Seismic behavior of two Portuguese adobe buildings: Part I - in-plane cyclic testing of a full-scale adobe wall

This article addresses the laboratory testing of a full-scale double-T shaped adobe wall, under in-plane horizontal cyclic loading of increasing amplitude, with the aim of contributing to the understanding of the seismic behavior of adobe structures. The wall was built with lime adobes taken from an existing building and mortar with a traditional composition. The behavior of the wall was assessed in terms of: shear stress versus horizontal drift and moment versus rotation relationships; maximum lateral strength; drift and rotation at peak stress; evolution of stiffness, lateral displacements, dissipated energy, and natural frequency; and damage pattern. The wall exhibited brittle behavior and in-plane strength corresponding to 56% of the vertical load. Cracking was observed with an X-shaped pattern whereas no sliding occurred at its base. This research supported the subsequent development of a repair and retrofit solution and also of numerical models to simulate the seismic behavior of two adobe buildings.     

PUTTING THE WORLD INTO A BOX: A GEOGRAPHY OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY 'TRAVELLING LANDSCAPES'

Materiality, performance and mobility have recently attracted increasing interdisciplinary interest and called for new approaches to landscape. In most cases, however, these remain limited to the first meaning of landscape, as a complex of material/ visual forms in a given geographic area. By contrast, the second meaning of landscape, as a representation on different media, has remained out of such a debate. This article proposes a reconcep‐tualization of landscape representations as travelling objects at once visual and material. It does so through the example of nineteenth‐century panoramas. Part of a broader history of performative representation, these are approached on the one hand as optical devices participating in the construction of a ‘new kind of observer’, and on the other as material objects travelling across space and time, through different cultural contexts and changing accordingly. In their various manifestations, panoramas and other optical devices paralleled and complemented formal geographical education, but they also constituted terminals in the nineteenth‐century geographical web of perception comparable to the TV, the internet or video cell‐phones in our contemporary world.