Peter Blundell Jones

Architecture and participation

Edited with Peter Blundell Jones and Doina Petrescu. A collection of essays setting out the whys and hows of new approaches to participation. Chapters include work by Jon Broome, Giancarlo de Carlo, CHORA, and my two fellow editors.

Exploring urban history and space online: Design of the virtual Sheffield application

Abstract The Sheffield Urban Contextual Databank project was set up to develop digital means of transferring the physical database amassed in the Sheffield Urban Study project to suitable formats accessible through multiple routes. We have developed a Web-based virtual city platform capable of displaying urban contextual information containing 3D models and other related documents in a user-centred way. With this prototype, we explored an alternative way of building virtual cities that is beyond conventional static urban modelling. The ability to retrieve urban contextual information according to user-specified locations and boundaries is essential for future uses of the system in supporting collaborative design and research relating to the city of Sheffield.

House design by surname in Feng Shui

Feng Shui is an exclusive Chinese cultural achievement and experience in architecture. This paper reviews one special Feng Shui model for the selection of auspicious orientations for house elements such as the main entrance, kitchen, or bedrooms, based on the classification of surnames. Investigation of original references and historical literature reveals that this model has been mentioned, but never analysed in detail. Four significant Feng Shui concepts forming the theoretical aspect of the model have been revealed. These four concepts are the Five Elements, the Magic Square, the concept of centrality and the layout of the Chinese courtyard house.

The Sheffield Urban Study project

In the UK, government policy has encouraged architecture schools to be more research active and there is pressure to make the two final years of the five year course more definitively postgraduate. The University of Sheffield has responded with an experiment that combines studio teaching with real research on the city and its history. Sheffield is Britains fourth largest city with a population of around half a million. It grew very rapidly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, It now employs a fraction of the former labour force and the city is having to adjust its identity.

On an alternative framework for building virtual cities: supporting urban contextual modelling on demand

For various purposes, virtual city applications have been developed around the globe to provide users with online resources and services over the Internet. Following our research on the Sheffield Urban Contextual Databank (SUCoD) project, this paper presents an alternative framework for building virtual cities, which goes beyond conventional static urban modelling. A three-tier system framework is described in conjunction with the design and implementation of the SUCoD prototype. We demonstrate SUCoDs novel functionalities by showing that complex urban contextual information sets, including three-dimensional interactive models, multilayer interactive maps, and hypermedia documents, can be retrieved dynamically by user-specified urban contextual attributes, spatial locations, and boundaries. The three-tier framework also facilitates system development in an extensible way, allowing continuous parallel extensions of system functionalities, user-interface components, and contextual data resources. SUCoDs dynamic capabilities are considered crucial in its future uses for urban contextual modelling on demand in relation to the past, present, and future of the City of Sheffield.

Lanthanum stimulates the accumulation of cyclic AMP and inhibits secretion and thromboxane B2 formation in human platelets.

La3+ was found to inhibit the secretion of 5-hydroxytryptamine and the production of thromboxane B2 by washed platelets exposed to collagen or thrombin. In addition, La3+ inhibited secretion in response to sodium arachidonate, although the conversion of arachidonate to thromboxane B2 was not affected. La3+ was also found to enhance the accumulation of cyclic AMP under basal conditions and in response to prostaglandin E1, in washed platelets. The inhibition of cyclic AMP accumulation by ADP was prevented by La3+, suggesting that the effect of ADP on cyclic AMP metabolism was dependent upon the presence or flux of calcium at the platelet membrane. La3+ inhibited the activity of adenylate cyclase in platelet lysates both in response to prostaglandin E1 and to F-, indicating a possible effect at the catalytic subunit of the enzyme. None of the observed effects of La3+ could be reversed by the addition of Ca2+ up to 10 mM. The stimulation of cyclic AMP production by La3+ may largely explain the inhibitory effect of La3+ upon platelet secretion and thromboxane B2 production. These results also suggest that Ca2+ localised at the platelet plasma membrane may be important in the regulation of cyclic AMP metabolism.

Acoustic form in the Modern Movement

The architects of the Modern Movement in the late 1920s found new sources of form through the pursuit of technical and functional issues in design. They sought shaping agents in functional organization, in the admission of light, in efficiency of structure and construction, and many other physical issues of this kind. At the same time, they felt the need to escape from traditional rules of architectural composition involving Classical orders of columns, symmetry and axes. They were ready to discover a new and surprising identity for buildings precisely to defy the historicist conventions that until then dominated architecture as a cultural tradition. Acoustics is an area in which many interesting claims were made, and some famous Modernist designs were supposedly formed, or at very least inspired, by acoustic forces. These historical instances beg the question whether acoustics is really a legitimate and helpful formal determinant of buildings. Perhaps instead, the acoustic arguments put forward by architects to justify their formal choices were just convenient alibis. This is a far more complex issue than at first it seems.

Social order versus ‘natural’ disorder in the Chinese garden

This architectural and landscape case study of the Couple’s Garden in Suzhou addresses a conundrum in the Chinese garden. It hinges on the contrast between the ritual formality of the house’s halls...

What can a bridge be? The wind and rain bridges of the Dong

Bridges are taken for granted in the modern world as utilitarian structures and if noticed at all are remarked upon mainly for the elegance of their engineering structures, but a mere couple of centuries ago many in Europe still had chapels in which prayers for a safe crossing could be said. In the Dong areas of south-west China, which remained remote until around two decades ago, the bridges are the principal monuments, elaborately roofed and decorated with shrines to various gods, built with pride and at great local cost. Our research began with the question of why so much trouble was taken over these bridges, and led on to how they were read by their users and builders, and what they were considered to mean. The consequent excursions into anthropological theory and traditional Chinese ideologies, which can only be briefly summarised in the following paper, revealed a rich and complex network of causes, fascinating in their multiplicity and interaction. The enquiry was pushed far beyond the bounds of traditional art history, engaging fundamental questions about the significance of architecture as a communicative and ritual medium in traditional oral-based cultures. At a more general level it also prompted a thought-provoking exploration of the similarities and differences between bridges metaphorical and bridges physical.

The lure of the Orient: Scharoun and Häring's East-West connections

Among Hugo Harings papers in the Haring archive of the Akademie der Kunste in Berlin are the minutes of six meetings entitled Discussions about Chinese Architecture held on Fridays and once on a Saturday dating from November 1941 to May 1942. The persons involved are Hugo Haring, Hans Scharoun, Chen Kuan Lee and John Scott. Of Scott, a Germanised American, we know little: it seems his wife Gerda worked at Harings art school. But Chen Kuan Lee is a key figure in this story. Born in Shanghai in 1919, he had arrived in Berlin in 1935 to study architecture under Hans Poelzig, completing the course in 1939. He then became Scharouns assistant until 1941, working on the private houses that provided a limited creative opportunity under the Nazis. Lee returned to Scharouns office in 1949, remaining there until 1953, one of only four assistants during the crucial period of 1951/1952 when Scharouns new architecture was under development with key projects such as the Darmstadt School and Kassel Theatre. In between, Lee served as an assistant to Ernst Boerschmann (1873–1949), the great German investigator of Chinese culture and author of several books on Chinese architecture. Boerschmann had visited China from 1906 to 1909, when he was sent by the German government to make a comprehensive cultural study, rather as Hermann Muthesius had been sent to England in 1896. To complete Lees biography, in 1954 he set up as an architect on his own account, building several Chinese restaurants, more than 30 private houses and some apartment blocks in a Scharoun-like manner [1], some spatially very interesting, but this kind of work went out of fashion with the advent of postmodernism in the 1980s and Lee died quite recently in obscurity.