The Architect-Teacher’s Role in Formulating Architectural Pedagogy in China before 1952: The Examples of Huang Zuoshen and Liang Sicheng

This thesis examines China’s early modern architectural pedagogy before the 1952 restructuring of higher education under the Communist regime. In this context, it reflects on two key figures—Liang Sicheng (1901–1972) and Huang Zuoshen (1915–1975)—in their respective departments of architectural engineering at Tsinghua University (Beijing) and St. John’s University (SJU, Shanghai). I explore three themes—architect-teacher, makeshift modernity, and contested discourse—which encapsulate Huang’s and Liang’s teaching methodology and reflect their foreign-study experiences. Part 1 is dedicated to Huang: his studies at the Architectural Association (1933–1938) in Britain during its curricular revolution inspired by the Modern Architectural Research Group; his learning at the Graduate School of Design (1939–1941), not only from Gropius (the focus of previous scholarship) but also other modernists; and the SJU architecture programme Huang established in 1942, where he gathered an international faculty and promoted progressive approaches beyond Bauhaus principles. Part 2 features Liang’s environmental design pedagogy at Tsinghua: his concept of building (ying jian, culminating in his proposal for a College of Building); his methods of teaching city planning (which he added to his curriculum after the Second World War); and his influences from midwestern US institutions (i.e., the Cranbrook Academy of Art, the University of Michigan, and Taliesin) and Harvard’s Fogg Museum of Art. Finally, the thesis investigates Huang’s and Liang’s beliefs about the social position of the architect. It aligns Liang’s views on architecture’s relationship to society, engineering, and art with Huang’s commitment to architecture’s popular, scientific, and national aspects in post-1949 China. This thesis demonstrates that, despite the differences between inward-looking Beijing and outward-looking Shanghai, and between Liang’s and Huang’s respective backgrounds in the Beaux-Arts and Bauhaus modernism, these two figures embody the pedagogic plurality that characterised the establishment of architectural education in the first half of twentieth-century China

Dynamic analysis of flexible mechanical systems using LATDYN

A 3-D, finite element based simulation tool for flexible multibody systems is presented. Hinge degrees-of-freedom is built into equations of motion to reduce geometric constraints. The approach avoids the difficulty in selecting deformation modes for flexible components by using assumed mode method. The tool is applied to simulate a practical space structure deployment problem. Results of examples demonstrate the capability of the code and approach

Is Contract Farming More Profitable and Efficient Than Non-Contract Farming-A Survey Study of Rice Farms In Taiwan

Trade liberalization and globalization has modernized the food retail sector in Taiwan, affecting consumers, producers and trade patterns. These changes have placed significant pressures on farmers and processors including more stringent quality control and product varieties. The government has launched a rice production-marketing contract program in 2005 to assist rice farmers and the agro-business sector to work together as partners. The minimum scale for each contract is 50 hectares of adjacent rice paddies with 50 participants including rice farmers, seedling providers, millers and marketing agents. In order to evaluate the outcome of this program, a survey is conducted in the summer of 2005 after the first (spring) crop is harvested. Information of price and value of output and major variable and fixed inputs are collected along with characteristics of the farmers and farms. The survey results show that the average revenue of a contract farm is about 11 percent higher than an average non-contract farm. The per hectare cost of production in a contract farm is about 13 percent lower and as a result the average profit margin under contract is more than 50 percent above those without contract. A swtiching regression profit frontier model is adopted to further investigate their efficiency performance. The result indicates that an average contract farms is 20 percent more efficient than an average non-contract farm in a comparable operating environment. The result also suggests that although contract farming has potential to improve the profit of smallholders, it is not a sufficient condition for such improvement.Land Economics/Use,