Architectural Patents and Open-Source Architectures: The Globalisation of Spatial Design Innovations (or Learning from ‘E99’)

Patents are the strongest form of intellectual property rights available internationally, so far unbeaten by open source as a body of innovation and know-how. Mark Garcia , senior lecturer in the Department of Architecture & Landscape at the University of Greenwich, London, here considers the pros and cons of the patent system for architects in the digital age: from issues over patent categorisation by type, to possibilities of micro-royalties through the capacity of design software to track every stage of input from multiple contributors.     

Entrepreneurship in Architectural Robotics: The Simultaneity of Craft,Economics and Design

What do Odico Formwork Robotics, RoboFold, Machineous, ROB Technologies and GREYSHED share in common? They are all architectural robotics startups. Jelle Feringa , Chief Technology Officer at Odico, places the phenomenon of the architectural robotics entrepreneur in a historical and cultural context while highlighting the very practical role startups are poised to play in bridging the gap between academic research and industry, by providing the building industry with much needed new software tools.     

Resisting system and failure modes of masonry domes

The research synthesized in this paper focused on ultimate strength, structural safety assessment, and collapse of masonry domes. Activity was directed at analyzing the relationships between safety factor and geometry, and carrying out research targeted at reducing the incidence and severity of structural failures in cultural buildings. This paper shows that the resisting system of a masonry dome is not the two-dimensional shell, but a one-dimensional mechanism that derives from the splitting of the shell and drum. The resisting system, whose geometry depends on the dome shape and brick or stone pattern, may include the lantern and/or the masonry constructions around the drum.Well-known domes taken from architectural cultural heritage are used to exemplify the pivotal role of geometry and construction techniques in providing ultimate strength. These examples also show the importance of considering the architectural design of the time, in structural analyses.The results found in the paper suggest how to provide masonry domes with adequate safety, using the minimal level of structural intervention; in particular, without altering the way the building reacts to applied loads. Hence, the paper helps understand how to reduce the amount of structural work, which, in turn, guarantees conservation and restoration, as well as safeguarding.The conclusions are devoted to analyzing which observations are valid for seismic assessment and how the other observations have to be modified for seismic actions.     

Inhabiting Time

In recent architecture, design has prioritised an engagement with time through its creation of temporary and highly flexible structures. There has, however, been less focus on how the design of buildings might impact the experience of time of the people who inhabit them. Here the distinguished author and emeritus professor Juhani Pallasmaa , who is renowned for his writings on the phenomenology of architecture, provides a reminder of the importance of what it means to ‘dwell in time’.     

Desargues and Leibniz: In the Black Box - A Mathematical Model of the Leibnizian Monad

Here Bernard Cache provides a detailed analysis of a paper written in 1636 by the French mathematician, architect and engineer, Girard Desargues. Desargues is best known as the founder of projective geometry. Cache explains how he initally developed this significant concept in response to the very practical problems of producing a perspectival drawing. The introduction of projective geometry, though, had potentially more far-reaching implications on philosophical thought, informing the theory of monads developed by the German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz in 1714 to explain the metaphysics of simple substances. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

E. O. Hoppé’s Portraiture: The Maker,Patronage, the Public

Emil Otto Hoppé established himself as the leading producer of photographic portraits in Edwardian London, a position he augmented until the mid-1920s. Particular aesthetic, psychological and philosophical ideas undergirded his practices – practices which, in some respects, were then unconventional. His portrait work helped him to achieve some celebrity as an influential cultural figure, and this status in turn advanced his career as a portrait maker. Three important determinants of Hoppé’s portrait output are identified and elaborated upon: ‘The Maker’ (Hoppé himself); ‘Patronage’ (the actual or assumed demands of customers, including sitters); and – an entity that is less easy to define – ‘The Public’. Hoppé claimed, of certain eminent figures, that he had made ‘the recognised face’, and the sense of public recognition here implies that the likeness must combine intense insight with extensive circulation in the illustrated press. Viewed in retrospect, the range of Hoppé’s portraits – from such leading politicians as Philip Snowden, through such society beauties as Lady Hazel Lavery, to artists, including Jacob Epstein and Rudyard Kipling – punctuated a particular period of history, the cultural moment at which emerging aspects of twentieth-century modernity could be discerned. Exemplary in this respect, despite its unusual collage nature, is Hoppé’s depiction of the Italian Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.     

From the Vault of the Heavens

Many clues lead to the conjecture that Brunelleschi knew about the use of the astrolabe, an instrument very often used in his times; among his friendships we find the astronomer Paolo Dal Pozzo and engineer Mariano di Jacopo da Siena, who certainly knew how to use the astrolabe accurately. Because this instrument is based on the principle of stereographic projection, a particular kind of central projection, it is quite possible that Filippo applied this principle for the perspective construction outline for Masaccio’s Trinità in S. Maria Novella, as well as for the two lost panels of the Baptistery of Florence.     

GECO™: Architectural Design Through Environmental Feedback

In recent years there has been a disconnect between the early stages of design and the power of evolving analysis tools. Thomas Grabner and Ursula Frick , the founding directors of design research and development consultancy [uto], explain how their plug-in GECO™ creates essential connections between modelling and analysis software, providing the opportunity to restructure conceptual design.