Tower Block Research Articles

Student life - The future is in our hands

Title:Recovery of the Heart:Dialogues with People Working towards a Sustainable Beijing Author:Author:Stephanie B.Tansey 239 pages,paperback Published by New World Press in August 2012 Living under a sky spiked with concrete tower blocks,

Disseminated Histoplasma capsulatum diagnosed on peripheral blood film

European Journal of HaematologyVolume 90, Issue 5 p. 440-440 Clinical Picture Disseminated Histoplasma capsulatum diagnosed on peripheral blood film Eng-Soo Yap, Eng-Soo Yap National University Cancer Institute Singapore, SingaporeSearch for more papers by this authorYen-Lin Chee, Corresponding Author Yen-Lin Chee National University Cancer Institute Singapore, SingaporeCorrespondence Dr Yap-Eng Soo, National University Cancer Institute Singapore, National University Health System, 1E Kent Ridge Road, NUHS Tower Block Level 7, Singapore 119228, Singapore. Tel: +65 6779 5555; Fax: +65 6779 5678; e-mail: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author Eng-Soo Yap, Eng-Soo Yap National University Cancer Institute Singapore, SingaporeSearch for more papers by this authorYen-Lin Chee, Corresponding Author Yen-Lin Chee National University Cancer Institute Singapore, SingaporeCorrespondence Dr Yap-Eng Soo, National University Cancer Institute Singapore, National University Health System, 1E Kent Ridge Road, NUHS Tower Block Level 7, Singapore 119228, Singapore. Tel: +65 6779 5555; Fax: +65 6779 5678; e-mail: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author First published: 05 March 2013 https://doi.org/10.1111/ejh.12092Citations: 2Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article.Citing Literature Volume90, Issue5May 2013Pages 440-440 RelatedInformation

The perceptions of tenants in the refurbishment of tower blocks

Purpose – Refurbishment has been suggested as a means towards sustainable development. The paper seeks to examine the tenants' perception on the benefits, effectiveness and overall satisfaction with the refurbishment process of the tower blocks.Design/methodology/approach – Literature review is used to identify the perceived problems, benefits and overall process of refurbishment. A survey questionnaire was used to collect data from 67 tenants living in three tower blocks (high‐rise flats) in West London. The sample data are analysed using descriptive statistics such as frequencies including ranking analysis.Findings – The findings suggest that refurbishment as opposed to demolition was a viable option for achieving sustainability. The majority of the tenants agreed that their surroundings and way of life improved after refurbishment. Other notable benefits from refurbishment were improved security, improved social behaviour and social harmony. However, the respondents failed to either identify or suggest...

A common European home? Filming the urban Thirdspace in Marc Isaacs's Lift (2001)

ABSTRACTFocussing on how people dwell in contemporary, late-capitalist, postcolonial Europe, Marc Isaacs's documentary cinema is space-based, insofar as it finds its raison d'être in precise places, whose real and metaphoric values it simultaneously represents, foregrounds and contests. Almost entirely set inside a lift in a tower block in East London, Lift (2001) is an eloquent example of Isaacs's spatial methodology. Mobilizing concepts from critical theory and political geography—in particular, Michel Foucault's heterotopia and Edward W. Soja's Thirdspace—this article argues that, by offering a utopian reading of the common European home, Lift holds a critical mirror to the urban West. Its strategy consists in situating the spectator vis-à-vis non-singular Others through a series of triangulations of subjects, which aim not so much at measuring the distance between what may seem like antithetical, fixed positions, but at suggesting fluidity and repositionings on the plane of both textual and social discourses.

Odbudowa miasta Roztok po II wojnie światowej

The reconstruction of the city of Rostock after World War IIOne can distinguish three periods in the urban planning and housing industry in the Soviet occupation zone, which also reflect architectural trends in Rostock: 1) in the years 1945–1950 – the construction industry inspired by the style of “New Objectivity”; 2) in the years 1950–1957 – the reconstruction of city centres in the style of “national tradition” (in Rostock it was Gothic art) following the Soviet model (with trunk lines, parade squares and city landmarks); 3) industrial housing industry (“wielka płyta” / panelák – blocks of fl ats constructed of pre-fabricated concrete): “cheaper, better, more beautiful” with reference to the style of the “New Objectivity”, constructing dormitory-towns with panelak (prefab) blocks of flats. The so-called Bildzeichenarchitektur (the architect Hermann Henselmann) constitutes a special architectural form, the example of which are such buildings as: the tower block for the University in Leipzig in the form of an open book, the fine tower block of the VEB Carl Zeiss enterprise in Jena in the shape of a telescope, the tower block in the shape of a large sail in Rostock (the project was not completed). The housing industry had priority over urban planning.

Nikolaus Pevsner: the life

Born Nikolai Pewsner into a Russian-Jewish family in Leipzig in 1902, Nikolaus Pevsner was a dedicated scholar who pursued a promising career as an academic in Dresden and Gottingen. When, in 1933 Jews were no longer permitted to teach in German universities, he lost his job and looked for employment in England. Here, over a long and amazingly industrious career, he made himself an authority on the exploration and enjoyment of English art and architecture, so much so that his magisterial county-by-county series of 46 books on The Buildings of England is usually referred to simply as 'Pevsner'. As a critic, academic and champion of Modernism, Pevsner became a central figure in the architectural consensus that accompanied post-war reconstruction; as a 'general practitioner' of architectural history, he covered an astonishing range, from Gothic cathedrals and Georgian coffee houses to the Festival of Britain and Brutalist tower blocks. Susie Harries explores the truth about Nikolaus Pevsner's reported sympathies with elements of Nazi ideology, his internment in England as an enemy alien and his assimilation into his country of exile. His Heftchen - secret diaries he kept from the age of fourteen for another sixty years - reveal hidden aspirations and anxieties, as do his numerous letters (he wrote to his wife, Lola, every day that they were apart).Harries is the first biographer to have read Pevsner's private papers and, through them, to have seen into the workings of his mind. Her definitive biography is not only rich in context and far-ranging, but is also brought to life by quotations from Pevsner himself. His life - as an outsider yet an insider at the heart of English art history - illuminates both the predicament and the prowess of the continental emigres who did so much to shape British culture after 1945.

Mumbai's suburban mass housing

ABSTRACT:In the 1960s and 1970s, the state-operated Maharashtra Housing Board and its successor organization Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority (MHADA) responded to Mumbai's exponential growth with what at the time was internationally considered to be the most effective measure to fight the housing shortage: large estates of standardized apartment blocks. In Mumbai's northern suburbs, housing compounds were built for designated income levels, such as Kannamwar Nagar and Sahyadri Nagar for the ‘low-income group’ and DN Nagar or Sahakar Nagar for the ‘middle-income group’. This article argues that Mumbai's state-sponsored tower blocks adapted an internationally discussed urban design concept to specific local conditions. The designers took up influences from both local Maharashtrian and European housing typologies of the mid-twentieth century, including upper-class art deco apartments, socialist housing compounds and serially built working-class chawls. In contrast to mass housing developments in Chicago, Moscow or Paris, Mumbai's tower blocks were built individually rather than from prefabricated parts, offered rather high standards of living compared to that of the majority and, as a result, became increasingly inhabited by comparably wealthy groups. Since the beginning of economic liberalization in the 1990s, many have been converted into private co-operatives. Once designed to house the masses, they are now visible symbols for a growing minority that constitutes Mumbai's new middle class. At the same time, they are an example for the local evolution of the modernist housing block type that is only apparently similar all over the world.

Objects of amplified context: an interview with artist-teacher Pepón Osorio

This article seeks to contribute to the emerging literature on the mediation of politics in the wider sphere of civic and popular culture. By focusing on one particular country, the United Kingdom, and on a specific audit period, February 2010, we present some preliminary findings from a larger project assessing contemporary mediations of politics and the political across a diverse range of genres within print, broadcast and online media. Our findings are derived from three complementary studies, one focusing on the variety of generic forms through which the story of ‘MPs expenses’ was mediated; one focusing on a reality-style series, Tower Block of Commons, and the range of ways that it sought to engage the political imagination of its audience; and a final study addressing the place of emotions in political life. Substantively, the findings point towards a desire for a new moral order for British politics, including a new kind of politician. Theoretically, the article validates the proposition that there is much more to political mediation than the dominant focus on political journalism can satisfactorily encompass.

Reappraising the Role of Suburban Workplaces in Darwin’s Creative Economy

Traditionally, suburbs have been conceived as dormitory – in binary opposition to the inner-city (Powell). Supporting this stereotypical view have been gendered binaries between inner and outer city areas; densely populated vs. sprawl; gentrified terraces and apartment culture vs. new estates and first home buyers; zones of (male) production and creativity against (female) sedate, consumer territory. These binaries have for over a decade been thoroughly criticised by urban researchers, who have traced such representations and demonstrated how they are discriminatory and incorrect (see Powell; Mee; Dowling and Mee). And yet, such binaries persist in popular media commentaries and even in academic research (Gibson and Brennan-Horley). In creative city research, inner-city areas have been bestowed with the supposed correct mix of conditions that may lead to successful creative ventures. In part, this discursive positioning has been borne out of prior attempts to mapthe location of creativity in the city

Public injecting drug use and the social production of harmful practice in high-rise tower blocks (London, UK): A Lefebvrian analysis

This paper presents, qualitative findings relating to specific environments hitherto unrecognised as settings used for the injecting-use of illicit drugs in an urban setting. This concerns the temporary appropriation of communal space within high-rise social-housing by injecting drug users (IDU); specifically those settings used by tower-block residents for garbage disposal ('bin chute rooms'). These environments were found to be used on daily, habitual bases by all IDU interviewed during the study. Such settings were found to contribute to a wide range of injecting-related harm and hazard. These findings further debate concerning the negative effect of place on health risk in the context of ′public' injecting drug use. These results are situated within Lefebvre's theoretical framework concerning the 'production of space'. It is contended that the 'representational spaces' shaped by IDU creates a dialectic between wider 'spatial practice' and 'representations of space'. Accordingly, it is further suggested that particular 'spaces' of harm reduction (such as 'safer injecting facilities') should be considered in UK settings in order to address injecting-related harm.

A ‘building event’ of fear: thinking through the geography of architecture

This paper examines an incidence of fear that a resident experienced in a council tower block in inner London. Thinking through this ‘building event’, the paper returns to earlier work that called for a move towards ‘a critical geography of architecture’ and draws on the work in so-called new geographies of architecture over the past decade. A series of arguments related to the human experience of buildings is made. Latourian actor network theory-type approaches in architectural geography are criticised for having little to say about emotion. An argument is made that the work on affect in geography needs to develop a more complex sense of human subjectivity and to take the force of the material more seriously. More generally new critical geographies of architecture are urged to attend to the theoretical, conceptual and methodological intricacies of affect/emotion, materiality, immateriality and human subjectivity.

Cochrane Review Summary for Cancer Nursing

National Cancer Institute Singapore, National University Health System, Singapore, A Member of the Cochrane Nursing Care Field (CNCF) Correspondence: Emily Ang, DNurs, MN, BN, Cert Ed, ONCC, CCNC, RN, National Cancer Institute Singapore, 5 Lower Kent Ridge, Rd, Tower Block, Level 7, Singapore 119074 ([email protected]).

GIVING FLESH TO THE ‘WRAITHS OF VIOLENCE’

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. ‘Englishness was white, male, southern, Protestant, and middle class. I was a woman, a Catholic, a northerner, of Irish Descent … All these markers—descent, religion, region, accent—are quickly perceived and decoded by those who possess Englishness, and to this day they are used to exclude. You are forced off centre. You are a provincial. You are a spectator. If you want to belong to Englishness, you must sell off aspects of your identity’ (Mantel 2007 Mantel , Hilary . 2007 . Ghost writing . The Guardian , Saturday 28 July. Available from http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2136130,00.html (accessed 30 July 2010 ). [Google Scholar], 96). 2. Eight Months on Ghazzah Street seems to fit most definitions of the Gothic, whether that is the genre's richness in ‘offering a symbolic expression of female paranoia’ (Felski 2003 Felski, Rita. 2003. Literature after feminism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], 152) or its tendency to draw ‘on the condensed associative and emotional power of archetypal symbols—houses, veils, fathers, virgins—coating them with ever more charged layers of meaning’ (2003, 153). The fate of Frances in Eight Months on Ghazzah Street fits Felski's ‘typical’ gothic blurb well: ‘Stranded in an isolated setting, the heroine uncovers an unspeakable secret and is subject to terrible dangers …’ (151). 3. She has also produced a good deal of short criticism, including 15 years of critical contributions to the London Review of Books. 4. In Vacant Possession we get another dark mention of balconies, those questionable extensions to home. On hearing she is likely to be re-housed in a council tower block owing to some project of urban re-development, Muriel Axon says she ‘shan't mind’, what with the consolation of being able to ‘throw things off the balconies’ (1986, 29). 5. Levi writes, here, with a very specific historical context in mind, that of the difficult—if not impossible—obligation placed on the survivor of the death camp to ‘recount not only our own fate, but that of the others, the submerged’ (1995, 64). I hesitate to re-position his usage here, but believe it has the power to illuminate the moral and imaginative project of Mantel's fiction.

How fast does a building fall?

In this paper, the time required for a tower block to collapse is calculated. The tower collapses progressively, with one floor falling onto the floor below, causing it to fall. The rate of collapse is found to be not much slower than freefall. The calculation is an engaging and relevant application of Newton's laws, suitable for undergraduate teaching.

The Economic and Environmental Impact of Communal Laundry Spaces in High Density Housing in the UK

The paper supplements data obtained in the course of a collaborative, EPSRC-funded research project (‘Environmental Assessment of Domestic Laundering’ led by the Mackintosh School of Architecture with Glasgow Caledonian University and the University of Strathclyde). The aim of the paper is to compare energy and related impacts from individual domestic washing and drying appliances with those for communal laundry facilities. Having set the historical context, including a rather unsatisfactory status quo with respect to standards and regulation, the methodology and data-acquisition for analysis is outlined. This involved face-to-face questionnaires and spot measurements with 100 representative households in Glasgow’s public sector (range of low-, medium- and high-rise) and longer-term measurements and diaries associated with 20 of these. Further questionnaire data from 36 housing providers with regard to communal facilities augmented extrapolations from short-term metrics in a specific shared laundry facility at the base of a 1960s tower block. Although further detailed work is suggested, the findings indicate distinct advantages for communal facilities of this nature, in particular with respect to the drying process. In this regard, not only are the energy loads much higher than those for washing, but also the negative consequences of various methods used in the home are potentially serious in terms of health and wellbeing. Concluding comments also recognize that a degree of flexibility and choice is desirable in terms of individual and shared approaches, and hence makes suggestions for a range of measures that might be incorporated in improved statutory and ‘best practice’ standards.

Norfolk Park Green Homes, Sheffield

AbstractIn a neighbourhood of Sheffield that was once dominated by tower blocks, Matthew Lloyd Architects has created colourful timber‐clad homes that resemble a community. David Littlefield describes how a determined architect and client, despite local scepticism, have been able to provide housing that is not only spacious, generous in size and sustainable, but also comparatively cheap. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Experimental Study of a Thermal Plume Evolving in a Confined Environment: Application to Fires Problems

We propose to study the natural convection flow resulting from the interaction of a fire with walls that surround it. Indeed, when a fire occurs in a tunnel or in a tower block, it creates a thermal plume causing a heating of the neighbouring walls. This heating by thermal radiation of the walls creates a phenomenon of thermosiphon which interacts with the plume. To study this flow we simulated the problem at the laboratory where we placed a rectangular source heated by Joule effect at the entrance of an open-ended vertical canal. The flow visualization by laser plan and the exploration of the thermal and dynamic fields inside the canal enabled us to describe the flow structure. In order to better characterize this flow, we carried out a fine analysis by studying the spectra of temperature fluctuations. This spectral analysis allowed us to clarify the energetic evolution of the vortexes during their ascension and verify some known spectral laws.

Optimizing Material Hoisting Operations and Storage Cells in Single Multi-storey Tower Block Construction by Genetic Algorithm

During construction, materials have to be stored properly and transported within a site area or even different storeys in a high-rise structure. The total costs for storage and transportation are prime concerns. Optimizing material storage locations so as to pay the least transportation costs induced during the project period is a typical construction management problem. In this paper, a genetic algorithm (GA) approach to optimize the vertical hoisting and storage layout for a high-rise multi-storey tower building in confined sites is studied. Costs include the storage and distribution costs which are calculated in terms of vertical transportation, horizontal movements and then vertical distribution expenses. The sum of these costs is set as the objective function for optimization. Since it is a typical multiple-level warehouse layout and distribution problem, which is NP-hard in nature, an effective assignment system with GA approach is applied. An example of 10 types of materials to be stored and distributed in a 30-storey building is used as a numerical example to illustrate the model development. The results also demonstrate the effectiveness of applying the GA in minimizing the total transportation costs that verify the practical application of the proposed approach.

Concrete universality: Tower blocks, architectural modernism, and realism in contemporary British cinema

This article examines the representation of tower blocks in Last Resort (Pawlikowski 2000) and Red Road (Arnold 2006). Commonly associated in the popular imagination as the site of major social problems (crime, poverty, antisocial behaviour), the concrete high-rise has become the symbol of the decline of contemporary Britain. Both films recognise the structural decay that characterises many post-war housing developments and acknowledge the social problems that plague them, yet they seek to understand this deterioration as a consequence of larger social and political decisions and developments. Last Resort records the transformation of tower blocks into holding cells for asylum seekers. Red Road turns the proliferation of CCTV cameras on a Glaswegian housing estate into a metaphor for a society fearful of those people and places incongruent with a modern, affluent Britain. In each case, dramatisation enhances documentation rather than compromises it, and the tower block becomes the setting for what iek terms concrete universality, the process whereby fiction explodes documentary from within (iek 2006: 31). In this way, these films constitute a revitalised realism in which the truth of the antagonisms that divide society can best be shown in the guise of fiction.

Stochastic modelling of water demand by domestic washrooms in residential tower blocks

AbstractAccurate estimates of probable simultaneous maximum demand are essential for appropriate decisions on sizing water supply plants and piping systems for high‐rise residential buildings at a balance of acceptable plant reliability and construction cost. This study proposes a stochastic model of the probable maximum simultaneous water demands of domestic washrooms at some usage patterns for which the appliances in the same washroom would not operate simultaneously. The model parameters were determined from surveys of usage patterns in 597 domestic washrooms of typical high‐rise residential buildings in Hong Kong. The results showed that the probable maximum simultaneous demands due to a number of domestic washrooms in a typical high‐rise residential building were only about 50–60% of those estimates with an assumption of all appliances in simultaneous operation. This study is a useful source of reference in determining loadings of water supply plants and piping systems for high‐rise residential buildings.