Sounds of Music and Worship in Uku Baha, Patan

Sounds of music and worship played in the courtyard of Uku Baha

Post-occupancy evaluation of architecturally-designed low-income housing in Ahmadabad, India

This paper presents post-occupancy evaluation of low-income houses that have been built through the DMU: Square Mile India Programme in Ahmedabad, India. Questionnaire and interviews were conducted which elicited information on respondents’ socio-cultural and environmental experiences in the new houses compared to the existing dwellings in the community. Findings include: 1. increased expectations and higher demands for space and facilities in the new houses, 2. discontent with integrated courtyard/ open spaces, 3. prioritising flood protection over environmental quality and thermal comfort conditions in the existing houses and 4. Significant change in the perception of social status of families in the new homes. The findings highlight residents’ need for adequate sleeping area, thermal comfort, safety from animals and security. These aspects must be critically considered in future design of similar houses. The paper produces empirical evidence on users’ perception that will provide better knowledge and understanding to the designer and policy-makers to identify important factors to improve residents’ quality of life in a low-income housing context

Search Tracker: Human-derived object tracking in-the-wild through large-scale search and retrieval

Humans use context and scene knowledge to easily localize moving objects in conditions of complex illumination changes, scene clutter and occlusions. In this paper, we present a method to leverage human knowledge in the form of annotated video libraries in a novel search and retrieval based setting to track objects in unseen video sequences. For every video sequence, a document that represents motion information is generated. Documents of the unseen video are queried against the library at multiple scales to find videos with similar motion characteristics. This provides us with coarse localization of objects in the unseen video. We further adapt these retrieved object locations to the new video using an efficient warping scheme. The proposed method is validated on in-the-wild video surveillance datasets where we outperform state-of-the-art appearance-based trackers. We also introduce a new challenging dataset with complex object appearance changes.Comment: Under review with the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technolog

Sustainability and the Urban Planning Context: Housing Development in Algeria

This paper describes research into the development of housing in Algeria. It focuses on the history of traditional dwellings and the importance of outdoor space located inside the building: typically in the form of a courtyard. Courtyard dwellings in the city of Constantine are examined in some detail. The rapid urbanisation process taking place in Algeria in recent years together with difficulties in the planning system since colonial times has caused difficulties in responding to housing needs. The concentration of the population in smaller areas of cities has led to the need for more compact yet comfortable dwellings. The paper describes how the situation might be dealt with in the township of Jijel. A number of stakeholders are being consulted and the key results of in-depth interviews with architects are reported. The findings from the review of the existing housing areas and survey are then interpreted to make suggestions for development in the future

The Episcopal Basilica, the Via Sacra, and the Semicircular Court at Stobi, R. Macedonia

Stobi was the largest and best known city in northern Macedonia in Late Antiquity. Located at the confluence of the Erigon (modern Crna) and Axios (modern Vardar) rivers, now in the Republic of Macedonia, the city became the capital of the province of Macedonia Secunda in the second half of the 5th century. Bishop Budios from Stobi participated in the Council of Nicaea in 325, and several later bishops of the city are known. According to an inscription, Bishop Philip was responsible for the construction of his episcopal church. The Episcopal Basilica at Stobi is the outstanding Early Byzantine church known in the province of Macedonia Secunda, in terms of size, associated buildings, complexity of plan, unusual features, architectural sculpture, and mosaic and painted decoration. Four successive phases of the basilica functioned from the late 4th century or ca. 400 AD until the late 6th century when the city was abandoned. More specifically, the first phase of the Early Church, constructed probably ca. 400 AD, was renovated and enlarged into its second phase, most likely between 425 and 450, although no definite date can be assigned. During the third quarter of the 5th century the Early Church was deliberately and carefully dismantled. The original construction of the Basilica on the Terrace, socalled because it stood on an artificial terrace ca. 4 m above the floor level of the Early Church, is dated on the basis of ceramic evidence to the last quarter of the 5th century;4 a major rebuilding is less precisely dated to the first half of the 6th century, most probably to the 520s or 530s

On the Influence of Shade in Improving Thermal Comfort in Courtyards

This study analyzes the thermal performance of courtyards in traditional buildings in the city center of Córdoba (South of Spain), one of them displaying a shading component, to determine the influence of this precise element. The courtyards have been monitored simultaneously during a summer period when temperatures during the day reached over 45 °C. The obtained data was contrasted, and we confirmed that the shading element provided an improvement of the thermal performance of the courtyard which doubled the thermal leap between outdoor and inside the courtyard temperatures when the shading element was installed, in comparison to the courtyard without shade. Therefore, the tempering effect of courtyards can be significantly improved by means of using these simple elements

Research Reports from the Programme for Belize Archaeological Project, Volume Three

Table of Contents : Archaeological Investigations of the Programme for Belize Archaeological Project: An Introduction to Volume Three / by Fred Valdez, Jr. and Rissa M. Trachman (p.1-6) -- Mount Allison University: The 2008 Archaeological Program in Northwest Belize / by Grant Aylesworth and Brent Suttie (p.7-14) -- Excavations (2008) at the Los Pisos Courtyard, La Milpa, Belize / by Maria Martinez (p.15-34) -- Investigations (2008) at La Milpa, Belize: Plaza A, Structure 4 / by Rissa M. Trachman (p.35-40) -- An Overview of Archaeological Investigations at Plaza B, La Milpa: The 2008 Field Season / by Brett Houk, Débora Trein, and Gregory Zaro (p.41-60) -- Excavations at La Milp, Belize: Structure 22 / by Gregory Zaro (p.61-70) -- Overview of the 2008 Excavations at Structures 23 and 27, Plaza B, La Milpa, Belize / by Antonio Padilla and Shannon M. Smith (p.71-80) -- Preliminary Investigations East and West of the Acropolis, La Milpa, Belize: The 2008 Field Season / by Brandon S. Lewis (p.81-84) -- The 2008 Field Season at Group A of the Medicinal Trail Site, Northwestern Belize / by David M. Hyde (p.85-96) -- A Late Preclassic Burial at Medicinal Trail: Excavation and Analysis of Burial 3 / by Angeliki Kalamara Cavazos (p.97-110) -- Group B of the Medicinal Trail Site: Select Excavations at Operation 12 / by Deanna M. (p.111-114) -- Group B of the Medicinal Trail Site: Operation 12 (Lots A, Q, and R) / by Lauri McInnis Martin (p.115-120) -- Operation 15: Berm Structures and Water Management at Medicinal Trail (RB 62), Belize / by Erin E. Gill (p.121-126) -- Medicinal Trail Archaeology: Investigations at Operation 13 / by Maia Dedrick (p.127-142) -- Excavations at the Medicinal Trail Site (2008): Operation 14 / by Madelyn Percy (p.143-144) -- RB 70: The 2008 Investigations (p.145-148) -- Excavations at La Milpa Easts and the Aguada Lagunita Elusiva: The 2008 Field Season / by Estella Weiss-Krejci (p.149-168) -- Plan for Phase Two Research at Wari Camp (RB 56): Household, Neighborhood, and Ward in the Prehispanic Maya City / by Laura Levi (p.167-176) -- Experimental Pottery Studies in Belize / by Sharon Hankins (p.177)Texas Archeological Research Laborator

Late Antique Residences at Golemo Gradište, Konjuh, R. Macedonia

The systematic excavations that began at Golemo Gradište in 2000 were the first major, legal investigations on the site itself. Through survey of the site, researchers had reached a number of conclusions and hypotheses about lines of fortification walls, location of gates, and roads associated with the site. But almost nothing was known about the buildings or the internal arrangement of the site, and there were questions about dating. Therefore, both on the acropolis (2000-2004) and on the northern terrace (2005-present), the first step was to set trenches in several places, to investigate the architecture and the urban plan and to establish a chronology of the settlement. Given the discoveries in those initial trenches, excavation was later focused on a few areas. One consequence of this approach was limited excavation in several areas that were probably residential (or a combination of residential with industrial or commercial), but only a few examples of extensively investigated residential complexes. [excerpt

The influence of religious and cosmological beliefs on the solar architecture of the ancient world

In the earliest civilizations of the Ancient World, sun worship developed in parallel with an understanding of the movement of the stars. That was the origin of an architecture that expressed a number of religious and cosmological beliefs. Studies of ancient archaeological remains have revealed that astronomical orientations strongly influenced the construction of some of the most important ancient architectural monuments. Besides its religious role, the sun regulated the culture of the Ancient World in many of its more practical aspects. For instance, the observation of solar and lunar cycles allowed people to anticipate seasonal change. This provided man with a means of organizing and improving agricultural and livestock activities and, in turn, influenced the construction of the large civil and religious buildings. The complex relationships that developed between cosmology, sun worship, early mathematics, and the orientation of buildings with respect to the position of the sun, also decisively influenced the birth and development of what has come to be known as passive solar design. This article describes some of these influences dating from the megalithic period to the development of Mesopotamian and Egyptian architecture.Postprint (published version