From Battleship to Breakwater: post‐military adaptive reuse of the Australian warship Protector

The light cruiser Protector, built 1884, served as an Australian naval asset for 40 years. Decommissioned from the Royal Australian Navy in 1924, it was subsequently converted into a lighter. The vessel re‐entered military service during the Second World War, but was involved in a collision, condemned, and ultimately installed as a breakwater on Australia's Great Barrier Reef. While much of Protector's military career is well documented, little is known of its conversion and adaptation to civilian roles. What follows is a discussion of efforts to archaeologically document Protector's surviving hull and identify signatures of adaptive reuse indicative of its post‐military career.     

Engineering complexity

Abstract

Engineering systems are becoming increasingly complex as they address the challenges of the twenty-first century. However the stability of complex systems has long been difficult to determine, and may indeed represent a technological limit. Some systems are both stable and complex, but in others excessive complexity leads to collapse. Collapse may arise from a tradeoff between optimality and resilience. Recent analysis of very large complex systems shows that behind their apparent lack of order are a number of statistical patterns, which perhaps provide the much sought after pointers to system stability. Components with high levels of connectivity to the rest of a given system, and that can induce coherent behaviour across the system, can produce some spectacular collapses. These may be a special weakness introduced by global communication systems.     

Spider Webs: Design and Engineering

Abstract

‘All things in nature,’ said Sullivan, have a shape, that is to say, a form, an outward semblance, that tells us what they are that distinguishes them from ourselves and from each other ….'. ‘Whether it be the sweeping eagle in his flight or the open apple-blossom, the toiling work-horse, the blithe swan, the branching oaks, the drifting clouds, over all the coursing sun, form ever follows function, and this is the law.’     

Engagement: Archaeological Design and Engineering

Practice, architectonics, the disposition of materials, instruments, people, the articulation of heterogeneous parts in an assemblage that performs transformative work: we can easily call this engineering—science in action. One of the main topics of this collection of papers is the design of archaeological knowledge. Taking a lead from these papers, let us ask how we might work with the richness of the past, creatively, respecting the qualities of materials and relationships. From these questions, I sketch a few components in the design of knowledge.     

工程遗产初探

工程遗产不同于古建筑,也不同于工业遗产。中国的古代工程遗产具有独特的科学技术价值、集成价值和发展价值。然而工程遗产实物难于辨识,遗产价值易被忽视,遗产性质和遗产构成难于界定,遗产真实性难于评估,遗产保护和展示难度大,因此长期以来重视程度不够。我们需要加强基础研究,并争取政策支持和开放合作,以实现对工程遗产的整体保护。     

Engineering as a Source of Scientific Ideas

Abstract

Engineering has discovered some laws of nature as limits to what can be done, from which have developed the sciences of thermodynamics, information theory and cybernetics. Considered as a science, engineering lies between physics and biology, because its machines have physical structures and properties but biological organizations and functions. The old idea of the living body as an engine retains its power in modern biology; and the reconsideration of various natural non-biological processes in terms of engineering and biological concept reveals inadequacies in modern physical theory.     

人类基因工程面临的道德问题

基因工程已经用于人类克隆并因此引起了极大的关注和争议。比如道德灾难、基因歧视以及转基因产品的不确定性。因此人类克隆应该受到限制,用于治疗目的的人类克隆应该严格受控。     

工业环境保护与安全工程专业建设的探索

通过分析工业环境保护与安全工程专业的发展现状,提出应以现代高等教育理念为指导,构建包括科技和人文素质课、专业理论课、实践课、选修课四大部分的课程体系,和为培养适应社会经济和科技发展的新型高素质人才的理论教学体系。     

人类基因工程面临的道德问题(英文)

基因工程已经用于人类克隆并因此引起了极大的关注和争议,比如道德灾难、基因歧视以及转基因产品的不确定性。因此人类克隆应该受到限制,用于治疗目的的人类克隆应该严格受控。     

Brush-Piling: Eighteenth Century Engineering in an American Wilderness

Abstract

Old Mill was one of a small group of early silk mills established in East Cheshire during the mid-18th century. It was notable for its size, and for the involvement of James Brindley in its construction. The mill was extended and a beam engine added c. 1830, but it was partially demolished in 1939. In 2003 the remaining structures were demolished, which provided the opportunity for a programme of building recording and excavation. James Brindley's role is examined in terms of the application of water power, and the context of the classical architecture and likely geological provenance of Old Mill is discussed.     

Engineering space and time: moving pictures and motionless trips

The paper investigates the ‘motionless trips’ enabled by 19th-century visual technologies such as the magic lantern, phantasmagoria, panorama, and diorama. Although these technologies are often held to have culminated with the appearance of animated photography (film) in the 1890s, we argue that they possessed their own autotelic significance. Paralleling the transformations wrought upon reality by cultures of transport such as the railway, the visual attractions referred to here also reconfigured reality. For whilst they were frequently employed to simulate the transportation of the spectator not only to distant locations but also through time, the most profound journey these developments accomplished was a voyage into the abstract fabric of space and time itself. The abstraction of space and time as a material independent of actuality, and its re-engineering into new configurations, was eventually perfected in the cinema: a space-and-time machine that spliced together the ‘mobility’ of the magic lantern, Phenakistiscope, and Praxinoscope; the ‘space-lapse’ of the panorama; the ‘time-lapse’ of the diorama and chrono-photography; the realism of photography; and the haptical obscenity of the stereoscope.     

The Rolt Memorial Lecture, 1994 Engineering Works in Rural Areas

Abstract

The Rolt Memorial Lecture for 1994 takes as its theme rural engineering works, with several of which Tom Rolt was himself involved. The article considers the location and sites of these works: their labour force: and the range of their products. It concludes with several case studies of engineering works in Hampshire and Dorset.