Research on the Conservation and Renewal of Rural Landscape and Vernacular Architecture in Chongqing, China

The study suggests that the rural construction of Chongqing, especially the characteristic protected villages, must fully protect and renew the rural landscape and vernacular buildings with regional characteristics. The local protection of the countryside,especially the tradiontal village should be based on the cognition and understanding of the characteristics of the local natural and cultural environment, exploring its inherent cultural heritage and evolutionary drive, guiding the healthy and balanced development of rural landscape systems in the period of economic and social transformation through a systematic and comprehensive methodology. Based on actual rural construction cases in Chongqing, this study explores specific methods for protecting and renewing rural landscapes and vernacular buildings. It emphasizes that conservation and regeneration strategies need to be based on fieldwork and analysis and research. It should integrate local, artistic, multi-party construction and other multiple methods, and optimize the landscape and architectural resources while highlighting the regional characteristics, so that it can inherit the culture and meet the needs of sustainable rural development,and help rural revitalization

Monument Monitor: using citizen science to preserve heritage

This research demonstrates how data collected by citizen scientists can act as a valuable resource for heritage managers. It establishes to what extent visitors’ photographs can be used to assist in aspects of condition monitoring focusing on biological and plant growth, erosion, stone/mortar movement, water ingress/pooling and antisocial behaviour. This thesis describes the methodology and outcomes of Monument Monitor (MM), a project set up in collaboration with Historic Environment Scotland (HES) that requested visitors at selected Scottish heritage sites to submit photographs of their visit. Across twenty case study sites participants were asked to record evidence of a variety of conservation issues. Patterns of contributions to the project are presented alongside key stakeholder feedback, which show how MM was received and where data collection excelled. Alongside this, the software built to manage and sort submissions is presented as a scalable methodology for the collection of citizen generated data of heritage sites. To demonstrate the applicability of citizen generated data for in depth monitoring and analysis, an environmental model is created using the submissions from one case study which predicts the effect of the changing climate at the site between 1980 - 2080. Machine Learning (ML) is used to analyse submitted data in both classification and segmentation tasks. This application demonstrates the validity of utilising ML tools to assist in the analysis and categorising of volunteer submitted photographs. The outcome of this PhD is a scalable methodology with which conservation staff can use visitor submitted images as an evidence-base to support them in the management of heritage sites

Of assembling small sculptures and disassembling large geometry

This thesis describes the research results and contributions that have been achieved during the author’s doctoral work. It is divided into two independent parts, each of which is devoted to a particular research aspect. The first part covers the true-to-detail creation of digital pieces of art, so-called relief sculptures, from given 3D models. The main goal is to limit the depth of the contained objects with respect to a certain perspective without compromising the initial three-dimensional impression. Here, the preservation of significant features and especially their sharpness is crucial. Therefore, it is necessary to overemphasize fine surface details to ensure their perceptibility in the more complanate relief. Our developments are aimed at amending the flexibility and user-friendliness during the generation process. The main focus is on providing real-time solutions with intuitive usability that make it possible to create precise, lifelike and aesthetic results. These goals are reached by a GPU implementation, the use of efficient filtering techniques, and the replacement of user defined parameters by adaptive values. Our methods are capable of processing dynamic scenes and allow the generation of seamless artistic reliefs which can be composed of multiple elements. The second part addresses the analysis of repetitive structures, so-called symmetries, within very large data sets. The automatic recognition of components and their patterns is a complex correspondence problem which has numerous applications ranging from information visualization over compression to automatic scene understanding. Recent algorithms reach their limits with a growing amount of data, since their runtimes rise quadratically. Our aim is to make even massive data sets manageable. Therefore, it is necessary to abstract features and to develop a suitable, low-dimensional descriptor which ensures an efficient, robust, and purposive search. A simple inspection of the proximity within the descriptor space helps to significantly reduce the number of necessary pairwise comparisons. Our method scales quasi-linearly and allows a rapid analysis of data sets which could not be handled by prior approaches because of their size.Die vorgelegte Arbeit beschreibt die wissenschaftlichen Ergebnisse und Beiträge, die während der vergangenen Promotionsphase entstanden sind. Sie gliedert sich in zwei voneinander unabhängige Teile, von denen jeder einem eigenen Forschungsschwerpunkt gewidmet ist. Der erste Teil beschäftigt sich mit der detailgetreuen Erzeugung digitaler Kunstwerke, sogenannter Reliefplastiken, aus gegebenen 3D-Modellen. Das Ziel ist es, die Objekte, abhängig von der Perspektive, stark in ihrer Tiefe zu limitieren, ohne dass der Eindruck der räumlichen Ausdehnung verloren geht. Hierbei kommt dem Aufrechterhalten der Schärfe signifikanter Merkmale besondere Bedeutung zu. Dafür ist es notwendig, die feinen Details der Objektoberfläche überzubetonen, um ihre Sichtbarkeit im flacheren Relief zu gewährleisten. Unsere Weiterentwicklungen zielen auf die Verbesserung der Flexibilität und Benutzerfreundlichkeit während des Enstehungsprozesses ab. Der Fokus liegt dabei auf dem Bereitstellen intuitiv bedienbarer Echtzeitlösungen, die die Erzeugung präziser, naturgetreuer und visuell ansprechender Resultate ermöglichen. Diese Ziele werden durch eine GPU-Implementierung, den Einsatz effizienter Filtertechniken sowie das Ersetzen benutzergesteuerter Parameter durch adaptive Werte erreicht. Unsere Methoden erlauben das Verarbeiten dynamischer Szenen und die Erstellung nahtloser, kunstvoller Reliefs, die aus mehreren Elementen und Perspektiven zusammengesetzt sein können. Der zweite Teil behandelt die Analyse wiederkehrender Stukturen, sogenannter Symmetrien, innerhalb sehr großer Datensätze. Das automatische Erkennen von Komponenten und deren Muster ist ein komplexes Korrespondenzproblem mit zahlreichen Anwendungen, von der Informationsvisualisierung über Kompression bis hin zum automatischen Verstehen. Mit zunehmender Datenmenge geraten die etablierten Algorithmen an ihre Grenzen, da ihre Laufzeiten quadratisch ansteigen. Unser Ziel ist es, auch massive Datensätze handhabbar zu machen. Dazu ist es notwendig, Merkmale zu abstrahieren und einen passenden niedrigdimensionalen Deskriptor zu entwickeln, der eine effiziente, robuste und zielführende Suche erlaubt. Eine simple Betrachtung der Nachbarschaft innerhalb der Deskriptoren hilft dabei, die Anzahl notwendiger paarweiser Vergleiche signifikant zu reduzieren. Unser Verfahren skaliert quasi-linear und ermöglicht somit eine rasche Auswertung auch auf Daten, die für bisherige Methoden zu groß waren

Archaeology and visuality, imaging as recording: a pictorial genealogy of rock painting research in the Maloti-Drakensberg through two case studies

Ph.D. university of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Humanities (Art History), 2012Pictorial copies play an essential role in the creation of rock art knowledge, forming a bridge between the art and theories of interpretation. My thesis traces a ‘pictoriography’, that is, a historiography of the practice of recording rock paintings in pictures. I begin with the earliest examples dotting the shifting edges of the Cape Colony from the mideighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries. Thereafter, the focus shifts to the Maloti-Drakensberg, where two case studies bring this disciplinary history into more recent times. The first is the rainmaking group from Sehonghong Shelter (Lesotho). One of the first rock paintings to be published, it became one of the most iconic in southern Africa. I relate its various copies to one another and to wider views of Sehonghong, revealing how it has been decontextualized and reproduced in diagrammatic form. I develop a ‘digital restoration’, whereby copies circulating independently in the world are returned in digital images to their place of origin. I develop this process further in a site-wide study of eBusingatha Shelter (AmaZizi Traditional Authority Area, KwaZulu-Natal Drakensberg). Once an impressive painted gallery, eBusingatha has been severely damaged by vandalism, removals and collapse, while documents tracking its demise accumulated elsewhere. I reunite scattered records, enabling copies to be contextualized and lost visual qualities of the originals to be restored. Throughout these pictorial genealogies, I explore the distance between the way the rock paintings are illustrated and the way they actually look. While recording strategies are diverse, one dominant convention has emerged in recent decades. Meticulous tracings converted into monochrome redrawings effect a translation of complex and ambiguous painted occurrences into clean forms ‘peeled’ from the rock and projected like shadows onto paper. The are more like text than picture. Colour for instance is considered an integral part of painting traditions worldwide, yet is expunged from the study of San rock paintings. A reintegration of such pictorial attributes into their study may encourage a return to the material world of the imagery and a contextualization of the semantics of its symbolic constituents

Art’s Public Lives: Sculpture in China After 1949.

This dissertation considers through sculpture how after the Communist Revolution in 1949 the official line in China for art to serve “the people,” or renmin, sought to institutionalize a new value system in the arts. Specifically, how did the idea of "the people" shape artistic practice and how did the artist through his or her artwork will the concept of "the people" into being? What was the role of sculpture in mobilizing the masses around the idea of “the people”? The case studies of three important sculptural projects--Monument to the People’s Heroes (1952-1958), the Sichuan Sculpture Exhibition (1964), and Rent Collection Courtyard (1965)--reveal the actual challenge of shaping into concrete form an idea on which the Chinese state grounded its own sense of nation. By focusing on how sculpture was interacting with its audience rather than what is being represented, this study asserts the centrality of sculptural aesthetics involving three-dimensional scale, materiality, and process in engaging the viewer with the politics of postwar socialist China. Sculpture’s significance under the leadership of Mao Zedong lies not only in how sculpture functioned as a visual and tangible national symbol to assert a certain definition of “the people,” but also in how it posited a new kind of people, or humanism, for the world during the rise of international Maoism in the 1960s and 1970s. By way of rigorous visual analysis, archival research, and personal interviews, this study also reveals the uneven development of cultural production on the ground versus the state’s absolute vision, which included tasking artists in early Communist China to create a new culture for a new nation.PhDHistory of ArtUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/116643/1/vli_1.pd

RFID Technology in Intelligent Tracking Systems in Construction Waste Logistics Using Optimisation Techniques

Construction waste disposal is an urgent issue for protecting our environment. This paper proposes a waste management system and illustrates the work process using plasterboard waste as an example, which creates a hazardous gas when land filled with household waste, and for which the recycling rate is less than 10% in the UK. The proposed system integrates RFID technology, Rule-Based Reasoning, Ant Colony optimization and knowledge technology for auditing and tracking plasterboard waste, guiding the operation staff, arranging vehicles, schedule planning, and also provides evidence to verify its disposal. It h relies on RFID equipment for collecting logistical data and uses digital imaging equipment to give further evidence; the reasoning core in the third layer is responsible for generating schedules and route plans and guidance, and the last layer delivers the result to inform users. The paper firstly introduces the current plasterboard disposal situation and addresses the logistical problem that is now the main barrier to a higher recycling rate, followed by discussion of the proposed system in terms of both system level structure and process structure. And finally, an example scenario will be given to illustrate the system’s utilization

Pastoralism as Institutions: Modeling the Pastoral Landscape in Tibet in the Second and First Millennium BC

Previous archaeological research has made significant advances in our understanding of the chrono-spatial patterns of ancient human occupation of the Tibetan Plateau based on archaeobotanical, zooarchaeological, and material cultural analysis. The surge of archaeological data in prehistoric Tibet calls for further analysis of the potential social and environmental forces that shaped the prehistoric landscapes of Tibet. This dissertation presents a synthetic analysis of the role of pastoralism in shaping the economy, materiality, and mobility of Tibetan societies in the second and first millennium BC. Based on both previously published archaeological evidence and my own analysis of newly documented archaeological data, I argue that pastoralism can be seen as a social institution that is shaped and reproduced through participation, which fundamentally changes the ecological and cultural landscapes of Tibet in the second and first millennium BC. This research tackles this theme using a multi-methodological approach that includes survey archaeology, excavation, geospatial modeling, and network analysis. I present early pastoralism in Tibet through the lens of emergent institutions that structured the geographic patterns of settlement, cultural interactions and patterns of landscape organizations under changing cultural conditions at both local and trans-regional scales. My research also combines traditional archaeological material culture analysis with landscape archaeology and geospatial analysis in Tibet. My exploratory archaeological survey is the first survey of pastoralist landscapes by identifying and interpreting the long-term ecological and social formation of pastoralist sites across eco-zones in the mountainous regions of Tibet. The research contributes to our understanding of emerging pastoralism in prehistoric Tibet, as well as its durability as a persistent and contemporary tradition on the Tibetan Plateau. At a local scale, I analyzed the material remains of an agropastoral settlement in the first millennium BC, Bangga, suggesting that ancient people occupied Bangga and practiced settled pastoralism in a changing cultural context. In addition to the archaeology in Bangga, I also conducted an exploratory archaeological survey in the Shannan region based on the hypothesis that pastoral activities are continuous through time and space. The survey successfully identified two prehistoric pastoral corrals, Badong and Yukang. Both sites are repeatedly used in prehistoric, historic, and modern times. According to the results of material culture analysis, radiocarbon dating, excavations, ethnoarchaeological GIS analysis, and soil erosion models on those two sites, I further argue that the human-environmental feedback possibly facilities the reproduction of pastoralism on a local scale. At a trans-regional scale, I developed two new geospatial models, coupled with a comprehensive material cultural analysis that interprets how Tibet\u27s cultural landscape is associated with pastoral mobility networks. The pastoral mobility network is constructed under the assumption that herds travel along the best vegetation; the cultural landscape is represented by a social network based on the similarity of ceramics. I discover that the settlement pattern of Tibet between 3600 and 2200 BP is significantly correlated with the pastoral networks. The pastoral network is broadly similar to the ceramic social network, especially in eastern Tibet. The trans-Himalayan participation explains the discrepancies between the pastoral mobility networks and the ceramic social networks and is again validated by a contextual analysis of the newly discovered bronze mirrors in Tibet

Wood. Rethinking Material

Als organisches Baumaterial erfährt Holz in Zeiten der Klimakrise eine besondere Wertschätzung. Eingebunden in umweltschonende Ressourcenkreisläufe zeigt sich seine Innovationskraft, wenn es als Material Bestandteil neuer technologischer Entwicklungen und hybrider Verwendungen wird, die aktuellen und komplexen architektonischen Aufgaben gewachsen sind. Das neue Denken des Materials Holz als hochmodernem und veränderlichem Baustoff der Zukunft hat gerade erst begonnen. GAM. 17 nimmt Holz in seiner Vielschichtigkeit und seinem architektonischen Potenzial neu in den Blick und stellt dabei konstruktive und gestalterische Konzepte vor, die die Möglichkeiten des Materials für eine klimafreundlichere Bauwirtschaft ausloten. Ergänzt wird dies durch einen Rückblick in die Geschichte des Holzbaus und seine ideologischen Verstrickungen, die die Weiterentwicklung des Baustoffs lange erschwert haben. Mit Beiträgen von Reyner Banham, Urs Hirschberg, Anne Isopp, Jens Ludloff, Laila Seewang, Stephan Trüby, Anselm Wagner und andere