Peak and Valleys (by Architecture) in a Flat (Digital) World

Wissenschaftliches Kolloquium vom 19. bis 22. April 2007 in Weimar an der Bauhaus-Universität zum Thema: ‚Die Realität des Imaginären. Architektur und das digitale Bild

Driving forces behind mergers and acquisitions activity : the aggregate economic activity and the stock market

Driving Forces Behind Mergers and Acquisitions Activity: The Aggregate Economic Activity and the Stock Market By Leonidas V. Tzonis The present thesis, motivated by controversies in the literature investigates a series of empirical issues relating to mergers and acquisitions activity in the UK. More specifically, it seeks answers to the following questions: do mergers come in waves, and is there a significant relationship between the aggregate mergers and acquisitions activity, the business cycle and the stock market, both at aggregate and industrial level? Are the stock market mis-valuation and the market timing ability of manager among the driving forces behind merger waves? The focal point is the UK corporate control market over the last twenty years (1985-2005). The main results emerging from the empirical analysis indicate that there exist three distinctly different types of behaviour (regimes) in the series of mergers and acquisitions numbers, both at aggregate and industrial level. Moreover, the contemporaneous relationship between the mergers and acquisitions activity in the UK with the Stock Market and the aggregate economic activity (Business Cycle), is found to be significant, at aggregate level. Finally, consistent evidence which suggests that stock market mis-valuation and the market timing ability of manager is more likely to drive the corporate control market is provided

History is returning to design

I looked up “history” in the dictionary. The definition I liked best was, “study of the past.” Now any number of things can be the study of the past. Archaeology is the study of the past; it has more specific definitions than “history” does. How you choose to study history - whether as mainstreams, as isolated events, as typologies, etc. - however you choose to study it, there is no first rate and secondrate history implied by how you choose to study it - Lawrence Speck. When any field is undergoing development, it invents a simplistic framework on which things are hung. Then as the field expands, as it develops, the repertory begins to expand. I think we are moving out of that central spine on which everything was hung. We are moving into the study of social relationships, political relationships, vernacular, etc., and beginning to absorb more. The profession of architectural history is expanding. Many of these problems are resolving themselves - Dora Wiebenson. Whatever you propose to do, you have to make your own slides. Which means you have to have money to travel. I am struck by the fact that I teach courses to hundreds of students each year - mainline, bread-and-butter courses that go on year after year - but if I ask the university for the opportunity to travel, to see the buildings I am supposed to know something about, and to photograph them in ways that are appropriate for use in my lectures, they think all I am after is a summer in Europe - Richard Betts. While I have questions about this characterization of past historical scholarship, I generally agree with the authors’ aims. The danger in their proposed method is that it threatens to pull the researcher away from the object toward an analysis of society, rather than bringing relevant data to the object under investigation - Stephen Tobriner

Reverse-engineering of architectural buildings based on an hybrid modeling approach

We thank MENSI and REALVIZ companies for their helpful comments and the following people for providing us images from their works: Francesca De Domenico (Fig. 1), Kyung-Tae Kim (Fig. 9). The CMN (French national center of patrimony buildings) is also acknowledged for the opportunity given to demonstrate our approach on the Hotel de Sully in Paris. We thank Tudor Driscu for his help on the English translation.This article presents a set of theoretical reflections and technical demonstrations that constitute a new methodological base for the architectural surveying and representation using computer graphics techniques. The problem we treated relates to three distinct concerns: the surveying of architectural objects, the construction and the semantic enrichment of their geometrical models, and their handling for the extraction of dimensional information. A hybrid approach to 3D reconstruction is described. This new approach combines range-based modeling and image-based modeling techniques; it integrates the concept of architectural feature-based modeling. To develop this concept set up a first process of extraction and formalization of architectural knowledge based on the analysis of architectural treaties is carried on. Then, the identified features are used to produce a template shape library. Finally the problem of the overall model structure and organization is addressed

The Art of Building Reception: Aris Konstantinidis behind the Global Published Life of his Weekend House in Anavyssos (1962–2014)

Aris Konstantinidis’s Weekend House in Anavyssos (1962–1964) holds an emblematic place within his oeuvre. This article uncovers the architect’s own role in building the global reception of this project through a tripartite account of its global published life from the printed page to the digital website over the last five decades (1962–2014). Konstantinidis created a uniquely hermetic zone around his work by adopting a publishing practice that combines his own photographs as narrative and his accompanying text as an architectural manifesto of his regional modernism. Highlighting turning points in the published life of this building, the article relates the original gaze of the architect to the gaze adopted by each subsequent researcher of his work. The conclusion recalibrates the gaze of the contemporary architectural historian towards an architectural work that has effectively been doubly built to be received as canonical, as well as an architectural persona that is often easily romanticised in its dominant interpretations

Planning southern Iraq: placing the progressive theories of Max Lock in Um Qasr, Margil, and Basra in the context of Iraqi national development, 1954–1956

Between 1954 and 1956, the architect, educator, and planner, Max Lock (1909–1988) produced a trilogy of plans to modernize the historical city of Basra and create new areas at Margil and Um Qasr in the south of Iraq. The New Basrah Plan was heavily inspired by the works of Patrick Geddes and aligned with contemporaries such as Lewis Mumford, Lock’s planning was progressive in scope and looked to differ from the planning of post-war principles in Britain through his notions of ‘civic surgery’. Contrary to this, his plans for Um Qasr and Margil focussed on infrastructure and the creation of more industrial areas not prioritizing people and place as highly as he did in the New Basrah Plan. Lock’s ‘Civic Surgery’ offered an alternative to mainstream thought by attempting to create usable, humanistic spaces, which hampered by politics and legislation, resulted in the plan’s shelving and were contradicted by his other works’ philosophies. New retrospective analysis of his underappreciated career reveals the complexities of his planning which this article demonstrates through the ‘failure’ of the New Basrah Plan and his plans at Um Qasr and Margil

Santiago calatrava the complete works

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