Revolving Architecture

Alternately lauded as the future of architecture or dismissed as pure folly, revolving buildings are a fascinating missing chapter in architectural history with surprising relevance to issues in contemporary architectural design. Rotating structures have been employed to solve problems and create effects that stationary buildings can't achieve. Rotating buildings offeredever-changing vistas and made interior spaces more flexible and adaptable. They were used to impress visitors, treatpatients, and improve the green qualities of a structure by keeping particular rooms in or out of the sun. The follow-up to his critically acclaimed book A-frame, Chad Randl's Revolving Architecture: A History of Buildings that Rotate, Swivel, and Pivot explores the history of this unique building type, investigating the cultural forces that have driven people to design and inhabit them. Revolving Architecture is packed with a variety of fantastic revolving structures such as a jail that kept inmates under a wardens constant surveillance, glamorous revolving restaurants, tuberculosis treatment wards, houses, theaters, and even a contemporary residential building whose full-floor apartments circle independently of each other. International examples from the late 1800s though the present demonstrate the variety and innovation of these dynamic structures.

This book showcases over 100 cutting-edge research papers from the 4th International Conference on Research into Design (ICoRD’13) – the largest in India in this area – written by eminent researchers from over 20 countries, on the design process, methods and tools, for supporting global product development (GPD). The special features of the book are the variety of insights into the GPD process, and the host of methods and tools at the cutting edge of all major areas of design research for its support. The main benefit of this book for researchers in engineering design and GPD are access to the latest quality research in this area; for practitioners and educators, it is exposure to an empirically validated suite of methods and tools that can be taught and practiced.

Revolutionary Stagecraft draws on a rich corpus of literary, historical, and technical materials to reveal a deep entanglement among technological modernization, political agendas, and the performing arts in modern China. This unique approach to Chinese theater history combines a close look at plays themselves, performance practices, technical theater details, and behind-the-scenes debates over “how to” make theater amid the political upheavals of China’s 20th century. The book begins at a pivotal moment in the 1920s—when Chinese theater artists began to import, use, and write about modern stage equipment—and ends in the 1980s when China's scientific and technological boom began. By examining iconic plays and performances from the perspective of the stage technologies involved, Tarryn Li-Min Chun provides a fresh perspective on their composition and staging. The chapters include stories on the challenges of creating imitation neon, rigging up a makeshift revolving stage, and representing a nuclear bomb detonating onstage. In thinking about theater through technicity, the author mines well-studied materials such as dramatic texts and performance reviews for hidden technical details and brings to light a number of previously untapped sources such as technical journals and manuals; set design renderings, lighting plots, and prop schematics; and stage technology how-to guides for amateur thespians. This approach focuses on material stage technologies, situating these objects equally in relation to their technical potential, their human use, and the social, political, economic, and cultural forces that influence them. In each of its case studies, Revolutionary Stagecraft reveals the complex and at times surprising ways in which Chinese theater artists and technicians of the 20th century envisioned and enacted their own revolutions through the materiality of the theater apparatus.

While most studies on the history of architectural theory have been concerned with what has been said and written, this book is concerned with how architecture theory has been created and transmitted. Architecture Thinking across Boundaries looks at architectural theory through the lens of intellectual history. Eleven original essays explore a variety of themes and contexts, each examining how architectural knowledge has been transferred across social, spatial and disciplinary boundaries - whether through the international circulation of ideas, transdisciplinary exchanges, or transfers from design practice to theory and back again. Dissecting the frictions, transformations and resistances that mark these journeys, the essays in this book reflect upon the myriad routes that architectural knowledge has taken while developing into architectural theory. They critically enquire the interstices – geographical, temporal and epistemological – that lie beyond fixed narratives. They show how unstable, vital and eminently mobile the processes of thinking about architecture have been.