the design team.     

Collaborative Intelligence = Respect

Cultural projects today are often unprecedented in their complexity, scale and collaborative effort. Keith Kaseman, partner of Kaseman Beckman Advanced Strategies (KBAS), describes how building information modelling (BIM) enabled the realisation of the Pentagon Memorial in Arlington, Virginia. Twenty-eight contractors and consultants were brought on board in the design and delivery of the monument's 184 ‘memorial units’, which collectively commemorate the individual lives lost at the Pentagon on 11 September 2001.     

Integrating Robotic Fabrication in the Design Process

Does the application of robotic technologies in Southeast Asian cities, where the residential high-rise is pre-eminent, provide a unique opportunity to introduce bespoke design elements and liberate the high-rise from serial production and standardisation? Michael Budig, Jason Lim and Raffael Petrovic of the Future Cities Laboratory (FCL) at the Singapore-ETH Centre for Global Environmental Sustainability (SEC) introduce the research project ‘Design of Robotic Fabricated High Rises’ (2012-13) led by Fabio Gramazio and Matthias Kohler, exploring high-rise typologies and architectural scenarios for future vertical cities.     

Distinguishing Between the Drawn and the Made

Here Bob Sheil , Director of Technology and Computing at the Bartlett School of Architecture and co-organiser of the 2011 Fabricate Conference at UCL, pulls back on the rush towards material computation. With the blurring of the projected image and the constructed artefact, there is the very real danger of reducing ‘architectural production to a systematic industrial exercise’. This fails to recognise the extent to which ideas and performance are transformed, developed and refined through the very process of making. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

All Night Long: The Architectural Jazz of the Texas Rangers

In the mid-1950s, a group of young faculty at the University of Texas School of Architecture in Austin - aka the Texas Rangers - entertained themselves with weekly sessions of a sophisticated, collective drawing game, ‘Dot-the-Dot’, in which there was an emphasis on inventive fluency in hand drawing as well as an innate knowledge of historic European city plans. What happened when Mark Morris , Visiting Associate Professor at Cornell University, decided in a design studio to ask present-day students to revive the game?     

Boxcar滤波器和极化Refined Lee滤波器对极化SAR分类精度影响的评估

本文阐述了Boxcar滤波器和极化Refined Lee滤波器的滤波原理,比较了两种滤波器的滤波效果.通过滤波后的极化图像分类精度的比较发现,滤波能显著提高监督分类的精度,滤波是提高分类精度必不可少的技术环节,Boxcar滤波在提高分类精度方面要优于Refined Lee滤波,此外滤波窗口的大小对分类精度也有重要的影响.     

Optimal assignment of human resources for maintenance departments using fuzzy queuing systems

Maintenance-related costs are one of the main components of overhead costs and constitute an important part of a product’s actual cost. Therefore, making proper efforts to reduce and optimise maintenance costs could be one way of gaining competitive advantages. A major part of maintenance-related costs is the salaries paid to the workforce in the maintenance department. This paper seeks the optimal assignment of human resources to the maintenance department to reduce the related costs. First, we model the maintenance department using fuzzy queue models. Then, a cost function is proposed which includes the costs of workforce shortage and workforce overload. The optimal size of workforce is obtained by considering different numbers and choosing the one which minimises the total costs. Some parameters are fuzzy outputs of the queue models, which make fuzzy results of the cost function. In order to find the minimum fuzzy cost function, we use Lee and Li fuzzy ranking method. Finally, our model is tested in a spiral-tube company and a sensitivity analysis is performed.     

Morphology evolution in PS/LDPE blends in a twin screw extruder: Effects of compatibilizer

In order to understand the mixing in polymer extrusion, the morphology of PS/LDPE blends compatibilized with SEBS was simulated based on the Lee and Park model. Experiments were performed in a co-rotating twin screw extruder and a Haake mixer, and the morphology of the compatibilized blends of various compositions was compared with the non-compatibilized ones. The size of the dispersed phase of the compatibilized blend was smaller than the non-compatibilized one, and the blend of the PE matrix had a smaller size in the dispersed phase than the non-compatibilized one. Simulation results were agreed well with experiments, and the Lee and Park model could be applied in the extrusion analysis of compatibilized polymer blends.