Brick Row Research Articles

Computational and experimental analysis of PCM-infused brick for sustainable heat regulation

Examining the thermodynamics of phase change materials (PCMs) when merged into construction materials is a significant subject within the realm of building science and environmental responsibility. When infused to construction materials like bricks, PCMs have the capacity to elevate a building’s temperature regulation by minimizing the energy required for thermal contentment. This research is dedicated to learn about the thermal conduct and the consequences of the fusion of calcium chloride hexahydrate mineral (CCHPCM) within the pores of a masonry unit. To achieve this, we implemented a practical testing specifically designed to scrutinize how CCHPCMs alter the thermal performance of studied compounds. Multiple configurations were designed by adjusting the arrangement of CCHPCM within the bricks, resulting in three distinct setups. The first set involved filling one row of the bricks, the second set entailed filling two rows, and the final configuration entailed filling all the pores with PCM. Additionally, a computational modeling was executed to survey the thermic behavior of bricks infused with CCHPCM, operating with COMSOL Multiphysics application program. The elaborated work concluded to having an enhancement of the brick’s thermal storage capacity, for Set-3, in which all rows of bricks are filled with PCM, a delay of 2 h is observed compared to Set-0 the brick without CCHPCM. This simulation also encompassed comparative findings regarding the thermal performance of CCHPCM when incorporated into the masonry unit. Overall, this study supplied the valorization of CCHPCMs infused in masonry units and their usage in distinct layouts on upgrading its candidature to achieving environmental responsibility.

The smart city old industrial buildings renovation: based on improved greedy algorithm

With urban development and industrial restructuring, many old industrial buildings are left unused, making the renewal of such buildings a crucial aspect of urban construction. To meet the growing need for intelligent and efficient urban construction, this study proposes a greedy algorithm that considers the update of action spaces (AP-GA) to optimise the basic work of old building renovation – the layout of rows of tiles. The algorithm is optimised using the idea of action space update and backtracking. Real testing shows that the optimisation method provides the highest optimisation rate (18.20%) for AP-GA and reduces the number of cut bricks. Although the running time is slightly longer than that of the original algorithm, the brick integrity of the layout is significantly improved. When compared with other algorithms, the optimised AP-GA has the shortest average running time of 580.1 μs, demonstrating its effectiveness in the layout of rows of bricks. This new algorithm provides a more efficient and excellent method for the renewal and renovation of old industrial buildings, broadening the research perspective in the field.

On a Writing & Walking Field Trip with Seven High School Boys Exploring Langston Hughes Sites in Washington, D.C.

The city teaches us todaywith brick row houses andfront stoops, bicyclists,the squeal of car brakes.Hurried drivers watch uswaiting on a sidewalk,writing on his front steps.Bikes hiss by, their spokessparkle against a grey sky.My students gazeat Langston’s windows,wondering what poem beganhere, what poem ended here,what poem was tossed away.One moment, they are a riotof laughter, shining withsilly, colliding with each other.The next, they searchthe sky for wounds.I watch them sitting on Hughes’ stoop;these are serious boys,writing words they mean,seeking words that will be truein America.I wonder about these boys.Where do they begin?Where do they end?Will America toss them away?What loneliness or lovewill carry them?

Double-Voweled: An Experiment

Double-Voweled: An Experiment Alyse Bensel (bio) Phyillis Ardella Ness Bensel (1936–1965) ABSTRACT Flesh is the first literature. –Tracy K. Smith, “History” Pain is private and there is no easy way to put it on display that does not have a titillating quality. [...] nevertheless, there is something to be said for recounting the truth of what was done and also for opening yourself up to the pain of knowing it. –Kathryn Neurnberger, “The Invention of Fire” But women become dead women every minute and always have, so I’m more surprised the whole world is not on fire every minute, that everyone hasn’t felt like they could die. –Anne Boyer, “The Dead Woman” INTRODUCTION The vowels in my grandmother’s name elide, a y followed by an i, creating a digraph. Together, double-voweled, they make the same sound. The i is omitted in the newspaper, later autocorrected by algorithms and software in search engines, its only presence on her gravestone. A difficult spelling, its full sequence is an octave of vowels surrounded by her birth and death dates. Along with the documents that claim her life as tragic ending, the listing for her grave has forgotten the i. Here I, granddaughter, investigate Phyillis’ name and her movements, including her posthumous effects within a particular familial population. This experiment does not subscribe to the what if theory or attempt to resurrect the dead to speculate if she had lived. The only possibilities here are in the how of her death. HYPOTHESIS Hypotheses can never be truly proven. Instead they must be supported by evidence, of which there are scraps, dust motes floating in the corners of your vision. You must have a hypothesis prior to conducting [End Page 28] an experiment, but what is done is done. Astrophysicists have not yet built elaborate and untenable portals through space and time. We all move through what gravity gives us, which leads me to the following: When inside a moving automobile, a car of unknown weight and height, a body will project at a certain speed when that vehicle collides with another moving vehicle, this one known to be much larger and heavier compared to one occupied by a mother and her four young sons. Since we know seat belts were not standard with vehicles or required by law in 1965, the bodies inside must have moved in different ways depending on how the vehicles collided, another unknown, and their relative speeds, also unknown. Due to the various unknowable variables and factors of this experiment, it is hypothesized that all that will be left of Phyillis is her name misspelled in the evidence, her gravestone the exception. PROCEDURE 1. Walk to the outer rim of whichever town you are currently living in to a graveyard—you will find one, as the dead outnumber the living. Go to the oldest section, farther back, down or up a hill, shaded by conifers, and decipher the worn headstones, noting birth and death dates. Analyze the ages for patterns: here was war, a pandemic, the spikes in both old and young a matter of fact and history, a public grave, recorded death, the end of anonymous falling into dampened sound. 2. Determine her resting place, if she was lying beside the driver’s side door or thrown under the still braking asphalt truck, if she was propelled through the windshield during the collision or after the second collision with the telephone pole, or if the car even made a second impact. Look up the intersection as it exists today: three corners of brick row homes, one corner a playground. There are seven telephone poles in total. Calculate the sudden stop in motion despite the red traffic light. Find a splinter jutting from your toe after dropping a drinking glass in the sink to note its trajectories. No time to mouth a warning, as its belled body will break. You pray you will find all the pieces, sharp glinting edges stowed among the floorboards. 3. Watch old public safety announcements. The dummy family lurches forward in their seats upon impact, the airbags deploy, the windows shatter, the car crumples. A slow motion drama–look, see...

On the architectural methods of construction of the early medieval rural areas of Ustrushna (On the example of jizzakh oasis)

This article analyzes the types, stages of development and methods of architectural construction of rural areas of the Jizzakh oasis in the V-VIII centuries (Pardakultepa, Kingirtepa, Almantepa I., II, Yakubbobotepa). The bricks are mostly laid. The 2 bricks in the lower rows of bricks were pressed from the upper half of the brick, and this “lock-key” rule, spoken in the language of the local masters, was followed in all cases. The cotton walls are raised in two different ways. The first method is to cut the cotton with a fork. The surface of the straw is cut and leveled with a sharp tool. This type of straw is 70 cm long and is cut horizontally at a distance of 80–100 cm (oven) and made of “blocks”. The rooms in the northern part are connected to the southern rooms by an open door from the narrow “bullet” corridor of the 8th room to the 2nd room. Also during this period, another house, 3 rooms, was built on the east side.

Eminönü Çuhacı Han’ın Tarihsel ve Mimari İrdelemesi, Koruma Sorunları ve Çözüm Önerileri

İstanbul’un Eminönü semtinde yer alan Çuhacı Han, 1728 yılında sadrazam Nevşehirli Damat İbrahim Paşa tarafından çuha ticaretiyle uğraşanlar için inşa ettirilmiş, günümüzde kuyumcu esnafı tarafından kullanılmakta olan tek avlulu, revaklı ve üç katlı plan tipine sahip şehir içi hanlarındandır. Kapalıçarşı’ya çok yakın olması sebebiyle sirkülasyonun yoğun olduğu hana zaman içinde kullanıcıların ihtiyaçları doğrultusunda pek çok ek yapılmış, yapı özgün halinden kısmen uzaklaşmıştır. Bunun yanında, rüzgâr, yağmur gibi atmosferik olayların da etkisiyle günümüzde yapı malzemeleri üzerinde bozulmalar görülmektedir. Bu çalışmada Çuhacı Han’ı oluşturan mimari öğeler ve malzemeler incelenmiş, hanın korunmasında sorun oluşturan etmenler açığa çıkarılmıştır. Buna göre yapının öncelikle muhdes eklerinden ayıklanması gerekmektedir. Bu ekler, strüktüre zarar veren ağır bir betonarme merdiven ile özgün halinde açık olan üst kat revaklarının dolgularıdır. İhtiyaç dahilinde yapılmış saçak, tente ve üst kat revaklarının kapatılmasında kullanılan cam gibi ekler ise hanın özgün halinde olmamasına rağmen, işlevsel olduklarından ve çağdaş malzeme ile yapıldıklarından, koruma konusunda tehdit yaratmamaktadır. Eklerin haricinde yapıdaki malzemeler üzerinde özellikle su etkisi sebebiyle pek çok malzeme bozulması tespit edilmiştir. Çalışmada, yapıda görülen malzeme bozulmaları sıralanmış, bunlar için koruma önerilerinde bulunulmuştur. Söz konusu sorunlara gereken müdahalenin yapılması ve tedbirlerin alınması, sonrasında yapının sürekli bakımının sağlanması, tarihimizde önemli yeri olan bu kültür varlığının, özgün haline en yakın şekilde gelecek nesillere aktarılmasında büyük rol oynamaktadır.

A Novel Baseline-Based Method to Detect Local Structural Changes in Masonry Walls Using Dense Terrestrial Laser Scanning Point Clouds

The use of Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS) data for structural analysis is gaining growing interest. This paper is focused on a new method for detecting local structural changes in masonry walls investigated with TLS technology, which is accurate and capable to obtain dense 3D coordinates of point clouds for the measured objects. The kernel of the method is the definition of a structural change descriptor based on a baseline network. Baselines connect feature points of each brick with its adjacent bricks within one scan. To analyze changes, the baseline vectors in the baseline network of each brick are compared with the unique standard baseline network matrix, computed on those bricks without apparent damage. This paper also describes intermediate steps of the procedure, namely the TLS data acquisition, a coordinate transformation for the point cloud, and the segmentation of bricks and mortar for further extraction of individually labelled bricks. Furthermore, it illustrates the performance of the proposed baseline-based method with a validation experiment at the Stevin laboratory of Delft University of Technology. From the analysis of this experiment, interesting results were obtained: the changes along the X axis are more significant than those along the Z axis, while the changes along the Y axis only happened within the same rows of bricks of the wall. By comparing the results obtained by manually picking the brick centers, the accuracy of the proposed methodology was proved with the maximum difference value of ~4 mm.

Thermal functions of internal courtyards in traditional Chinese shophouses in the hot-humid climate of Malaysia

The main purpose of this study was to identify the thermal functions of internal courtyards in traditional Chinese shophouses (CSHs) located in the hot-humid climate of Malaysia with the aim of providing useful passive cooling strategies for modern urban houses. The CSHs are deep-plan brick row houses that are located in relatively dense urban areas. First, this paper empirically analyses the effects of courtyard forms on their indoor thermal environments based on the results of field experiments conducted in 16 CSHs in the city of Malacca in 2011 and 2014. Second, this paper investigates the detailed thermal environments of the selected two traditional CSHs with different courtyard types to discuss the thermal functions of courtyards. It was determined that air temperatures in internal courtyards can be explained using the sky view factor, the height of the courtyard and the difference in the heights of the building and walls that form the courtyard. The courtyard forms that characterized their thermal environments were classified into five types and the different types of courtyards performed different functions with respect to improving the indoor thermal comfort in the CSHs. It was suggested that closed, cross ventilated courtyards be embedded to achieve indoor thermal comfort and avoid excessive humidity in hot-humid climates. Meanwhile, it was also recommended that a staggered form courtyard with V-shaped roofs should be designed as a nocturnal cooling source.

Prologue as Part of the Body

Prologue as Part of the Body Anna Journey (bio) "Guess how I spent my Halloween?" Captain Morgan asked me over the telephone. I hadn't heard his voice in nearly five years. He spoke as fast as one of his humming tattoo guns. "I spent it in a graveyard," he said, "in Salem, Massachusetts, drinking wine beside a pond with a Croatian witch!" I told him I wasn't surprised to hear it. The last time we'd talked, Captain Morgan had sent me the text message, "Thinking of you," beneath a photograph of a granite headstone engraved with my own last name. Five years ago, a nineteenth-century graveyard in Richmond, Virginia, had brought us together. He: an artist about to leave Richmond to open a tattoo parlor in Nashville. Me: a poet fleeing a breakup in Houston and a falling out with a close friend, Lee. I believed returning to Richmond—the city in which I'd lived for most of my twenties—and renting an apartment on the grounds of my favorite cemetery would help me recover. I could get by on funds from a recent literary grant and write poems all day, I thought, gazing into a landscape of rest. Captain Morgan had posted an ad online for the one-bedroom he needed to abandon due to his new plans: a spacious ground-floor unit in the cemetery's former caretaker's house—that grand lavender Victorian trimmed in ivory paint just inside Hollywood Cemetery's wrought-iron front gate. As I scrolled through the rental listings, I recognized the house immediately. Amid the thorny evergreens and leaning headstones, the mansion resembled an iconic haunted house, replete with gothic spires, bay windows, scarlet drapes, and wraparound porch. When Captain Morgan opened the door of the apartment to give me a tour, his arms and neck poked from his T-shirt. My eyes moved over his tattooed skin swirled in dense sleeves of ink. _______ I lived for three years with Carrick in our narrow brick row house on South Cherry Street, three blocks away from Hollywood Cemetery. The [End Page 112] graveyard, designed in 1847 and landscaped in the "rural style," rises on one side of the James River in a sprawl of grassy hills and foot paths clustered with its namesake's deep green holly trees, gnarl-kneed magnolias, bark-sloughing sycamores, and three-story cedars that smell like cookie dough after the rains. Between trees tilt irregular rows of ivy-draped headstones: grey or rose-pink granite and strange white soap-stones carved to mimic vine-shrouded oak stumps. My favorite graves: a pair of horizontal ledger slabs marking a married couple, Jonathan and Winnifred (I called them "Johnny and Winnie"), enclosed by a low brick wall at the steep riverside edge of the cemetery. The enclave formed a rhombus-shaped balcony overlooking the parallel lines of the railroad tracks below and the James River beyond. I'd nod to Johnny and Winnie, saying hello if no one else was around, and then hoist myself up to perch on the far wall and watch a coal train that idled beneath my feet or peer at clusters of sunbathers sprawled on flat rocks on Belle Isle across the river. Sometimes the wallop of bongo drums pulsed downwind. Hollywood Cemetery houses an eclectic mix of regional skeletons, including a number of major figures of the Civil War-era South: Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy; twenty-five Confederate generals, such as J.E.B. Stuart; a number of victims of the November 1918 influenza epidemic; Virginius Dabney, editor of the Richmond Times Dispatch (now nicknamed the Richmond Times Disgrace), who wore sharkskin trousers and won a Pulitzer for his work championing civil rights; the suffragette Lila Meade Valentine; James Monroe, the fifth president of the United States, whose tomb juts up from the middle of a sort of gazebo-sized, iron birdcage; and the Irish schoolteacher William Burke, who tutored the teenaged and not yet famous Edgar Allan Poe. In the middle of the graveyard sit several horseshoe-shaped "whispering benches" of cool white marble designed with concave backs that amplify and channel echoes. This way...

The Pomfret “Cluster” and the Old Brick Row: New England Architectural Icons Reconsidered

The Pomfret “Cluster” and the Old Brick Row: New England Architectural Icons Reconsidered

<i>Mine Towns: Buildings for Workers in Michigan’s Copper Country</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Mine Towns: Buildings for Workers in Michigan’s Copper Country Jack Williams (bio) Alison K. Hoagland Mine Towns: Buildings for Workers in Michigan’s Copper Country Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. 328 pages. 115 black-and-white illustrations. ISBN 978-0-8166-6566-2, $75.00 HB ISBN 978-0-8166-6567-9, $25.00 PB America’s industrial landscapes contain many evocative clusters of subsidized housing built by a parent company for its workers. Usually peripheral to a company’s manufacturing or mining structures, these modest worker dwellings serve as physical reminders of the difficult and sometimes dramatic struggles of their inhabitants for dignity and equality. Often these clusters are all that remain after the demolition of the main industrial structures. Their at times monotonous similarity renders them intelligible within an often grim and marginalized context. Even individualized changes over time, such as porch additions or wrappings of vinyl or asphalt siding, cannot disguise their once standardized construction and simple site plans. Familiar examples exist in most regions of the United States, like the alphabetized streets of the mill community of Whitinsville, Massachusetts, or the unrelenting streets of repetitive housing forms in the mining towns of Pennsylvania’s anthracite coal region. Mill communities in the South such as Monroe, Georgia, have row upon row of “shot-gun” houses whose tiny pedimented entrances front tree-lined streets. Southern New England’s larger former textile centers have entire neighborhoods of ubiquitous “triple deckers,” long blocks of matched multifamily dwellings. The discovery of these forgotten fragments of replicated worker housing reveals other deeply hidden layers of history. The most famous, and beautiful, example is the failed social experiment of Pullman, Illinois, south of Chicago. Pullman’s attractive brick row houses and hierarchical streets and squares make a harmonious urban composition envied today by planners and architects, in spite of its deeply flawed paternalism. The repetition of housing forms in these and other examples suggest a complex urban ambiguity. On the one hand, repetition negates individuality, reducing inhabitants to faceless cogs in the vast impersonal machinery of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism. Yet these same forms also tell a different story—of individuals joined together into communities that offered hope and resilience. The resolution of the tension between repetitive parts that perhaps constitutes a larger whole and the expression of the individual though his or her private dwelling is the essence of successful urbanism. In this thoughtful, rigorously researched book, Alison K. Hoagland addresses this ambiguity through discovery and discussion of unique company towns in Michigan’s northern peninsula. She finds her evidence in housing and other aspects of the area’s material culture—schools, churches, libraries, and other communal structures—and weaves a fascinating tale of immigrant workers that brings alive the people and communities that labored in the region’s copper mines in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Because Hoagland describes modest buildings that have often been demolished, the book relies heavily on plans and historic photographs. Mine Towns is unusually rich and graphically complete, with many illustrations that are well explained and thoughtfully integrated with the text. The author’s grasp of the subtleties of architectural spaces inferred from plans is remarkable and rewards a close study of her thorough research. After a brief introduction to the Copper Country of the upper Michigan peninsula, Hoagland discusses the different typologies of the region’s worker housing, such as “saltboxes and T-plans.” By interpreting historic plans and photographs, her writing exposes the daily lives of immigrant families and their different living arrangements. Poignant photographs capture the sparseness of the interior furnishings of these homes; Hoagland’s writing explains the incredible crowding. The density of boarders within such limited spaces recalls the conditions of New York’s Lower East Side tenements. She notes that workers may have shared the same beds in shifts corresponding to their working hours. In “Acquiring Conveniences” (chapter 4), she elaborates housing modernizations such as interior plumbing, central heating, and electrical services in fascinating detail and provides an insightful history of the conveniences we take for granted today. As many of these [End Page 103] changes to the interiors of dwellings took place within...

Teaching Math and Science

Local Systemic Change projects, funded by the National Science Foundation, were designed to help teachers of mathematics and science deepen their content knowledge and improve their instructional practices. Ms. Weiss and Ms. Pasley describe how these aims were accomplished through combination of intensive professional development and follow-up support when the teachers took their new knowledge and skills back to the classroom. ********** IN THE FALL of 2001, University of Delaware Professor Jon Manon observed mathematics lesson about factoring in an eighth-grade classroom of an urban middle school, a school which is home to what is often reputed to be one of the most challenging student populations in Delaware. Jenni Green (a pseudonym), the teacher he was observing, had been participant in an intensive summer institute, and Manon wanted to find out if any of the summer's workshop lessons had had an effect on her work. decided that I would look for 'residue' from the summer professional development across grades and units, writes Manon in case study published on LSC-net, an interactive website for the project leaders of the Local Systemic Change (LSC) initiative, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) since 1995. In particular, I was seeking evidence that our emphasis on the instructional model, the launch-investigate-summarize lesson cycle, was finding root in actual practice. (1) A LESSON IN FACTORING Jenni Green used to teach sixth grade. This year, was an eighth-grade mathematics teacher. According to Manon, she did have special concerns about particular students, e.g., one 14-year-old had baby and often stayed home to care for it. But when these kids were in school, Jenni was prepared to help them focus on learning mathematics. Manon's visit to her classroom came at what Jenni described as a very critical moment in the Mathematics in Context curriculum algebra unit, Building Formulas. (2) Manon continues: This was the lesson in which factoring was first introduced. We agreed that it was seminal concept, gatekeeper to success in more formal algebra course. As the name of the unit suggests, building situations were used to introduce algebraic representations. Section B, Basic Patterns, exploited the context of construction with bricks to introduce representation for rows of bricks involving Standing, S, and Lying, L, bricks. For example, the length of [a simple] pattern, made up of two Standing [bricks] and one Lying brick, might be represented symbolically as 2S + L. A such as this one might be repeated to produce longer string of bricks. And that new configuration might be represented as either three groups of two Standing and one Lying--3(2S + L)--or, dropping the reference to the pattern, as 6S + 3L. Before the students arrived, Jenni had described the approach planned to take to introduce her lesson. She decided to challenge her students to identify the basic pattern in longer string and then determine how many times that was repeated. As the first students entered the room, Jenni apparently made up her mind to try something different. Seated at the overhead projector, Jenni wrote 15S + 10L and asked, How can I figure out what the is in this case? Immediately, Ellen, diminutive girl in the front row, answered, Five ... it fits into [15] ... three times. For 10, it will be 2. Initially caught off guard by both the promptness and content of Ellen's response, Jenni recovered and asked, So the is repeated how many times? She drew 15 Standing and 10 Lying bricks on the overhead and, indicating in the drawing, said, I'll try to clarify Ellen's thinking ... for every three Standing, there are two Lying bricks ... pretty cool. I like that Ellen! Then, looking quite pleased and shifting her gaze from to the rest of the class, said, Ellen stole my thunder! …

Lost Tribes

That fall, the only flat I could afford was in southwestern London, where the heel of the city lay wedged toward Surrey and Putney and the famously pristine English gardens I never actually laid eyes on. You took the train to Tooting Bec, the last station on the line, and from there the red bus to Streatham High Road, and then you walked: down the blaring Road, past the enraged Cypriot widow's fish-and-chips shop, past the doors opening and swinging shut at the Streatham Arms at the corner of High and Lower, onto a curved block of squat brick row houses with earnest patches of lawn protected from dogs and children by waist-high iron fences. This was my daily route, from the university where I studied the principles of anthropology according to the exacting standards of British colonialism, to my two dark rooms at 28 Fernwood Avenue, bath privileges down the hall.

The Prospect From Rugman's Row: The Row House in Late Sixteenth- and Early Seventeenth-Century London

Study of the development of the town house in London has focused mainly on the period following the Great Fire, and only latterly for the first time on the medieval period. The differences between building practice and concepts in London before and after the Fire have been over emphasized, obscuring a pattern of evolution and continuity in which phenomena generally taken to be of the mid- or later seventeenth century have rather earlier origins. Timber-framed row houses built in the last decade of the sixteenth century conformed to a well established medieval pattern. The first brick row houses of the early seventeenth century, including some of back to back plan, were part of this same tradition. The emphasis on improvement characteristic of many later building promotions was already evident in early seventeenth-century estate management. The term ‘terrace’ has been misused, giving the mistaken impression that the brick houses of post-Fire London were somehow a new phenomena. The large scale speculative ...