Architectural history from eye-level: Nikolaus Pevsner's ‘Treasure Hunts’ in the Architectural Review, 1942

In 1942, Nikolaus Pevsner published a series of articles in the Architectural Review that he called ‘Treasure Hunts’. Discussing mostly obscure, and often unpopular, buildings of the last hundred years, Pevsner jovially invited readers to join him in a game to ‘Date your District’. Instantly recognisable through bubble-shaped detail photographs and with a mixture of cheerful language and dense art-historical analysis, these articles present a unique opportunity within Pevsner’s often-examined oeuvre to explore word-image relationships and their appeal to the lay public. The present article analyses the use of typography, layout and photography in the Treasure Hunts and relates them to two specific modes of writing, analysis and ‘pictorial criticism’, a term coined by James M. Richards. Both verbal and graphic elements of the Treasure Hunts work by contrasting overviews to close-ups, imitating human vision and intellectual cognition and, by doing so, facilitate the education of the lay public in visually reading - and enjoying - buildings, their proclaimed aim. Thus, Pevsner established an architectural history from eye-level that relied on natural vision paired with art-historical method, bred and shaped through his German training, applied in a distinctly English context, and refined later in his Buildings of England

Non-LTE models for synthetic spectra of type Ia supernovae. III. An accelerated lambda iteration procedure for the mutual interaction of strong spectral lines in SN Ia models with and without energy deposition

Context. Spectroscopic analyses to interpret the spectra of the brightest supernovae from the UV to the near-IR provide a powerful tool with great astrophysical potential for the determination of the physical state of the ejecta, their chemical composition, and the SNe distances even at significant redshifts. Methods. We report on improvements of computing synthetic spectra for SNIa with respect to i) an improved and sophisticated treatment of thousands of strong lines that interact intricately with the "pseudo-continuum" formed entirely by Doppler- shifted spectral lines, ii) an improved and expanded atomic database, and iii) the inclusion of energy deposition within the ejecta. Results. We show that an accelerated lambda iteration procedure we have developed for the mutual interaction of strong spectral lines appearing in the atmospheres of SNeIa solves the longstanding problem of transferring the radiative energy from the UV into the optical regime. In detail we discuss applications of the diagnostic technique by example of a standard SNIa, where the comparison of calculated and observed spectra revealed that in the early phases the consideration of the energy deposition within the spectrum-forming regions of the ejecta does not qualitatively alter the shape of the spectra. Conclusions. The results of our investigation lead to an improved understanding of how the shape of the spectrum changes radically as function of depth in the ejecta, and show how different emergent spectra are formed as a result of the particular physical properties of SNe Ia ejecta and the resulting peculiarities in the radiative transfer. This provides an important insight into the process of extracting information from observed SNIa spectra, since these spectra are a complex product of numerous unobservable SNIa spectral features which are thus analyzed in parallel to the observable spectral features.Comment: 27 pages, 19 figures. Submitted to A&A, revised versio

Introduction: Building word image, a new arena for architectural history

The study of word-image relationships is one of the most innovative and cross-disciplinary fields to have emerged in the humanities over the last decades. This special collection of Architectural Histories opens up this area to architectural history by exploring the rising coexistence of the graphic and the verbal in the public dissemination of architecture in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Originating from a conference session at the Third International Meeting of the European Architectural History Network in Turin, June 2014, this selection of articles also presents the foundation for an EAHN Interest Group on Word & Image, which will help to define this new arena. Even if word-image relationships are, so far, rarely identified as a specific topic within our discipline, as architectural historians we already investigate them across periods, territories and subjects. The purpose of this collection is to make this a subject per se by examining descriptions and illustrations of buildings in printed and publicly disseminated media such as newspapers, journals, pamphlets, books, manuscripts or catalogues. We hope that the papers in this special collection of Architectural Histories will encourage architectural historians of all fields to question the interplay between buildings, words and images afresh, thus building a new understanding of the verbal and visual presence of architecture

The crowd and the building: Flux in the early Illustrated London News

When the illustrated newspaper was “invented” in 1842, festivals soon became prime content for the young Illustrated London News. Presenting festivals from home and abroad, illustrated papers were full of images and descriptions of spectacle in motion – including spectacular architecture and people. What was the relationship between the crowd and the building, in word and image, and how did it relate to the role architecture played in the public sphere? This article argues that the increasing plasticity of the text, alongside the rising dominance of the image, turned printing from a static into an inter- active medium. The page transformed from a surface into a space that could capture figures and buildings in flux. As styles multiplied in the age of historicism, text and image in the Illustrated London News pro- vided an immersive, yet highly controlled, experience of the metropolis and its events

An archaeology of perception: verbal descriptions of architecture in travel writings

This thesis relates two fields, the history of perception and that of language, to each other in order to argue that the ways in which we verbally describe buildings are inherently linked to the way in which we look at and make sense of them. It will show that what we understand when seeing, what we know to have seen, is shaped by the means we find to express and communicate it. The subject matter of this research is the unfamiliar architectural object as it is perceived, described and imagined while travelling. Contextualising and linking various descriptions of built spaces in travel writings at distinct moments between the seventeenth and twentieth century, perceptual modes of British and German travellers in Italy and England are mapped out. Special emphasis is placed on the context of the seventeenth century, and the birth of Empiricism, which is argued to have led to a new way of perceiving as well as describing the built environment. Texts investigated include travel diaries, letters, guidebooks as well as novels by authors such as John Evelyn, John Bargrave, Daniel Defoe, Tobias Smollett, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jacob Burckhardt, John Ruskin and Nikolaus Pevsner. Through an archaeology of perception, local and often fragmentary narratives are constructed - ‘snapshots’ which focus on past moments rather than providing an extensive historical panorama. Processes of rendering, ordering, thinking, looking and reading the perceived are submitted to methods drawn from the following fields: the disciplines of history - the histories of art, sciences and literature - as well as the cognitive sciences, particularly cognitive linguistics, alongside the more specific concerns of architectural history and theory. Modes of perception located and retraced include notions of immediate and detached recording, of fragmented and vectorial structuring, of emotional versus truthbearing seeing, of a pure and hyperreal looking as well as of itemizing against visual description

Consistent Radiative Transfer Models including Time Dependent Energy Deposition for Type Ia Supernovae

Many aspects of the explosion mechanism of Type Ia supernovae (SN Ia) still remain unclear -- causing uncertainties in the derived cosmological parameters. Realistic models of the generation and transport of radiation in the ejecta are required which link theoretical explosion models to observations. We aim to construct theoretical spectra and light curves from consistent radiative transfer models that allow to study the dependence of observable features on the physical parameters of the explosion.Comment: To appear in "1604-2004: Supernovae as Cosmological Lighthouses", Padua, June 16-19 2004, eds. Turatto et al., ASP conference Series. 2 page

Fetal adverse effects following NSAID or metamizole exposure in the 2nd and 3rd trimester: an evaluation of the German Embryotox cohort

Background: Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAID) are frequently used to treat pain, fever and inflammatory conditions. Due to evidenced fetotoxicity, treatment with NSAID and metamizole should be avoided in the 3rd trimester of pregnancy. There is an ongoing debate on fetotoxic risk of 2nd trimester use which is why we have conducted this study. Methods: In this observational cohort study outcome of pregnancies with NSAID and/or metamizole exposure in the 2nd and/or 3rd trimester (study cohort n = 1092) was compared with pregnancies exposed to NSAID and/or metamizole in the 1st trimester only (comparison cohort, n = 1154). The WHO-UMC system was used to assess causality between study medication and study endpoints. Prenatal study endpoints were constriction of ductus arteriosus Botalli, oligohydramnios, late spontaneous abortion (SAB) or stillbirth. Postnatal study endpoints were patent ductus arteriosus (PDA), anomalies of the right heart ventricle, primary pulmonary hypertension (PPHT), and neonatal impairment of kidney function. Results: Ductus arteriosus constriction was diagnosed in 5/1092 (0.5%) in the study cohort versus 0/1154 pregnancies in the comparison cohort. In one fetus, ductus arteriosus constriction and oligohydramnios occurred already in the late 2nd trimester after long-term NSAID exposure. Oligohydramnios was diagnosed in 41/1092 (3.8%) in the study cohort versus 29/1154 (2.5%) cases in the comparison cohort [RR, 1.5 (95% CI 0.9-2.4)]. Limited to 2nd trimester, oligohydramnios occurred in 8/904 (0.9%) versus 2/1154 (0.2%) pregnancies [RR, 5.1 (95% CI 1.1-24.0)]. At least in four of the 2nd trimester exposed pregnancies NSAID exposure lasted several weeks. Late SAB or stillbirth occurred in 14/1092 (1.3%) versus 17/1154 (1.5%). Postnatal cardiovascular or renal pathology did not differ between the cohorts. Conclusions: NSAID use in the 2nd trimester limited to a few days does not appear to pose a relevant risk. Use for longer periods in the advanced 2nd trimester, however, may cause oligohydramnios and ductus arteriosus constriction similar to effects observed after 3rd trimester use

Non-LTE models for synthetic spectra of type Ia supernovae. IV. A modified Feautrier scheme for opacity-sampled pseudo-continua at high expansion velocities and application to synthetic SN Ia spectra

Context. Type Ia supernovae (SN Ia) have become an invaluable cosmological tool as their exceptional brightness makes them observable even at very large distances (up to redshifts around z~1). To investigate possible systematic differences between local and distant SN Ia requires detailed models whose synthetic spectra can be compared to observations, and in which the solution of the radiative transfer is a key ingredient. One commonly employed method is the Feautrier scheme, which is generally very robust, but which can yield wrong results under certain conditions that frequently occur in the modelling of supernova ejecta or even in the radiatively driven expanding atmospheres of hot stars. Methods. We use a sophisticated model atmosphere code which takes into account the non-LTE effects and high velocity gradients that strongly affect the physics of SN Ia atmospheres at all wavelengths to simulate the formation of SN Ia spectra by the thousands of strong spectral lines which intricately interact with the "pseudo-continuum" formed entirely by these Doppler-shifted lines themselves. We focus to an investigation of the behavior of the Feautrier scheme under these conditions. Results. Synthetic spectra of SN Ia, a complex product of computer models replicating numerous physical processes that determine the conditions of matter and radiation in the ejecta, are affected by large spatial jumps of the line-dominated opacities and source functions for which the application of even well-established methods may harbor certain pitfalls. We analyze the conditions that can lead to a breakdown of conventional procedures and we derive for the Feautrier radiative transfer solver a modified description which yields more accurate results in the given circumstances.Comment: 11 pages, 9 figures. Submitted to A&

Anticorrelated Photoluminescence and Free Charge Generation Proves Field-Assisted Exciton Dissociation in Low-Offset PM6:Y5 Organic Solar Cells

Understanding the origin of inefficient photocurrent generation in organic solar cells with low energy offset remains key to realizing high performance donor-acceptor systems. Here, we probe the origin of field-dependent free charge generation and photoluminescence in non-fullerene acceptor (NFA) based organic solar cells using the polymer PM6 and NFA Y5 - a non-halogenated sibling to Y6, with a smaller energetic offset to PM6. By performing time-delayed collection field (TDCF) measurements on a variety of samples with different electron transport layers and active layer thickness, we show that the fill factor and photocurrent are limited by field-dependent free charge generation in the bulk of the blend. We also introduce a new method of TDCF called m-TDCF to prove the absence of artefacts from non-geminate recombination of photogenerated- and dark charge carriers near the electrodes. We then correlate free charge generation with steady state photoluminescence intensity, and find perfect anticorrelation between these two properties. Through this, we conclude that photocurrent generation in this low offset system is entirely controlled by the field dependent exciton dissociation into charge transfer states