Architecture

The Forum of Trajan featured late antique statues of the poets Claudian, Flavius Merobaudes, Sidonius Apollinaris, and probably others in an outdoor exhibition honoring those authors whose works eased harsh political rivalries. This essay considers the statues as displayed in close proximity to the sculptural reliefs on the Column of Trajan. Its visual narratives depicting military campaigns in Dacia corresponded to Claudian's descriptions of battles, Merobaudes's narratives of war, and Sidonius's tales of military prowess. The chapter also analyzes the performance venues in Trajan's Forum, built during the reign of Hadrian, where poets performed before elite audiences. The portraits communicated messages in keeping with the poets' verses, which upheld the long-lasting image of Rome's resilience.

This paper examines US urban interstate rights-of-way and proposes that they be repurposed for a variety of uses. It situates the issue with a brief overview of the difficulties posed by urban interstates and some key milestones in the history of their development. In considering the potential scope of such interventions, the paper classifies all the discrete mid-sized American cities through a typological study of how they interface with the interstate system. The paper considers the shared characteristics of urban interstate rights-of-way that make them promising for the repurposing. Finally, through four though experiments, it proposes potential new uses for the reclaimed spaces and considers how these new uses might impact the city around them both spatially and functionally.

New Orleans' post-Katrina population is less than half of its previous size. Thus, this proposal is an urban strategy addressing shrinkage and abandonment, while simultan-eously rebuilding devastated areas in the Ninth Ward, to the east of the city center.

This study gives a comparative analysis of available daylight planning tools and develops a rule-of-thumb method for determining street width to building height ratios, related to actual illumination levels inside urban buildings. Nine daylight planning tools for site planning and urban design decisions were identified, their characteristics compared, and the tools classified. Six of these tools were compared by applying them to a 200' x 400' (651 x 122 m) urban block at 40 degrees latitude. FAR allowed by the generated envelope was calculated for each tool and compared. A wide range of allowable building envelopes was found.

All prescriptive tools either specified or implied a street height to width ratio (H/W), but none provided a quantified basis for its proportion or exposure plane. A study was initiated to determine H/W in relation to average an minimum daylight factor within a building. A test was conducted using physical modeling in a mirror box artificial sky. Results of this test, plotting H/W against average daylight factor can be used as a preliminary design tool or as a way to determine zoning restrictions, while protecting daylight access.

[1993] This paper presents a study of the relationship bewteen daylight factor (DF) inside a typical office at street level and the building height to street width ratio (H/W). This relationship is quantifies and the major variables explored.

A review of the daylight planning literature revealed that each daylight planning tool was designed in some way to control sky exposure by limiting street wall height or spacing between buildings, and that H/W recommendations varied between 1:1 and 1:3. A study was initiated to determine H/W in relation to average and minimum daylight factors within a building.

In this 1992 study, nine computerized design and analysis tools were compared for their capabilities at modeling cooling loads and seven different passive cooling strategies. Also, a test house was modeled using a rule-of-thumb method, a detailed hand calculation method on a computerized spreadsheet, and a computerized hourly thermal network analysis model.