FAÇADE 2013 | VOL.1
ATTACK HERE Why Houston's ship ports are at high risk for terrorist attack. P.14
TOPOPHILE
Topographer-turned-artist
BICYCLE BONANZA Must-haves for Summer 2013
PORTFOLIO PREP Tips for getting your work out there
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VOLUME ONE 6 COMMODITIES BICYLE BONANZA
8 EXODUS 12 RENEGADES PORTFOLIO PREP
TOPOPHILE
18 FEATURED: Victim of Texas City Explosion giveshis account. Since 1979, few precautions have been taken to prevent more explosions. It's clear that nothing is being done, but that something needs to.
10 BONUS TOP TEN FAÇADE
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A CASE FOR EVERY OCCASION.
WWW.SOCIETY6.COM
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VOLUME ONE
ATTACK HERE ALONG THE HOUSTON SHIP CHANNEL, THERE ARE MORE DEADLY PETROCHEMICALS THAN ANYWHERE ELSE IN THE COUNTRY. SO WHAT’S THE WORST THAT COULD HAPPEN IF TERRORISTS WERE TO STRIKE?
ANATOMY OF A PLAN A FLOOR PLAN IS A DRAWING TO SCALE, SHOWING A VIEW FROM ABOVE, RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN ROOMS, SPACES, AND OTHER PHYSICAL FEATURES AT ONE LEVEL OF A STRUCTURE.
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MAKE A STATEMENT.
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IMAGES COURTESY OF GRABCAD
COMMODITIES
BICYCLE BONANZA COVETED CONCEPTUAL RENDERS BECOME A REALITY FOR SUMMER 2013 By Xun Liang A bicycle, often called a bike (and sometimes referred to as a “pushbike”, “pedal bike”, is a human-powered, pedal-driven, single-track vehicle, having two wheels attached to a frame, one behind the other. A person who rides a bicycle is called a cyclist, or bicyclist. Bicycles were introduced in the 19th century in Europe and now number more than a billion worldwide, twice as many as automobiles. They are the principal means of transportation in many regions. They also provide a popular form of recreation, and have been adapted for such uses as children’s toys, general fitness, military and police applications, courier services and bicycle racing. The basic shape and configuration of a typical upright, or safety bicycle, has changed little since the first chain-driven model was developed around 1885. However, many details have been improved, especially since the advent of modern materials and computer-aided design.
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Their invention of the bicycle has had an enormous effect on society, both in terms of culture and of advancing modern industrial methods. Several components that eventually played a key role in the development of the automobile were invented for the bicycle, including ball bearings, pneumatic tires, chain-driven sprockets, and tension-spoked wheels. The dandy horse, also called Draisienne or laufmaschine, was the first.
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CARBON ROAD BICYCLE
Boardman told BikeRadar that breaking the £1,000 price barrier for a full carbon frame and fork was tricky, because of rising material and labour costs. Wheels are good quality, robust Mavic CXP 22 rims (32 spokes rear, 28 front) shod with Continental Ultra Sport II tyres.
STRiDA FOLDING BICYCLE
STRiDA wins I.D. Magazine’s Annual Design Award, Sail Magazine’s Pittman Award for Innovation and Safety, and the British Design Council’s Millennium Product Award. Steedman Bass, of Boston USA, purchases the rights to produce the STRiDA. With Bill Bennet , Eric Thomas, and Mark Sanders, Bass begins development of STRiDA Version 3.
TREK BICYCLE
Trek is the world leader in mountain bike technology. No surprise that our mountain bikes are the most technologically advanced on the market. Each platform leads its class, and every model is loaded with features and details that will make any ride, on any trail, better.
Queen Victoria’s Contraption While staying at her home on the Isle of White, in June 1881, Queen Victoria’s carriage was left in the dust by a girl on a Salvo. Subsequently, Her Royal Highness ordered two of the machines, requesting their inventor accompany the delivery. Starley hastened the order south and was given a crash course in royal protocol.
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ROYAL SALVO, 1881
EXODUS
P O RT F O L I O PREP LESS IS MORE, & OTHER CLICHÉD PHRASES ABOUT PUTTING YOUR WORK OUT INTO THE WORLD. By Phillip Wilson
COURTESY OF EHSAN ABDULRASOUL
These days you need to go beyond the ordinary to make your portfolio stand out. Here is an overview of what to do and how to excel. A strong portfolio opens doors, a weak portfolio closes them. Your portfolio is often the only thing a person sees before deciding whether or not to contact you, and in many cases you may not be present to explain it (particularly on-line portfolios). There are fundamental qualities that all outstanding portfolios share, and a variety of principals and techniques that can help take your portfolio from average to excellent. If at all possible, your portfolio should be appropriate to the situation and reviewer, and all portfolios should show creativity, skills, range, thought, and ambition. It is the overall combination of these, plus that “special something,” that makes one designer stand above the others.
K.I.S.S.
Keep It Simple, Stupid. There is no single “right” way to prepare a portfolio. A different presentation is appropriate for each person, each situation and each interview. You need to understand what kind of portfolio you are creating. Is it to get into school, to get an internship, to get a first job, a second job? Each of these will require a different selection of projects. Also consider what type of presentation are you preparing. Is it an on-line portfolio, a leave-behind book, a one-onone interview, a cold call, or something else? Each of these scenarios calls for a different type of media, so you should spend some time thinking about what you will show in each of these cases and prepare.
RANGE
Your portfolio should celebrate your ability to work on different types of projects. This lets the reviewer know that you are flexible and can work in a variety of situations. If possible, use examples from different product categories, demonstrate your familiarity with a variety of media, or indicate experience with a range of technologies. Integration of varied disciplines is always interesting and shows a willingness to collaborate with a variety of people, another important skill. Make an effort to show your contributions to a project.
Pops of color make any piece more interesting.
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THAT SPECIAL SOMETHING
There are fundamental qualities that all outstanding portfolios share, and a variety of principals and techniques that can help take your portfolio from average to excellent. If at all possible, your portfolio should be appropriate to the situation and reviewer, and all portfolios should show creativity, skills, range, thought, and ambition. If at all possible, your portfolio should be appropriate to the situation and reviewer, and all portfolios should show creativity, skills, range, thought, and ambition. It is the overall combination of these, plus that “special something,” that makes one designer stand above the others. production. This demonstrates a holistic design sense that is invaluable to most employers. Also, make sure to show a full range of abilities, including sketching, rendering, model making, finished products, photography, 3D modeling, etc.
AMBITION
A designer who can take initiative, resolve a wide range of problems, and manage projects from beginning-to-end is a valuable addition to every team. Your portfolio, combined with a written résumé, should illustrate these traits. Self-driven projects are great examples of this. If possible, show measurable contributions conceived and implemented by you, repeatedly, on a wide variety of projects. Indicate that you can work with limited supervision. Show that you can generate ideas—no one is looking for a designer that needs someone else to think for them. Make an effort to fill gaps in your employment history with an interesting variety of projects and activities.
LIKE A BANDAID
COURTESY OF EHSAN ABDULRASOUL
If your portfolio has excellent examples of everything listed above, congratulations—you are free to compete with thousands of other hungry designers. To rise above the rest and truly stand out in an extremely competitive field, your work needs to go the extra mile. Your projects should show insightful, conceptual foundations, indicating that you think about your work on many levels. Layers of meaning in your work allow people to explore and enjoy your projects repeatedly. Beautiful compositions that show a variety of technique stand out. This
Pieces that illustrate both practicality and creativiy are perfect for you portfolio.
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TOP 10
A 2012 ACADEMIC REVIEW SO WHY GO TO ARCHITECTURE SCHOOL? PEOPLE WHO ARE DRIVEN TO BECOME ARCHITECTS CAN’T CONVINCE THEMSELVES OTHERWISE.
UNDERGRADUATE
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Cornell University
5 Rice University
University of Texas (Austin)
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Virginia University
California Polytechnic University
CA Institue of Architecture
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Rhode Island School of Design
Syracuse Universty
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Iowa State University
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Pratt Institute
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PROS & CONS
compare
plan
We can’t discuss all 40 architecture programs that were ranked at the top of the Design Intelligence Best Architecture Schools lists in these pages, but let’s take a look the top 10 undergraduate and graduate schools.
attend
In spite of uncertain times, the future will need architects who can bring intelligence and insight to planning, urban design, sustainable building, and creating livable cities. We will still require talented professional leaders who have vision, optimism, and passion. Listed are the best graduate and undergraduate schools of last year.
GRADUATE
4 Washington University (St. Louis)
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University of Michigan University of Cincinnati
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Harvard University
Yale University
Columbia University
University of Pennsyl.
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MIT
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Cornell University
5 Kansas State University
MAP BY SADIE Z ALLPHIN
RENEGADES
T O P O P H I L E A MAN'S OBSESSION WITH TRADITIONAL TOPOGRAPHY BECOMES RIDICUOUSLY OVER-PRICED FINE ART By Remi Crawford The planetary science of topography is specific. It comprises of the study of surface shape and features of the Earth and other observable astronomical objects including planets, moons, and asteroids. It is also the description of such surface shapes and features (especially their depiction in maps). The topography of an area can also mean the surface shape and features themselves. In a broader sense, topography is concerned with local detail in general, including not only relief but also natural and artificial features, and even local history and culture. This meaning is less common in America, where topographic maps with elevation contours have made “topography” synonymous with relief. The older sense of topography as the study of place still has currency in Europe. Topography specifically involves the recording of relief or terrain, the three-dimensional quality of the surface, and the identification of specific landforms.
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In modern usage, this involves generation of elevation data in electronic form. It is often considered to include the graphic representation of the landforms on a map by a variety of techniques, including contour lines, hypsometric tints, and relief shading. The term topography originated in ancient Greece and continued in ancient Rome, as the detailed description of a place. The word comes from the Greek words topos and graphia.
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GRAY'S ANATOMY, 1918
THE WORD TOPOGRAPHY COMES FROM THE GREEK WORDS TOPOS (PLACE), AND GRAPHIA (WRITE).
MONEY, MONEY, MONEY In classical literature this refers to writing about a place or places, what is now largely called ‘local history’. In Britain and in Europe in general, the word topography is still sometimes used in its original sense. Detailed military surveys in Britain (beginning in the late eighteenth century) were called Ordnance Surveys, and this term was used into the 20th century as generic for topographic surveys and maps. In the 20th century, the term topography started to be used to describe surface description in other fields. Detailed military surveys in Britain (beginning in the late eighteenth century) were called Ordnance Surveys, and this term was used into the 20th century as generic for topographic surveys and maps. The earliest scientific surveys in France were called the Cassini maps after the family who produced them over four generations.
WHAT’S IN STORE FOR THE FUTURE
MEDICAL TOPOGRAPHY Topography is not limited to land. In early versions of Gray’s Anatomy, bodies were mapped out with the use of topography. Since the invention of MRIs, this method has become obsolete.
IMAGE PROVIDED BY CLIPART ETC
In the 20th century, the term topography started to be used to describe surface description in other fields where mapping in a broader sense. Besides their role in photogrammetry, aerial and satellite imagery can be used to identify and delineate terrain features and more general landcover. feal sense. Detailed military surveys in Britain (beginning in the late eighteenth century) wereused into the 20th century topographic.surveys and maps. The earliest scientific surveys in France were called the Cassini maps after the family who produced them over four generations. In the 20th century, the term topography started to be used to describe surface description in other fields.Where mapping in a broader sense. Besides their role in photogrammetry, aerial and satellite imagery can be used to identify and delineate terrain features and more general land cover feain features and more general land-cover features.
An objective of topography is to determine the position of any feature or more generally any point in terms of both a horizontal coordinate system such as latitude, longitude, and altitude. Identifying (naming) features, and recognizing typical landform patterns are also part of the field.
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ATTACK
HERE
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ALONG THE FIFTY-MILE HOUSTON SHIP CHANNEL, THERE ARE MORE TOXIC GASES AND DEADLY PETROCHEMICALS THAN ANYWHERE ELSE IN THE COUNTRY. SO WHAT’S THE WORST THAT COULD HAPPEN IF TERRORISTS WERE TO STRIKE? By S.C. Gwynne
IMAGE BY SADIE Z ALLPHIN
the
attack begins in the Houston Ship Channel, in the cargo hold of the Belize flagged, Singapore-owned container ship Ocean Princess. The vessel is eight hundred feet long. It is stacked from stem to stern with forty-footlong steel boxes and looks oddly top-heavy. On international manifests its cargo is listed as “toys and electrical components.” But that’s not all it is carrying. Inside one of the containers, each of which can hold thirty tons of cargo, is a stockpile of terrorist-planted explosives that makes Timothy McVeigh’s Oklahoma City bomb look like a firecracker. As the ship steams north and west toward the heart of Houston, there are no signs that anything is wrong. The U.S. Coast Guard boards the ship and performs a routine inspection, interviewing the captain and crew but opening no containers. U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which uses an x-ray machine to inspect some 10 to 12 percent of containers entering the port, sees nothing suspicious in this shipment and elects not to screen it. But as the ship approaches the giant Shell Oil refinery in Deer Park, the Coast Guard’s port commander receives a panicked call from the Department of Justice’s Counterterrorism Section in Washington. It’s bad news:
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Princess is probably carrying a bomb. The Coast Guard scrambles into action, but it is already too late. Before the cutters can reach the vessel, an immense blast rocks the channel and surrounding areas. As Homeland Security officials will later discover, the bomb consists mostly of Soviet-era anti-ship mines, originally loaded onto the Ocean Princess in Trieste, Italy, by an obscure but well-organized group of Algerian and Moroccan terrorists. The explosives are triggered by a device known as a GPS detonator, which sets them off.certain longitude-latitude coordinate is reached.
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CHEMICAL BREAKDOWN
Image provided by Google
In 2012, 10–12% of containers housed suspicous chemicals. Here's what they found:
12,000 gallons
UNDOCUMENTED JET FUEL Various ship containers held unmarked barrels that were later found to be jet fuel. Various ship containers held unmarked barrels that were later found to be jet fuel. Containers held unmarked.
5 ounces IF NO PRECAUTIONS ARE TAKEN, THE ENTIRE AREA COULD BE DEVASTATED.
URANIUM This amount of the unstable element would be disastrous for Texas, surronding states, and Mexico.
In this case, the coordinates were for Shell’s refinery. Today the terrorists are lucky: The bomb goes off just as the container ship is also passing a seven-hundred-foot liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) tanker. The blast rips into the side of the tanker, causing yet another large explosion, which in turn both ignites gasoline and crude-oil storage tanks at Shell and causes the tanks’ walls to rupture, sending a river of fire out into the refinery and reaching the far more dangerous pressurized pentane storage tanks. A little more than 11 million gallons of pentane are released, some of which burns and some of which evaporates and forms a vapor cloud, which then explodes with enormous force, leveling buildings and structures in the immediate vicinity. By the time another compartment on the LPG tanker is breached, sending a new fireball into the sky, more than two hundred people are dead. The container ship is half-submerged, still burning and resting on the bottom of the fifty-foot-deep channel. But all this, as Houstonians and the rest of the world will soon learn, is merely prelude. What happens next is scarcely imaginable. The U.S. Coast Guard boards the ship and performs a routine inspection, interviewing the captain and crew but opening no containers. U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which uses an x-ray machine.
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40 lbs
EXPLOSIVES Though it seems such a small amount, 40 lbs of explosives has the potential to blow up a 5 mile radius. Such a small amount, 40 lbs of explosives has the potential to blow up a 5 mile radius. Though it seems such a small amount, 40 lbs of explosives.
STRUCTURAL FLAWS
Charles Dickens once described Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, as “hell with the lid off.” His reference was to that city’s vast landscape of smoke-belching steel mills, but the metaphor also works for something much closer to home: the grotesquely magnificent stretch of refineries, petrochemical and other plants, mills, docks, silos, wharves, and warehouses that rise along the banks of the malodorous waterway known as the Houston Ship Channel. Over its full fifty-mile track—from near downtown Houston to Bolivar Roads, on the Gulf of Mexico—the channel houses three hundred plants and is one of the largest concentrations of heavy industry on earth, producing nearly half of the nation’s supply of gasoline and half of its petrochemicals. It comprises the largest refinery in the world (Exxon Mobil, in Baytown) and the sixth-largest seaport. Viewed from the tollway bridge on Houston’s east side, the upper channel can seem both frightening and, in its own dark, industrial Gothic way, weirdly beautiful. On certain days the whole brutish apparatus seems to hiss into action, spewing fire and emitting long, gorgeously looping plumes of cottony white steam that coil around its steel tanks and spires and rise hundreds of feet into the sky. Dickens, who chronicled England’s industrial revolution, would have felt right at home.
WHAT'S NOT WORKING
But as the above hypothetical attack suggests, the channel is more than just a spectacular industrial engine. It is also a prime terrorist target. That’s because it is both ground zero for the nation’s petrochemical industry and home to unfathomably large quantities of the deadliest, most combustible, disease-causing, lung-exploding, chromosome-annihilating, and metal-dissolving substances known to man. The sheer toxicity of it all, in fact, is one of the main reasons the channel zone evolved as it did: Part of the idea was to confine all of these poison-laden refineries and chemical plants and ships filled with anhydrous ammonia to their own noxious neighborhoods, generally away from homes and schools and offices.You don’t want to put storage tanks next to nursery schools if they have the potential for igniting and leveling every building within a half-mile radius. Chemical plants can kill people at long range, but it is still a bad idea to put them next to residential subdivisions. Back in the twenties and thirties, when industries began to locate along the channel en masse, this must have seemed like a sound idea. In the year 2004, when terrorist attacks are daily events and people fly planes into the World Trade Center to make a political statement, this sort of unarmored industrial concentration is like having a giant target painted on us with a sign, in Arabic, that reads “Attack here.”
DANGER ZONE
As most Houston residents can tell you, the Ship Channel has long been considered one of the top strategic targets in the United States. Russian missiles were (and perhaps are) aimed at it. A single well-placed strike would cripple a significant portion of our national economy. Along with the rest of the city, the channel was put on a Code Orange terrorist alert during Super Bowl.
THINGS ARE ALWAYS BLOWING UP OR BURNING OUT OF CONTROL, OR LEAKING IN THE CHANNEL
Which more or less leaves it to us to imagine what the effects of a terrorist attack might be. The notion that the Ship Channel is an enormous bomb waiting to be detonated is an oft-repeated truism. Everyone agrees that it is, but that tells you nothing about what happens when the bomb actually goes off. As we roll on and off of the now-familiar Code Orange alerts—only one notch back from Code Red, which means, presumably, that cargo planes loaded with TNT are already winging toward Disney World—it might be helpful to know exactly what it is that we are supposed to be afraid of. By that I do not mean minor bits of terrorism such as strapping one hundred pounds of C-4 explosives to a petroleum barge and sinking it in the channel or running a truck packed with Semtex explosives into a tank farm. Those are mere annoyances. I mean a full-scale, worst-case scenario of the sort the Homeland Security folks are modeling and simulating and staying up late worrying about, an attack that would have as deep and abiding an effect on the public as the horrors of 9/11. If we are supposed to believe these alerts, it seems.
GEORGE COMBS IN 1980 SHORTLY AFTER THE TEXAS CITY EXPLOSION.
IMAGE BY SADIE Z ALLPHIN
EXPLOSION SURVIVOR SPEAKS UP ABOUT TEXAS CITY Still, major accidents continue to happen. In 1979 the tanker Chevron Hawaii exploded at the docks of Shell Oil’s Deer Park refinery, killing 3 people and touching off a cascade of explosions and fires in storage tanks that engulfed Shell.
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The blast tore the ship in half, caused two nearby gasoline and crude-oil barges to explode, and filled the channel with a twenty-foot wall of burning crude oil. 1987 a crane operator at Marathon Oil’s Texas City refinery of deadly hydrogen
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WHY NO ONE IS REPORTING IT
To see just how hazardous the products of the channel’s plants are, you have to read the companies’ own worst-case scenarios. This information is public but is considered to be so sensitive that my request to the EPA in Houston for the documents brought an immediate return phone call from the Department of Justice’s Counterterrorism Section in Washington, asking who I was and what I wanted. In order to view the RMPs for channel plants, I had to go to the U.S. Marshal’s office at the federal courthouse in Houston, where I was escorted to a private room and watched by a guard for two hours while I read the material. I was allowed to take notes but not to remove or copy any of the information. In Pasadena the Crown Central Petroleum refinery’s worst case involves a “catastrophic failure of the hydrofluoric acid storage drum resulting in the release of 50,000 pounds of hydrogen fluoride gas over a ten-minute period.” The distance to what the EPA calls the “toxic end point” is 9.3 miles.Though the RMPs make no mention of terrorism, they do offer clues as to how much worse an attack would be than the hypothetical accidents they describe. A concerted terrorist assault might, for example, release the entire contents of all seven of Oxy Vinyls’ chlorine tanks, instead of just one. Chlorine is very nasty stuff.
GALENA PARK MAKES HOUSTON ESPECIALLY
There are at least five different unprotected routes to Houston's city center.
IMAGE PROVIDED BY GOOGLE
To understand how a terrorist strike might affect this vast tangle of smoke and steel, it helps to look at the horrific industrial accidents that already happen there with surprising regularity. Things are always blowing up or burning out of control or leaking in the channel—much as they would be likely to in a terrorist attack. Since 1955 the place has even had its own private fire brigade, with two hundred pieces of heavy equipment—Channel Industries Mutual Aid, or CIMA—that does nothing but put out the fires and fix the accidents. The worst of all the channel disasters was the 1947 explosion of the French freighter S.S.Grandcamp at a dock in Texas City. The ship was loaded with ammonium nitrate, the same stuff McVeigh used to craft his truck bomb in Oklahoma City 48 years later. A fire on the ship caused a blast that leveled docks, warehouses, and a chemical plant; damaged or destroyed one thousand residences or buildings; and killed 578 people. It remains the worst industrial accident in American history and led to sweeping changes in chemical manufacturing and storage.Still, major accidents continue to happen.
IMAGE PROVIDED BY GOOGLE
ACCIDENTS GALORE
FINDING A SOLUTION
From the deck of a Coast Guard patrol boat on the murky, dredged-out sliver of bayou that is the upper Ship Channel—the 23 miles of densely packed industry containing 89 large plants from the Turning Basin (where ships turn around), near downtown Houston, to Exxon Mobil’s refinery in Baytown—it is easy to see why the place is so vulnerable. The giant steel containment vessels everywhere, many of the 10-million-gallon variety. bunched tightly together. And as you pass by this seemingly endless expanse of industry, it is clear that no matter what sorts of security improvements might be made, the channel still has one big, basic problem. As a port that accommodates 6,400 ships and 150,000 barges each year. Trailcars and trucks, is directly connected to more than 287,000 jobs in Texas, and handles 177.6 million tons of goods yearly, many from foreign-flagged ships, the Port of Houston is by definition open and porous. You cannot lock it down. The Ship Channel is all about commerce, not security. There is far too much coming and going to mount anything like a foolproof defense against a terrorist attack.
SO, WHAT'S NEXT?
Not that people are not trying. In the wake of 9/11, vast changes have taken place in the way the channel and its industries are guarded. The Coast Guard, which is in charge of inspecting all shipping, has a sophisticated vessel-tracking system that uses color coding to distinguish ships with hazardous cargoes from those without. Port security is also buttressed by new laws that took effect on July 1 requiring full security plans for all plants and vessels, detailed advance notice of all incoming ships, information about their crews and cargoes, and provisions for ship escorts and armed sea marshals for the most dangerous shipments. But in fact the Coast Guard has only twelve ships in the channel and four large cutters off the coast and a relatively small number of personnel to handle the incoming traffic. every ship. Only one in five vessels is boarded, and most of those are searched only cursorily the problems of U.S. ports.
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TEXAS CITY WAS THE SITE OF THE 1989 EXPLOSION.
Since 1979, few precautions have been taken to prevent more explosions.
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PLAN BY UCHIDA ARCHITECT DESIGN OFFICE
ANTATOMY OF
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A PLAN. A FLOOR PLAN IS A DRAWING TO SCALE, SHOWING A VIEW FROM ABOVE, RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN ROOMS, SPACES, AND OTHER PHYSICAL FEATURES AT ONE LEVEL OF A STRUCTURE.
Similar to a map the orientation of the view is downward from above, but unlike a conventional map, a plan is understood to be drawn at a particular vertical position (commonly at about 4 feet above the floor). Objects below this level are seen, objects at this level are shown ‘cut’ in plan-section, and objects above this vertical position within the structure are omitted or shown dashed. Plan view or “planform” is defined as a vertical orthographic projection of an object on a horizontal plane, like a map. The term may be used in general to describe any drawing showing the physical layout of objects. For example, it may denote the arrangement of the displayed objects at an exhibition, or the arrangement of exhibitor booths at a convention. Now drawings are reproduced using plotters and large format xerographic copiers. A “reflected ceiling plan” shows a view of the room as if looking from above, through the ceiling, at a mirror installed one foot below the ceiling level, which shows the reflected image of the ceiling above. This convention maintains the same orientation of the floor and ceilings plans - looking down from above. Reflected Ceiling Plans or RCP’s are used by designers and architects to demonstrate lighting, visible mechanical features, and ceiling forms as part of the documents provided for construction.
IN THE BEGINNING A floor plan is not a top view or birds eye view. It is a measured drawing to scale of the layout of a floor in a building. A “top view” or “bird’s eye view” does not show an orthogonally projected plane cut at the typical 4’ height above the floor level. A floor plan could show. A plan view is an orthographic projection of a 3-dimensional object from the position of a horizontal plane through the object. In other words, a plan is a section viewed from the top. In such views, the portion of the object in above the plane is omitted to reveal what lies beyond. In the case of a floor plan, the roof and upper portion of the walls may be omitted. Roof plans are orthographic projections, but they are not sections as their viewing plane is outside of the object. A plan is a common method of depicting the internal arrangement of a 3-dimensional object.
The nursery school built in Dazaifu, a city located near Fukuoka city, had to be extended for two classes in order to increase the accommodation of children.
Considering the nationwide decline of birthrates, the number of accommodating children may decrease in the near future.
The nursery school built in Dazaifu, a city located near Fukuoka city, had to be extended for two classes in order to increase the accommodation of children.
Two dimensions it is often used in technical drawing and is traditionally crosshatched. The style of crosshatching indicates the type of material the section passes through. An architectural drawing or architect’s drawing is a technical drawing. Building (or building project) that falls within the definition of architecture. Architectural drawings are used by architects and others for a number of purposes: to develop a design idea into a coherent proposal, to communicate ideas and concepts, to convince clients of the merits of a design, to enable a building contractor to construct it, as a record of the completed work, and to make a record of a building that already exists. Architectural drawings are drawn according to a set of conventions, which include particular views (floor plan, section etc.), sheet sizes, units of measurement and scales, annotation and cross referencing. Conventionally, drawings were made in ink on paper or a similar material, and any copies required had to be laboriously made by hand. The twentieth century saw a shift to drawing on tracing paper, so that mechanical copies could be run off efficiently. The development of the computer had a major impact on the methods used to design and create technical drawings making manual draughting almost obsolete, and opening up new possibilities of form using organic shapes and complex geometry. Today the vast majority of drawings are created using CAD software. The size of drawings reflects the materials available and the size that is convenient to transport – rolled up or folded, laid out on a table, or pinned up on a wall. The draughting process may impose limitations on the size that is realistically workable. Sizes are determined by a consistent paper size system, according to local usage.
IT’S ALL IN THE DETAILS
I decided to constitute this building as one room space (9m span) which does not have a pillar inside of building, which becomes very useful for conversions to various uses (playroom etc.).
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Normally the largest paper size used in modern architectural practice is ISO A0 (841 mm × 1,189 mm or 33.1 in × 46.8 in) or in the USA Arch E (762 mm × 1,067 mm or 30 in × 42 in) or Large E size (915 mm × 1,220 mm or 36 in × 48 in). Architectural drawings are drawn to scale, so that relative sizes are correctly represented. The scale is chosen both to ensure the whole.
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EVEN AN ADULT WOULD NOT FEEL OPPRESSED DUE TO THE EFFECT OF UNEVEN CEILING GEOMETRY AND A TRAPEZOIDAL WINDOW.
IMAGES BY HIROYUKI KAWANO
Building will fit on the chosen sheet size, and to show the required amount of detail. At the scale of one eighth of an inch to one foot (1:96) or the metric equivalent 1 to 100, walls are typically shown as simple outlines corresponding to the overall thickness. At a larger scale, half an inch to one foot (1:24) or the nearest common metric equivalent 1 to 20, the layers of different materials that make up the wall construction are shown. Construction details are drawn to a larger scale, in some cases full size (1 to 1 scale).
SPRUCING THINGS UP Scale drawings enable dimensions to be ‘read’ off the drawing, i.e. measured directly. Imperial scales (feet and inches) are equally readable using an ordinary ruler. On a one-eighth inch to one foot scale drawing, the one-eighth divisions on the ruler can be read off as feet. Architects normally use a scale ruler with different scales marked on each edge. A third method, used by builders in estimating, is to measure directly off the drawing and multiply by the scale factor. Dimensions can be measured off drawings made on a stable medium such as vellum. All processes of reproduction introduce small errors, especially now that different copying methods mean that the same drawing may be re-copied or copies made in several different ways. Consequently dimensions need to be written (‘figured’) on the drawing. The disclaimer “Do not scale off dimensions” is commonly inscribed on architects drawings, to guard against errors arising in the copying process. A site plan is a specific type of plan, showing the whole context of a building or group of buildings. A site plan shows property boundaries and means of access to the site, and nearby structures if they are relevant to the design.
MAKING IT A REALITY For a development on an urban site, the site plan may need to show adjoining streets to demonstrate how the design fits into the urban fabric. Within the site boundary, the site plan gives an overview of the entire scope of work. It shows the buildings (if any) already existing and those that are proposed, usually as a building footprint; roads, parking lots, footpaths, hard landscaping, trees and planting. For a construction project, the site plan also needs to show all the services connections: drainage and sewer lines, water supply, electrical and communications cables, exterior lighting etc. Site plans are commonly used to represent a building proposal prior to detailed design: drawing up a site plan is a tool for deciding both the site layout and the size and orientation of proposed new buildings. A site plan is used to verify that a proposal complies with local development codes, including restrictions on historical sites. In this context the site plan forms part of a legal agreement, and there may be a requirement for it to be drawn up by a licenced professional: architect, engineer, landscape architect or land surveyor. A cross section, also simply called a section, represents a vertical plane cut through the object, in the same way as a floor plan is a horizontal section viewed from the top. In the section view, everything cut by the section plane is shown as a bold line, often with a solid fill to show objects that are cut through, and anything seen beyond generally shown in a thinner line. Sections are used to describe the relationship between different levels of a building. In the Observatorium drawing illustrated here, the section shows the dome seen from the outside, a second dome that can only be seen inside the building, and the way the space between the two accommodates a large astronomical telescope: relationships that would be difficult to understand from plans
FAÇADE
VOL. 1
THE COMPLETED PROJECT The nursery school built in Dazaifu, a city located near Fukuoka city, had to be extended for two classes in order to increase the accommodation of children. Considering the nationwide decline of birthrates, the number of accommodating children may decrease in the near future. I decided to constitute this building as one room space (9m span) which does not have a pillar inside of building, which becomes very useful for conversions to various uses. This wooden truss beam is set up.
Factory and conveyed to the construction site by a trailer. A complicated joint is set up in the factory, and only a comparatively easy joint is assembled at the construction site. It has realized improvement in construction accuracy, and shortened the construction period. This is realized to meet the client’s request “the childcare space surrounded by wood” and to cut down the construction cost. Moreover, by lowering the ceiling height, timber length was shortened.
A NEW WAY TO DRAFT.
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