Structures of policy : Building Bulletin in Postwar Britain

School design in Great Britain underwent great typological change in the post-war era, necessitated by depleted construction labour and materials, coupled with a bourgeoning school-age population resulting from the population boom and an expanded student base generated by the Education Act of 1944. Yet the impact upon the resultant architectural design was developed via a series of less explicit forces of influence. The work undertaken by architects commissioned by and working within local councils was to be informed by the Ministry of Education, whose economic calculations, and administrative and educational policies would have a fundamental influence upon the schools built. Transmitted through Council meetings and “regulations, circulars or administrative memoranda” which established student numbers and cost parameters, these were abstracted from the design process. The lack of opportunity to convey architectural aspiration established a great operational separation between intention and implementation. The issues of “Building Bulletin” published by the Ministry sought to address this divide, creating an opportunity for transmitting policy in an applied manner, and establishing the means for feedback from the profession and the absorption of research undertaken external to the Ministry including elemental analysis of building components, down to the detail of planting, furniture, kitchen equipment and staff administration. Through these, they were able to disseminate the findings from the built Development Projects by the Ministry’s Architects and Building Branch, which culminated in the design of at Wokingham School (“Building Bulletin No.8”, 1952. HMSO) and Junior School, Amersham (“Building Bulletin No.16”, 1958. HMSO) as a test bed to address “practical problems” highlighted in developing the necessarily revised typologies. This paper examines how this sporadic publication thus formed an underappreciated facet of the architectural genealogy, providing the means for the dissemination of applied policy and to explore its absorption in the architectural manifestation of educational buildings in Great Britain during this period

The new conception of the theatre as interpreted by Appia, Craig and Reinhardt

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston Universit

London County Council : A Plan for the Model Community

The aspirations set out in the publication of the County of London Plan in 1943 established the breath of the architectural challenges they aimed to address in building a new post-war society. The spatial and programmatic rationale underpinning the model communities proposed for the New Towns beyond the County boundaries to help alleviate the pressures of industry and residential congestion - and tested in the designated Redevelopment Areas such as Stepney and Poplar - aimed to produce “a new type of citizen, a healthy, self-respecting, dignified person with a sense of beauty, culture and civic pride… [with] a spirit of friendship, neighbourliness and comradeship.” In their intentions to build a “good citizen”, they questioned how they could be good architects too. The ethos of building for the communal rather than the individual is apparent in both the dream and the delivery. Operating across scales and between disciplines, consideration was given for both the material (architectural and infrastructural) and the immaterial (economic and legislative) structures required to build a new form of society. The resulting specific agency with which the architects were imbued enabled them to implement aspirational strategies and develop experimental architecture beyond the capacity of private practice. This paper questions the extent to which the interpersonal and spatial relationships the architects of the LCC sought to construct through architectural means were paralleled by the architectural practices put in place to deliver them. Drawing upon oral histories, bureaucratic documentation and contemporary publications, it seeks to reveal the processes by which their architectural practice was built, in order to better understand the architecture built as a result

In-House: The Council Architect

Far from being the arm which extended the dead hand of bureaucracy, council architects’ departments fostered an aspiration, ingenuity and innovation which benefited UK architecture as a whole – and can do so again

Time reversal constraint limits unidirectional photon emission in slow-light photonic crystals

Photonic crystal waveguides are known to support C-points - point-like polarisation singularities with local chirality. Such points can couple with dipole-like emitters to produce highly directional emission, from which spin-photon entanglers can be built. Much is made of the promise of using slow-light modes to enhance this light-matter coupling. Here we explore the transition from travelling to standing waves for two different photonic crystal waveguide designs. We find that time-reversal symmetry and the reciprocal nature of light places constraints on using C-points in the slow-light regime. We observe two distinctly different mechanisms through which this condition is satisfied in the two waveguides. In the waveguide designs we consider, a modest group-velocity of $v_g \approx c/10$ is found to be the optimum for slow-light coupling to the C-points.Comment: 16 pages, 4 figure

Iconic Ordure

Review of The Icon Project by Leslie Sklair (Pub. Oxford University Press): A new analysis of iconic architecture shows how it becomes emblematic of the immaterial forces behind it, but crucially disregards the agency of architects

Optimised chiral light-matter interactions at polarisation singularities for quantum photonics

Photonic crystal waveguides support chiral-point polarisation singularities which give rise to local chirality even in the absence of a global chiral symmetry. Placing a quantum dot at such a C-point gives rise to a uni-directional emission dependent on the electron spin – ideal for applications in quantum information as it entangles the spin direction of electrons on the quantum dot (static qubits) to the path in the waveguide (flying qubits). Here we discuss the optimisation of this chiral light-matter interaction using slow-light waveguides, and show designs with 8.6 times enhancement of the local density of optical states at a C-point

Comparing Penalized Splines and Fractional Polynomials for Flexible Modelling of the Effects of Continuous Predictor Variables

P(enalized)-splines and fractional polynomials (FPs) have emerged as powerful smoothing techniques with increasing popularity in several fields of applied research. Both approaches provide considerable flexibility, but only limited comparative evaluations of the performance and properties of the two methods have been conducted to date. We thus performed extensive simulations to compare FPs of degree 2 (FP2) and degree 4 (FP4) and P-splines that used generalized cross validation (GCV) and restricted maximum likelihood (REML) for smoothing parameter selection. We evaluated the ability of P-splines and FPs to recover the true functional form of the association between continuous, binary and survival outcomes and exposure for linear, quadratic and more complex, non-linear functions, using different sample sizes and signal to noise ratios. We found that for more curved functions FP2, the current default implementation in standard software, showed considerably bias and consistently higher mean squared error (MSE) compared to spline-based estimators (REML, GCV) and FP4, that performed equally well in most simulation settings. FPs however, are prone to artefacts due to the specific choice of the origin, while P-splines based on GCV reveal sometimes wiggly estimates in particular for small sample sizes. Finally,we highlight the specific features of the approaches in a real dataset