Calcutta of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century enjoyed global stature and connections as a consequence of its position within the British Empire as the capital of India. This study of Calcutta’s buildings aims to comprehend the architectural legacy of the period in terms of its construction history. The proposed thesis underlying the research is that Calcutta’s built environment bore witness to the intense traffic of ideas, people and goods characteristic of the era. The significance of the research is two-fold. It enjoys the distinction of being the first attempt to undertake a wide-ranging investigation into the construction history of a city in the Indian subcontinent, and indeed possibly anywhere in the world. Concurrently, the study endeavours to suggest a methodological approach for similar forthcoming studies in India and elsewhere, especially considering that the discipline of construction history is as yet at a nascent stage and such studies are only expected to multiply in number and scope in the coming years. The research effort trains its attention on two key aspects of construction history – human resource and material resource. The former is manifested in investigations into the training and work contexts of the professionals engaged in construction activity, i.e. the engineers and the architects. The latter takes the form of research into source and application of the commonly used construction materials. The methodology employed in the study encompasses a range of disciplines and related sources, especially drawing on architectural, urban, social and economic histories. Addressing the proposed thesis has necessitated directing research efforts towards situating developments in Calcutta in the context of and with reference to the metropolitan milieu. The analysis of the research findings and the conclusions thus drawn have served to corroborate the proposed thesis highlighting the incessant flux distinctive of the construction environment in Calcutta in the period of this study. The dissertation is expected to facilitate an enhanced understanding of Calcutta’s built environment for those entrusted with its care, especially those in the heritage and conservation sector, as well as contribute to the available pool of free knowledge furthering our understanding of human civilization.

This work discusses in detail the history of, and processes associated with the construction of baroque era trumpets then and now. The work addresses metallurgy, tools, construction methods, and playing characteristics of instruments built with old techniques and modern techniques.

The Lund-Spathelf House is located at 1526 Pontiac Trail in Ann Arbor, Michigan. During a recent renovation, the owner sought information regarding the construction of the house by searching through numerous written records. Despite an extensive history of the land on which the house currently sits, neither a construction year nor general period of construction could be obtained. Therefore, four samples of oak (Quercus spp.) were extracted from floor boards throughout the house for dendrochronological dating. The four samples crossdated conclusively with each other both visually and statistically and were used to build a floating 126-year tree-ring chronology. We used COFECHA to statistically evaluate the absolute temporal placement of this chronology against a nearby regional chronology (MI005.CRN) from the Cranbrook Institute, Michigan. The Lund-Spathelf House chronology was anchored in time with the regional chronology from A.D. 1720 to 1845 with a correlation coefficient of 0.62 (p < 0.0001, t < 8.76, n = 126). All four oak samples provided conclusive cutting dates of A.D. 1845, indicating the year the Lund-Spathelf House was constructed.

This thesis examines the views held by Muh&dotbelow;yi al-Din Ibn al-`Arabi on shari`ah, based for the most part on his magnum opus, al-Futuh&dotbelow;at al-Makkiyyah. It explores his attitude towards the shari`ah as practical religious law and his teachings concerning its sources and interpretation. Despite being misunderstood on account of his s&dotbelow;ufi background and his well-known criticism of the fuqaha' Ibn al-`Arabi's teaching, in fact, advocated a strict and consistent orientation to the shari`ah. This thesis shows how, on the one hand, his criticism of the jurists was due to their inability to achieve the high standards that he set for interpreting the law, and how, on the other, his s&dotbelow;ufi beliefs complemented, rather than weakened, the foundations of the shari`ah. It is clear that the principle underlying his approach to the shari`ah's application was his belief in its being a manifestation of God's mercy. He demonstrates this by pointing to the direct sources of God's law, accepting differences in legal opinion and seeking as much as possible the deeper spiritual and universal meaning of God's intentions in the law.

The former Whitewater Canal, built between 1836 and 1847, spanned a distance of seventy-six miles from Lawrenceburg to Hagerstown, Indiana.' Initial construction was financed by Indiana's Mammoth Internal Improvements Act of 1836; a bill that strained the financial resources of the state, forcing it into bankruptcy in the summer of 1839. Canal construction was stopped until 1842, when the state granted the privately organized and financed White Water Valley Canal Company a charter to complete the unfinished portion of the canal between Brookville and Cambridge City.The unwieldy Whitewater River, however, proved too formidable for the fledgling canal company. A series of floods, in conjunction with a costly law suit, forced the White Water Valley Canal Company into receivership in 1855. The company was purchased at auction in 1865 by the Whitewater Valley Railroad Company, a Cincinnati and Indianapolis Railway subsidiary. Between 1867 and 1868, the railroad company laid its tracks atop the towpath of the former canal.Today, the state of Indiana owns fourteen miles of former canal channel between Laurel and Brookville, Indiana. The state owned portion is maintained by the Indiana Department of Natural Resources, and is operated as the Whitewater Canal State Historic Site. The non-profit Whitewater Valley Railroad Museum runs excursion trains over much of the old towpath between Connersville and Metamora, Indiana. And the Indiana and Ohio short-line railroad operates over the former towpath between Harrison, Ohio and Brookville, Indiana.This paper provides an overview of the Whitewater Canal, a brief history of construction for each half-mile section of the canal between West Harrison and Brookville, and a survey of existing canal vestiges within each of those sections. The maps that accompany the list of construction sections identify the locations of numerous surviving canal structures as well the approximate locations of those structures either demolished or buried.The purpose of this project is to draw attention to an endangered segment of the former Whitewater Canal corridor. Roughly eighteen continuous miles of the old right-of-way between West Harrison and Brookville, Indiana is soon to be abandoned by the Indiana & Ohio Railroad, the current owner of the property. In addition to the picturesque scenery through which the right-of-way meanders, the old transportation route is steeped in the history of the Whitewater Valley and the State of Indiana itself. Ideal for recreational purposes and education, this threatened stretch of former canal corridor deserves attention and preservation. / Department of Architecture

Lic.-avh. Stockholm : Kungliga Tekniska högskolan, 2007.

No description available.

Dendroarchaeology has a discontinuous history in the Southeastern United States, mostly because of misconceptions (the Southeast is too mesic), bad sampling practices (no standard protocol exists for preserving prehistoric wood samples), and a lack of reference tree-ring chronologies long enough to date wood from the abundant prehistoric sites. The majority of archaeological applications in recent years has focused on the dating of historic sites and structures to verify the documented year(s) of construction largely in response to requests from historical agencies to verify when a particular structure was built. We have found that most structures are one to two generations younger than their reported date(s) of construction, but most agencies find this information useful as tree-ring dating lends historical credibility to any site. The future of dendroarchaeology in the Southeast is encouraging but many more trained experts are needed to meet the demand of dating historical structures and sites. Furthermore, once a sampling protocol becomes standardized for retrieving wood from prehistoric sites, the potential for absolute dating of these sites is enormous given that abundant wood is archived in locations throughout the Southeast.

Alfred Jackson was an enslaved African American born on The Hermitage plantation (outside Nashville, Tennessee) of President Andrew Jackson around 1810, and lived most of his life on the plantation. Staff from The Hermitage wished to better understand and interpret lifeways of those once enslaved on the plantation, but the date of construction of Alfred’s Cabin first had to be determined. Was it built when Alfred was enslaved or was a freedman? We extracted nearly 100 core samples from eastern red cedar logs used to construct the cabin. Of these, 39 cores were used to develop a master tree-ring chronology for the cabin. Crossdating of the Alfred’s Cabin chronology was accomplished using an eastern red cedar chronology developed by the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory Tree- Ring Laboratory at Columbia University in Palisades, New York. The 39 series from Alfred’s Cabin resulted in a high-quality master tree-ring chronology, with an average inter-series correlation of 0.66 and an average mean sensitivity of 0.28. Graphical (skeleton plot and line plot) comparison and statistical crossdating with COFECHA anchored the Alfred’s Cabin chronology firmly between 1749 and 1842 (r = 0.45, n = 94 yrs, t = 4.83, p < 0.0001). Cutting dates of these 39 trees ranged from 1841 to 1843. This latter date indicates that the final trees used to construct the cabin were harvested in spring or early summer of 1843, with final construction of Alfred’s Cabin occurring soon after.

Cette thèse traite de l’utilisation des technologies de Réalité Virtuelle (RV) dans les activités de Conception Assistée par Ordinateur (CAO). Plus précisément, les travaux de recherche portent sur une approche pour la modification directe et interactive d’objets CAO, notamment adaptée aux processus de conception en industrie. Généralement, les logiciels de CAO requièrent des compétences (expérience et connaissance), à la fois sur les fonctionnalités même du logiciel et les représentations utilisées, ainsi que sur les objets CAO concernés (principalement sur leur historique de construction, savoir de quelle façon ils ont été construits). D’un autre coté, la RV apporte de nouveaux paradigmes d’interaction 3d, tels que l’immersion et la perception multi-sensorimotrice (stéréoscopie, audio 3d, haptique, etc.), et il apparaît nécessaire de disposer de middleware intelligents pour gérer les objets CAO dans ces Environnements Virtuels (EV) immersifs. De précédents travaux ont proposé un mécanisme d’édition implicite d’objets CAO permettant la modification du Graphe d’Historique de Construction (GHC) de ces objets à partir de la manipulation de la représentation visuelle 3d de ces objets. Basé sur un processus d’étiquetage des éléments de frontière (B-Rep), et couplé avec un moteur d’inférence, ce mécanisme décrit un chaînage arrière entre ces éléments de frontières et les opérateurs d’un GHC. Cependant, cette approche avait pour limite majeure de proposer un modèle particulier de GHC, ce qui l’empêchait d’être intégrée à des systèmes CAO fermés ou commerciaux tels que ceux utilisés dans l’industrie et en particulier l’industrie automobile. Notre première contribution consiste donc en la proposition d’un modèle et d’une architecture permettant de généraliser ce mécanisme de chaînage arrière à n’importe quel système CAO basé sur les représentations de type B-Rep et GHC. Pour ce faire, nous avons spécifié plusieurs structures d’encapsulation pour la gestion des opérateurs du GHC ainsi que de leurs paramètres, et des composants de B-Rep. Deuxièmement, le précédent étiquetage, désormais attaché à ces structures d’encapsulation et non plus aux éléments de B-Rep directement, a été étendu pour permettre un chaînage arrière multiple. Certains éléments de frontières peuvent en effet être le résultat de plusieurs opérateurs du GHC, être liés à plusieurs éléments "parents", et ainsi plusieurs décisions peuvent être inférées à partir de leur manipulation. Ces avancées rendent possible la modification directe et intuitive d’objets CAO déjà existants (i.e. via le parcours et l’analyse de base de données CAO précédemment créées), en analysant leur GHC et en remplissant nos structures avec les données nécessaires. De plus, le mécanisme de chaînage arrière multiple renforce la capacité du moteur d’inférence, à libérer les utilisateurs, et spécialement les non-experts, de connaissances trop complexes à propos des modèles CAO. Comme preuve de concept de notre modèle, nous présentons un exemple détaillé de notre approche sur le noyau géométrique de CATIA et montrons comment notre modèle permet d’envisager un nouveau concept d’interaction en revue de projet immersive : permettre aux participants de modifier directement les modèles CAO sans quelque interaction sur station de travail. / This thesis addresses the use of Virtual Reality (VR) technologies in the activities of Computer-Aided Design (CAD). More precisely, this research focuses on an approach for direct and interactive modifications of CAD objects, an approach which might be adapted to the conception process in industry. Usually, CAD software requires some skills (experience and knowledge), on the software’s functionalities and representations, as well as on CAD objects (principally on their design history, on the way they were built). Moreover, VR technologies bring new interactive paradigms of 3D interaction, such as immersion and multi-sensorimotor perception stereoscopy, 3D audio, haptics, and so on), and one needs intelligent middleware to manage CAD objects in these immersive Virtual Environments (VE). Some previous work proposed a mechanism allowing implicit edition of CAD objects, from the manipulation of their 3D visual representations. Based on a technique of Boundary Representations (B-Rep) elements labelling, and coupled with an inference engine, this mechanism describes a backward chaining of B-Rep elements towards the operators of a dedicated model of Constructive History Graphs (CHG). However, this approach had a major limitation: since it was based on a specific model of CHG, its integration within commercial CAD softwares used in industry (and especially in automotive industry) was far from obvious. Our first contribution is then to propose a data model and an architecture to generalize this backward chaining mechanism to any of CAD system based on B-Rep and CHG representations. In order to do that, we have designed several encapsulations structures, to manage CHG operators and their parameters, and the B-Rep components. Secondly, the previous labelling, now attached to these structures, has been extended to enable a multi backward chaining. Actually, some B-Rep elements may be the result of several CHG operators, and thus, several decisions may be inferred from their manipulation. These improvements make possible to have direct and interactive modifications of existing CAD objects by parsing their CHG to fill our structures with useful data. Moreover, the multi backward chaining mechanism reinforces the ability of the inference engine to free users, especially non-expert ones, from too complex understandings on CAD models. As a proof of concept of our model, we present an detailed example of our approach on the geometric kernel of CATIA and we show how one can consider new concepts of interaction during immersive project reviews: to allow participants to directly modify CAD objects without any interaction on desktop workstation.