WAVE MOTION

wave motion, propagation of disturbances—that is, deviations from a state

of rest or equilibrium—from place to place in a regular and organized way.
Most familiar are surface waves on water, but both sound and light travel
as wavelike disturbances, and the motion of all subatomic particles
exhibits wavelike properties.
This study examines one-dimensional wave propagation in a multi-story building
with seismic excitation. In particular, the building is modeled as a series of shear
beams for columns/walls and lumped masses for floors. Wave response at one
location of the building is then derived to an impulsive motion such as
displacement and acceleration at another location in time and frequency domains,
termed here as wave-based or generalized impulse and frequency response
function (GIRF and GFRF), which is dependent upon the building characteristics
above the impulse location. Not only does this study illustrate features of GIRF and
GFRF in terms of building properties, it also shows broad-based applications of the
modeling. Two examples are presented with the use of the modeling. One is wave-
based characterization of ten-story Millikan Library in Pasadena, California with
the recordings of Yorba Linda earthquake of September 3, 2002. The other is
analysis for influence of stochastic floor-to-column mass ratio, story-height and
seismic input in seismic wave responses.

The young designer Margot Krasojević designs a building for the city of Sochi, Russia, which uses the
principle of the oscillating water column to exploit the energy of the waves. Inside, the Vine space is
used as an art gallery.

The project uses renewable energy to redefine the typologies in architecture and the constructed
environment. The site is located in Sochi, a coastal city by the Black Sea in Russia. The building uses the
principle of the oscillating water column to harness wave energy, converting this mechanical energy to
generate electricity. The small power plant is capable of producing up to 300kW, with an art gallery
inside.

This project aims to provide energy to 200 households and businesses in the vicinity. The Black Sea is a
small body of water, an inland sea with surprisingly strong wave motion and high energy potential,
effective enough for water turbine engineering.

The partly cantilevered and partly submerged building overlooks the coast. Tilted at 45 degrees to the
coast for maximum exposure to the waves, similar to nearby jetties, it increases wave generation while
the swelling refracts around it. The partially submerged projected element is designed to function as an
oscillating water column, increasing tidal resistance to impact on the building and reduce soil erosion.

The angle of the coastal line sculpture gallery corresponds to the angle of the bulge, which in turn
creates breaking point waves that do not lose their strength as they move. Architecture influences the
waves. When the energy of the waves converges against the protruding element of the building, it
activates the section of the oscillating water column.
ELECTRICITY

Electricity affected architecture in many ways. For one, builders and developers were able to
design entire structures based around lighting patterns and schemes. Electricity also enabled
taller structures to expand, as opposed to building flat.
Electric utilities transmit power from the power plant most efficiently at very high voltages. In the
United States, power companies provide electricity to medium or large buildings at 13,800 volts
(13.8kV). For small commercial buildings or residential customers, power companies lower the
voltage with a transformer on a power pole or mounted on the ground. From there, the electricity
is fed through a meter and into the building.

Power Distribution in Small Buildings

Small commercial or residential buildings have a very simple power distribution system.
The utility will own the transformer, which will sit on a pad outside the building or will be
attached to a utility pole. The transformer reduces the voltage from 13.8kV down to
120/240 or 120/208 volts and then passes the electricity to a meter, which is owned by
the utility and keeps a record of power consumption.

fter leaving the meter, the power is transmitted into the building at which point all wiring, panels,
and devices are the property of the building owner. Wires transfer the electricity from the meter
to a panel board, which is generally located in the basement or garage of a house. In small
commercial buildings, the panel may be located in a utility closet. The panel board will have a
main service breaker and a series of circuit breakers, which control the flow of power to various
circuits in the building. Each branch circuit will serve a device (some appliances require heavy
loads) or a number of devices like convenience outlets or lights.
Power Distribution in Large Buildings
Large buildings have a much higher electrical load than small buildings; therefore, the
electrical equipment must be larger and more robust. Large building owners will also
purchase electricity at high voltages (in the US, 13.8kV) because it comes at a cheaper
rate. In this case, the owner will provide and maintain their own step-down transformer,
which lowers the voltage to a more usable level (in the US, 480/277 volts). This
transformer can be mounted on a pad outside the building or in a transformer room
inside the building.

The electricity is then transmitted to switchgear. The role of the switchgear is to

distribute electricity safely and efficiently to the various electrical closets throughout the
building. The equipment has numerous safety features including circuit breakers, which
allow power to be disrupted downstream - this may occur due to a fault or problem, but
it can also be done intentionally to allow technicians to work on specific branches of the
power system.

It should be noted that very large buildings or buildings with complex electrical systems
may have multiple transformers, which may feed multiple pieces of switchgear. We are
keeping this article simple by sharing the basic concepts.
The electricity will leave the switchgear and travel along a primary feeder or bus. The
bus or feeder is a heavy gauge conductor that is capable of carrying high amperage
current throughout a building safely and efficiently. The bus or feeder is tapped as
needed and a conductor is run to an electric closet, which serves a zone or floor of a
building.

Each electrical closet will have another step-down transformer - in the US, this will drop
the power from 480/277 volts to 120 volts for convenience outlets. That transformer will
feed a branch panel, which controls a series of branch circuits that cover a portion of the
building. Each branch circuit covers a subset of the electrical needs of the area - for
instance: lighting, convenience outlets to a series of rooms, or electricity to a piece of
equipment.

How electricity made light available at the flick of a switch – and how it changed life irrevocably

‘Artificial’ light is usually regarded as a surrogate for ‘natural’

light, less good than the real thing. Or, at least that was the case
until electricity, which, as Sandy Isenstadt argues in his book
Electric Light, changed the whole meaning of ‘illumination’,
literally and metaphorically – an epiphany at every flick of a switch.
For the first time, light became something both instantaneous, and
activatable at a distance, and it is these two features as much as
the brilliance of the light source itself that transformed our
perception of life, cities, and even nature.

Electric Light is about a technical invention, but it is not about the

technology. Rather it explores how electricity created new spaces
that were largely defined by and made up of light. The development
of new types of lamp – arc-lights, tungsten, neon, fluorescent – is
acknowledged but not lingered on. We don’t need to know how it is
produced – it is what it produces that matters. For historians, the
taken-for-granted, dispersed everywhere is always harder to deal
with than the occasional and the exceptional, which cling to a
particular time and place. On this account, Isenstadt’s book is a
considerable achievement. Subtitled ‘An Architectural History’, it
might more accurately be described as ‘A Cultural History’, though
one which emphasises the spatial. If this is an ‘architectural
history’, it is architecture taken in the widest – and best – sense, as
what changes space, and as an agent of sensory perception and of
social relations. Architects themselves hardly make an appearance,
except to remark on their early resistance to electric light, and on
the slowness of their take-up of its possibilities. Instead, the book is
about the very particular changes to our ways of being in the world
that have been brought about by electric light, changes that are
coterminous with modernity.
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Yablochkov Candles illuminate the Boulevard De l’Opera.
“L'Avenue de l'Opéra éclairée par les lampes Jablockoff,”
Lumière Électrique: Revue Universelle d’Électricité, 4:38
(Aug. 10, 1881)
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“Electric Light’s Golden Jubilee” commemorative two-cent
stamp, issued in 1929 by the U.S. Post Office, to celebrate the
50th anniversary of Thomas Edison’s demonstration of the
incandescent light bulb.
‘Instantaneous, malleable, ubiquitous, evanescent, electric light is
modernity’s medium,’ says Isenstadt. Modern too is electricity’s
ability to make spaces less particular in regard to each other: ‘a
well-lit workspace no longer needed to cleave to the edge of a
building. Easily accessed electric light made space more fungible’.
Electricity makes everywhere, if not the same, at least open to
many more possible uses. This is a book about modernity; it
engages with the theorists of modernity, from Marx to Adorno, to
Berman. Above all, it accepts that modernity changes us all
irreversibly. Perceptions of buildings, interiors, cities and roads
have all been affected by electric light – and we have become
accustomed to seeing space in a particular kind of way, from which
there is no going back. Modernity, to borrow the title of one of
Walter Benjamin’s books, is a one-way street. As the electrical
engineer Matthew Luckiesh, head of General Electric’s Research
department, speculated, electric light could modernise vision itself.

‘Instantaneous, malleable, ubiquitous,

evanescent, electric light is modernity’s
medium,’ says Isenstadt
Electric Light, befitting its subject, proceeds by spotlighting certain
themes: switches and remote control; night driving; factory
lighting; and illuminated advertising – Times Square and its many
imitators. Each of these is dealt with in terms of the way that
electricity altered and shaped perception. The story told is from the
early development of electric light in the 1880s up to World War II,
and it is almost exclusively about the USA. These two choices,
temporal and geographical, make sense in that the US was one of
the principal innovators in electric lighting, and it can be argued
that it is when a technology first comes into use that its effects are
most marked. As a modern medium, its greatest impact was in the
early 20th century, when many of modernity’s more transformative
effects were most abruptly felt. Furthermore, Americans seem to
have been exceptionally assiduous in measuring and monitoring the
effects of electric light on human life. Whether other countries
would throw up quite the same abundance of research on electric
light as Isenstadt has found there is worth considering. American
science – and cod-science’s – fascination with electric light may be
to do with pervasiveness of scientific management, and the desire
to quantify every aspect of human labour. Research into factory
lighting, initially undertaken to improve productivity, overflowed
into the measurement of light’s effects in every other aspect of life.


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Progress in lighting from antiquity to 1900. “Eclairage,”
Nouveau Larousse Illustré, vol. 4, Claude Augė, ed., (Paris:
Libraire Larousse, 1900)


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Art and Science, twin pillars of the Lighting Expert. Matthew
Luckiesh, “Linking Science and Art with Practice in Lighting,”
TIES 12 (Feb, 1917).


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Edison was often compared to Prometheus, who stole light
from the Gods for the use of humanity. The image
recapitulates the mystic origin myth of electric light that were
common in the early decades of electric lighting. Maxfield
Parrish, Prometheus, oil on panel created for General Electric
calendars advertising Edison Mazda Lamps, 1919. Credit:
2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome
 

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Glare is as much a matter of placement as absolute
brightness. Here, “serious glare” is created by a lamp placed
at the curve of a country road, obscuring cars approaching
from beyond the curve. Preston Millar, “The Effective
Illumination of Streets,” Transactions of the American
Institute of Electrical Engineers 35 (June, 1915).
Despite the richness of the evidence about lighting from early 20th
century America, the exclusive attention to the country, and to the
years before 1945, does skew the story. In the American account of
electric light, productivity and commercial gain surface as the two
dominant themes. On one hand, lighting in the workplace and
heightened attention were means to make workers more efficient;
on the other, the spectacle of illuminated advertising in towns and
cities stimulated consumption. But if attention were shifted to
Europe at the same period, other considerations might take their
place. Isenstadt does not write about the floodlighting of
monuments and historic buildings, yet it was a feature of European
cities from early on – the Eiffel Tower, the Tower of London, and
many other monuments were floodlit for reasons unrelated to
productivity or commercial gain. Fairs, like the 1929 Barcelona
International Exposition, were designed primarily for their night-
time, illuminated effect, and although there was a precedent for
this in the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, the sophistication of the
lighting effects went far beyond the in-your-face spectacle of Times
Square. In cities that already regarded themselves as ‘Works of
Art’, electric illumination recast their public spaces and monuments
as a night-time experience for their citizens’ benefit. Or, to take a
more sinister example, Speer’s dramatic lighting at the 1936
Nuremburg rally, the ‘cathedral of light’, was certainly not directed
at either productivity or commerce.

The moment one is most aware of what a

technology does is when one is deprived of
it. Isenstadt’s final chapter on World War II
blackouts is vital to the story
The moment one is most aware of what a technology does is the
moment when one is deprived of it. This is as true of electric light
as of any other technology, and Isenstadt’s final chapter on World
War II blackouts is vital to the story. People had to learn again to
find their way in the dark: ‘blackouts revealed the underside of
electric light’. Freud had written about the disorientating effect of
stumbling about a darkened room looking for the light switch, but
now this experience was translated to an urban scale. But it is in
this important, and original, chapter that the restriction to America,
and pre-1945, become most apparent. Urban blackouts in the US
were never complete, and more of a token for the purpose of
creating citizen solidarity on the home front; in Europe on the other
hand, they were total, and a matter of life or death. Europeans’
scotopic experiences would be a richer story – though,
characteristically, it was in America that there was most research
into the effects of blackouts. Likewise, the 1945 cut-off date
excludes the great power cuts that are in people’s living memory,
like the 1977 New York power cut that left nine million without
electricity for two days: everyone who lived through that had a
story to tell.

What would a longer, more geographically diverse history of

electric light tell us? More of the same, one suspects, for the most
obvious feature must be brighter lamps, LEDs, more and more
lumens, and the great artificial suns on slender stalks that
illuminate goodsyards, container terminals, and sometimes entire
towns. But then there is Las Vegas, not just an extension of Times
Square, but a city of lights made to be seen from a moving car,
rather than by a stationary or slow-moving pedestrian. Where the
English writer Arnold Bennett suffered linguistic paralysis on
seeing Times Square – ‘These sky signs annihilated argument…
“You must not expect me to talk”’ – Las Vegas has had the very
opposite effect on its countless visitors.

Adrian Forty is professor emeritus at the Bartlett School of

Architecture, UCL, and author of ‘Words and Buildings’ and
‘Concrete and Culture’

Tesla Unveils Fully-Integrated Solar Roof System

e years ago, Elon Musk revealed his company Tesla’s latest world-changing innovation: a solar roof
system so fully integrated into a home’s architecture as to be indistinguishable from a traditional
roof. Made from textured glass, the tiles feature microscopic louvres that allow light to pass
through while blocking views to the photovoltaic cell within

Energy in the home

The way we use electricity in the home affects the amount of electricity we need to
generate. If we are wasteful then we need to make more.

In order to reduce our carbon footprint in our homes and also to reduce our reliance on
Scotland's energy resources, we can:

 have roof and cavity wall insulation installed to reduce the heat energy lost from
our homes
 have our windows double or triple glazed to reduce heat loss through our
windows
 switch off unwanted lights and appliances to reduce unnecessary energy use
 makeuse of energy efficient electrical appliances such as low energy light bulbs
where possible