Illumination matters. Revisiting the Roman house in a new light

Interpreting the social complexity of the Roman house requires a careful evaluation of existing evidence. With this in mind, recent work in the field has proposed a variety of different approaches, focusing each time on a specific type of source (architecture and décor, ancient texts, material evidence from excavated houses), each in turn recursively deemed more adequate for the purpose or more fruitful and less biased. This opposition of approaches and critiques between scholars has yielded an extraordinarily rich picture that, however, leaves some of the social dynamics of domestic space out of our reach. This dissertation, focusing on the case study of the House of the Greek Epigrams in the northern part of Insula V 1 in Pompeii, suggests a further level of understanding that combines the aforementioned types of sources with simulations and digital analyses to support archaeological interpretation. Everything visible in the house, including its architecture and its decorations, actively participated in the construction of the social identity of the owner of the house and the Romanitas of his family. However, everything visible is so by virtue of light, which is not a mere medium, but actively partakes in social dynamics and can be manipulated to meet certain demands. In this dissertation, light is considered in its dual aspect as a physical and as a visual and sensory phenomenon. Starting from the assumption that light is a powerful social agent, the study investigates, through historically grounded and physically accurate lighting simulations and analyses, the intertwined spatial and social circulation patterns in order to derive new insights into the social dynamics of the Roman house. In particular, this study argues that the social space of the Roman house was characterized by a greater complexity than that conveyed by ancient sources. It suggests a more nuanced picture, one of light and shadow but also of activity at different times of the day and year, and richer in people both in the foreground and in the background

Peripheral Visions: Design in ephemeral New Zealand print c1880 – 1914

My thesis is an investigation of design in print in New Zealand circa 1880 – 1914, the period in which it is generally accepted graphic design began in the industrial Western nations. The medium of design studied is New Zealand’s most significant printed product, popular everyday ephemera, which is contextualized within local and international print production, technology, and debates concerning design. The research aim is to contribute to new approaches in the proto-discipline of graphic design history, specifically the current debates concerning purpose, scope and methods, by writing a local study that has relevance here and internationally. In this way it joins the growing number of local and national design studies of countries customarily defined as politically, culturally and geographically peripheral. It further explores alternative approaches by using formal analysis as a tool for the interpretation of visual codes and their rhetoric in print to enable the appraisal of local significances and international relationships. The study follows a model of graphic design as visual communication encompassing purpose, production, and reception, to argue the historic significations, activities, and values of local graphic design are of critical import for their role in social and cultural formation at both national and international levels. It argues against traditional binary models of centre to margin design transmission to assert alternative theories of networks, and of the hybridity of forms (particularly in colonial societies). Theories that, like this study, seek to apprehend complexity and more appropriately explain research findings that indicate the spread of design in print is an active circulation of signifying forms in a process of influence, adaptation and exchange. The argument engages five theoretical debates that are further concerned with contemporary issues of history and its methods as they impinge on graphic design history. They are the current issues of historiography and calls for interdisciplinarity; the status and importance of ephemeral print; relationships of graphic design to modernity; concepts of the peripheral and networks; the use of semiotics in interpreting the visual rhetoric of typography and image. This investigation, allowing for problems with the survival and attribution of material, is formed by three case studies that encompass a range of processes, media and products. The first considers typography and letterpress through the linked printing and writings of compositor/printer Robert Coupland Harding; the second charts the career of lithographic designer and illustrator Robert Hawcridge and his use of visual syntax, rhetoric and iconography. The third considers the composite local illustrated magazine the New Zealand Graphic and the role of design in editorial and advertising matter. New knowledge is diverse, establishing crucial facts about design here, its forms, and the importance it was accorded in supposedly slight material. Widespread and unexpected influences and networks of exchange are traced, and the considerable but neglected role of graphic design in social and cultural formation and the early articulations of a national identity are appraised. While of significance for the development of graphic design history, the findings also have relevance for the wider investigations of new history, including transnational, cosmopolitan, technological, and material histories

Principles of Decoration in the Roman World

Principles of Decoration in the Roman World explores the manner in which architectural settings and action contexts influenced the perception of decorative elements in Roman culture. By examining the relationship between viewer, setting and medium through the lens of decor, the Roman concept of appropriateness, the papers in this volume shed new light on the decorative principles employed across Roman Italy and beyond

Typotecture: Histories, Theories and Digital Futures of Typographic Elements in Architectural Design

Written language constitutes an integral part of every urban landscape. However, in many cases there is no logical design and semantic relationship between the typographic elements and the architectural structures to which they are applied, resulting in visual pollution, a cacophony of words within the built environment. Taking this fact into account we can propose the concept of typotecture, a new form of architecture that integrates the graphic with the architectural field, an architectural practice that, in its role as a medium of communication, incorporates typography into its substance and expression. The research initially focuses on a systematic, chronologically structured historical analysis of existing examples of typotecture, along with their underlying theory, ranging from primitive pre-modern achievements to more coherent contemporary manifestations. This process helps us to identify an existing yet ill-defined cross-disciplinary design practice. Subsequently it creates a backdrop for its further development through the proposal of new innovative typotectural examples by experimenting with current digital design tools. The research aims to demonstrate that several building typologies where communication processes are involved (commercial, educational, religious, among others) have the capacity to transmit the required typographic information inherently, either two-dimensionally or three-dimensionally. These can offer fixed and mutable messages either explicitly or implicitly, depending on the function typotecture intends to serve (identification, navigation, promotion, education, recreation or mystification). The overall goal of the study is to prove that typotecture is capable of enhancing the value of architecture as a medium of communication, and contribute to contemporary meaningful and effective urban environments

A Semantic-based Framework for Digital Survey of Architectural Heritage

The research aims at developing a framework for semantic-based digital survey of architectural heritage. Rooted in knowledge-based modeling which extracts mathematical constraints of geometry from architectural treatises, as-built information of architecture obtained from image-based modeling is integrated with the ideal model in BIM platform. The knowledge-based modeling transforms the geometry and parametric relation of architectural components from 2D printings to 3D digital models, and create large amount variations based on shape grammar in real time thanks to parametric modeling. It also provides prior knowledge for semantically segmenting unorganized survey data. The emergence of SfM (Structure from Motion) provides access to reconstruct large complex architectural scenes with high flexibility, low cost and full automation, but low reliability of metric accuracy. We solve this problem by combing photogrammetric approaches which consists of camera configuration, image enhancement, and bundle adjustment, etc. Experiments show the accuracy of image-based modeling following our workflow is comparable to that from range-based modeling. We also demonstrate positive results of our optimized approach in digital reconstruction of portico where low-texture-vault and dramatical transition of illumination bring huge difficulties in the workflow without optimization. Once the as-built model is obtained, it is integrated with the ideal model in BIM platform which allows multiple data enrichment. In spite of its promising prospect in AEC industry, BIM is developed with limited consideration of reverse-engineering from survey data. Besides representing the architectural heritage in parallel ways (ideal model and as-built model) and comparing their difference, we concern how to create as-built model in BIM software which is still an open area to be addressed. The research is supposed to be fundamental for research of architectural history, documentation and conservation of architectural heritage, and renovation of existing buildings

Towards a post-industrial architecture : design and construction of houses for the information age

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2000.Includes bibliographical references (p. 132-137).The design and construction of modern residential architecture, which came into critical focus by architects of the Machine Age, continues to be a priority in the architectural discourse. For Modern architects, the desire to relate the house to industrial processes was an aesthetic and social imperative that never gained popular acceptance. Today, mention of an industrial, factory-produced house conjures images of mobile homes and cheap construction rather than innovative modern design. At the same time, the typical suburban single-family unit offers little in the way of innovation or individual expression. Land developers, rather than architects or planners, have taken control of the residential market, and do not offer architectural design services to average consumers. As a result, the design of homes adheres to generic standards that are neither flexible nor adaptable to changing family and individual needs. Stylistic choices are extremely limited. The topic of this thesis is to address these and other issues currently impeding the development of innovative residential architecture by exploring the use of computational tools to generate unique architectural solutions. Strategies for obtaining meaningful information from clients that generate spatial rules are explored, as well as a construction methodology that supports multivalent, adjustable architecture.Gregory L. Demchak.S.M

Image to Infinity: Rethinking Description and Detail in the Cinema

In the late 1980s, historian Hayden White suggested the possibility of forms of historical thought unique to filmed history. White proposed the study of "historiophoty," an imagistic alternative to written history. Subsequently, much scholarly attention has been paid to the category of History Film. Yet popular concerns for historical re-presentation and heritage have not fully addressed aesthetic effects of prior history films and emergent imagistic-historiographic practices. This dissertation identifies and elaborates one such alternative historiographic practice on film, via inter-medial study attending to British and American history films, an instance of multi-platform digital historiography, and an animated film - a category of film often overlooked in history film studies. Central to this dissertation is Gilles Deleuze's development of varieties of the Movement Image. Deleuze's Movement Image includes the "discursive image," a form which has not yet broken the coherence of sensori-motor connections between the object perceived and the affective response of the viewer. Related to the "discursive image," I propose that the "descriptive image" can capture what the larger category "representation" and the cinema-specific "spectacle" cannot. Drawing from literary and art-historical conceptions of the differences between "descriptive" and "narrative" forms, I propose that in the history film, the "descriptive image" functions as a meta-critical aesthetic, insisting that viewers perceive naturalized relationships as instead contingent. I argue that, rather than a "mature form" of realism, the "descriptive image" is a form of critical realism. Descriptive images are characterized by: long takes of long shots; the co-presence and co-equivalence of objects; a point of view neither neutral nor attributable to a character; and expressions of scope or forms for framing that assert that the given view is only one view from the set of possible views. Thus I examine exemplary texts that demonstrate a difference between "narrative understanding" and "descriptive understanding." These texts, despite their material differences, similarly present mixed historiographic forms, and enable us to see what studies of history on film, in their interest in re-presentation over presentation, have often missed: "descriptive images" allow us to differentiate the event of the film from an inadequate copy of an historical event

Knowledge and Reasoning for Image Understanding

abstract: Image Understanding is a long-established discipline in computer vision, which encompasses a body of advanced image processing techniques, that are used to locate (“where”), characterize and recognize (“what”) objects, regions, and their attributes in the image. However, the notion of “understanding” (and the goal of artificial intelligent machines) goes beyond factual recall of the recognized components and includes reasoning and thinking beyond what can be seen (or perceived). Understanding is often evaluated by asking questions of increasing difficulty. Thus, the expected functionalities of an intelligent Image Understanding system can be expressed in terms of the functionalities that are required to answer questions about an image. Answering questions about images require primarily three components: Image Understanding, question (natural language) understanding, and reasoning based on knowledge. Any question, asking beyond what can be directly seen, requires modeling of commonsense (or background/ontological/factual) knowledge and reasoning. Knowledge and reasoning have seen scarce use in image understanding applications. In this thesis, we demonstrate the utilities of incorporating background knowledge and using explicit reasoning in image understanding applications. We first present a comprehensive survey of the previous work that utilized background knowledge and reasoning in understanding images. This survey outlines the limited use of commonsense knowledge in high-level applications. We then present a set of vision and reasoning-based methods to solve several applications and show that these approaches benefit in terms of accuracy and interpretability from the explicit use of knowledge and reasoning. We propose novel knowledge representations of image, knowledge acquisition methods, and a new implementation of an efficient probabilistic logical reasoning engine that can utilize publicly available commonsense knowledge to solve applications such as visual question answering, image puzzles. Additionally, we identify the need for new datasets that explicitly require external commonsense knowledge to solve. We propose the new task of Image Riddles, which requires a combination of vision, and reasoning based on ontological knowledge; and we collect a sufficiently large dataset to serve as an ideal testbed for vision and reasoning research. Lastly, we propose end-to-end deep architectures that can combine vision, knowledge and reasoning modules together and achieve large performance boosts over state-of-the-art methods.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Computer Science 201