Reaching New Heights

The history of the ASME A17 elevator safety code is intertwined with the ability to build ever-taller skyscrapers. One key landmark, the Empire State Building, may have been impossible without the contribution of ASME code committee members.

Reaching New Heights

The history of the ASME A17 elevator safety code is intertwined with the ability to build ever-taller skyscrapers. One key landmark, the Empire State Building, may have been impossible without the contribution of ASME code committee members.

Una china poblana en Tamaulipas. La fotografía como representación de discursos políticos y nacionalistas

A partir de la fotografía de una niña vestida de china poblana en la ciudad de Tampico, Tamaulipas (México), que tiene como escenografía Nueva York, la icónica Estatua de la Libertad y el Empire State Building, el objetivo del artículo es desarticular los elementos que la componen desde diferentes puntos de análisis. En primer lugar, se observará cómo y cuándo fue producida, desde cuál tradición fotográfica de la primera mitad del siglo XX fue realizada, para finalmente demostrar los discursos políticos, nacionalistas, culturales e internacionales en los que está inmersa, y cómo la tradición se contraponía a la modernidad capitalista. Se comprobará que la fotografía es un documento histórico, un archivo visual que aporta nuevas formas de interpretar la historia tradicional.

ʿAṣfūriyyeh: A History of Madness, Modernity, and War in the Middle East

My book, published in 2020, reconstructs the history of ʿAṣfūriyyeh, one of the first ‘modern’ mental hospitals in the Middle East. It uses the rise and fall of this institution as a lens through which to examine the development of modern psychiatric theory and practice in the region as well as the socio-political history of modern Lebanon. ʿAṣfūriyyeh becomes a window into social-policy questions relating to dependency and welfare, definitions of deviance, the relation of mission to empire, state-building processes, and the relation of medical authority to religion. The book also examines the impact of war on health and healthcare infrastructures. Reflecting on the afterlife of this and other institutions, the book calls for a new ‘ethics of memory.’

Chapter 24

In later years, Cary Grant would claim that he did retire in the early 1950s. In fact, he had only an 18 month hiatus between films, and during that time he knew that he would return to the screen in Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch A Thief (1955). Hitchcock not only revived Grant’s career but also brought it into the modern era. All of his future films would be made in Technicolor and in a widescreen format, and all would feature location shooting in a spectacular setting. With To Catch A Thief, he found his favourite leading lady, Grace Kelly, and enjoyed a summer of filming with friends Alfred and Alma Hitchcock on location in the south of France. The Pride and the Passion (1956) was an epic historical drama filmed on location in Spain, where Grant fell deeply in love with his co-star Sophia Loren. The bittersweet love story An Affair to Remember (1957), co-starring Deborah Kerr, was filmed on location in Manhattan. Remarkably, the film’s producers tried to convince Grant that the setting should be changed to San Francisco, but he insisted on filming in Manhattan, citing the scene atop the Empire State Building as a crucial element of the film. He was correct. The scene is now considered iconic, and the film has become a perennially popular classic.

Seeing the World from Above: Training with Aerial Scenes Reveals the Effects of Experience on Scene Recognition

Throughout evolution, the human visual system has adapted to efficiently encode several environmental constants to deal with the huge complexity involved in representing large-scale spatial environments. Being terrestrial animals, these constants reflect a specific ground-based viewpoint. For example, people show a strong affinity for detecting a perceptual upright layout relative to the horizon. But, what happens when humans leave this terrestrial perspective, for example when taking a flight, or looking down from the Empire State building? Are the mechanisms originally evolved for terrestrial scene recognition also recruited for the recognition of novel large-scale environments people rarely encounter on a daily basis? We propose that studying how people learn to recognize aerial scene images can reveal how the scene recognition system develops through experience and shed light on the putative mechanisms underlying its malleability. We conducted an intensive six-session behavioral training study in which naive participants learned to categorize manmade and natural scenes at a specific-subordinate level (‘suspension bridge’). Scene images depicted real-world places from a terrestrial and an aerial viewpoint, allowing us to establish how people learn to categorize two visually-different images as the same environment. We found that performance constantly improved over the first five training sessions, with greater learning for the aerial compared to the terrestrial scenes. This viewpoint performance gap manifested more for manmade than natural scenes. In addition to memory improvements, we also found learning transfer, the hallmark of perceptual learning. Performance in the sixth session (in which participants categorized scenes they had not been trained with) was significantly better compared to the first session, and equivalent to average performance across training-sessions. Our findings provide novel evidence for the potential mechanisms underlying plasticity in the scene recognition system, showing both memory and perception contribute to experience-based enhancements in scene recognition.

SEISMIC UPGRADATION OF TALL BUILDINGS

High rises have involved interest for engineers for as long as century. All the more along these lines, the previous thirty years have seen various structures ascending starting from the earliest stage, resisting gravity. Burj Khalifa Dubai, Taipei, Petronas twin pinnacle, Empire state building are a portion of the living instances of designing wonders. What befalls a structure when it arrives at such inconceivable statures separated from the awe that it will be, it additionally represents a gigantic measure of challenge for the auxiliary architect. Since then these structures are looked by administration stacking conditions. Two destroying powers of nature, wind and seismic tremor become truly basic for these structures. The harmony among firmness and pliability to be given turns into the controlling components to the plan of such structures. Routinely giving enough firmness against colossal burdens doesn't appear to fulfill the necessities. These structures are frequently given adequate pliability so as to disperse the gigantic measure of powers. In any case, there is a limit, with respect to how much malleability can be given in a structure. A fast figuring shows that the highest-level uprooting that can be securely borne by a 500 m tall structure is nearly 2m. The structure would not fall flat if its popular narrative dislodges by 2m. Use of different sorts of dampers and isolators have been utilized in disseminating this vitality. Much exploration has gone into advancement of TMDs, ATMDs, BTMDs, and seismic base isolators. Examination has additionally gone into different kind of investigations method as more vigorous powerful examination, weakling investigation, time history investigation and execution-based investigation. Here an endeavor has been made to explore the near benefits and negative marks of various sorts of auxiliary arrangements to comprehend their conduct under seismic and wind loads. The structure considered is of 50 stories. Different designs that have been considered incorporates propped frameworks, shear divider frameworks, dampers and isolators. The investigations results have been organized and plotted to comprehend their conduct. Time history examination and execution-based investigation by sucker investigation have additionally been concentrated to comprehend the conduct of structures.

Skyscrapers

Our knowledge of the skyscraper as a building type is based on research exploring the type’s many facets, among them architectural, technological, and urban. In history, the question of a single definitive “first skyscraper” was debated throughout the 20th century. More recently, historians have asked: Is the type’s defining feature the technology of metal skeleton construction? If so, that places its origins in Chicago in the 1880s with the Home Insurance Building, Tacoma Building, Masonic Temple, and Reliance Building. Or is it simply “height”? That would place its origins in New York City during the late 1860s to mid-1870s with the Equitable, Western Union, and Tribune Buildings, both of which utilized elevator technology to attain height. A complete definition of the skyscraper, however, encompasses several key technologies. Making structures habitable for work or living, for example, required mechanical and electrical systems—initially plumbing, heating, and illumination, and later air conditioning. Within the city, a vast transportation infrastructure by rail facilitated movement to and from the skyscrapers of the central business district. Throughout history, the architecture of the skyscraper has illustrated aspects of American economic, political, and cultural change. The earliest skyscrapers in New York, the nation’s corporate headquarters, for example, recalled the towers of preindustrial Europe, and thus served as memorable landmarks, as demonstrated by the Woolworth Building, whereas those of Chicago, an entrepôt with an entrepreneurial business culture, exemplified the organic-functionalist theories of John Wellborn Root and Louis Sullivan, as realized in the Monadnock and Wainwright Buildings. During the 1920s, the skyscrapers of New York and Chicago inflected forms prescribed by zoning legislation, creating an urban vernacular specific to each city. New York’s 1916 ordinance engendered the setback skyscraper and its associated urbanism, with the Empire State Building as classic example, whereas Chicago’s comparable but unique 1923 code led to a “city of towers,” as illustrated by the Carbide and Carbon and Mather towers. The “Art Deco” and “skyscraper Gothic” idioms, best represented in the Chrysler Building and Chicago’s Tribune Tower, inspired exterior and interior ornamental schemes. The skyscrapers of the 1950s, by contrast, crystallized the “international style” in a society economically prosperous, consumer-oriented, and dominated by corporate enterprise, as superbly represented in the Lever House, New York. During the late 1960s and 1970s, technological optimism and ambition spurred the innovative and supertall Sears (Willis) Tower and the World Trade Center, which redefined the skylines of Chicago and New York, respectively, utilizing the structurally unprecedented braced tube technology to achieve new heights. The World Trade Center’s large-scale reconfiguration of the city’s fabric exemplified the day’s urban renewal schemes. Recent skyscrapers, including the Petronas Towers, Kuala Lumpur, now vigorously compete for height while participating in a global system of signification, in which they gesture toward sustainability, but above all else advertise modernity and economic vitality.

Introducing Massive Media

This chapter introduces the concept of massive media, a term used to describe the emergence of large-scale public projections, urban screens, and led façades such as the illuminated tip of the Empire State Building. These technologies and the social and technical processes of image circulation and engagement that surround them essentially transform buildings into screens. This chapter also introduces theoretical concepts surrounding space, media, cinema, monumentality, and architecture in order to provide a framework for the analysis of the emergence of the building as screen. These concepts are key axes upon which the ongoing transformations of the public sphere revolve. Subsequent chapters are introduced in which massive media is probed, in case studies and creation-as-research projects, for its ability to enable new critical and creative practices of expanded cinema, public data visualisation, and installation art and curation that blend the logics of urban space, monumentality, and the public sphere with the aesthetics and affordances of digital information and the moving image.