Browsing by Author "Sobel, Robert"

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    A growth/change strategy for planning space science laboratory facilities
    (1968) Robinson, James Y; Sobel, Robert
    The purpose of this thesis is to establish a growth/change principle and demonstrate its application for space science laboratory facilities. Laboratories by nature need to be flexible. They need the capability to grow and change as experimental requirements dictate. To achieve this capability, a system based on a growth principle is needed. The method of achieving this objective was: To determine a growth principle by exploring general methods of growth. To determine the functional areas of the laboratory environment by analyzing existing laboratories in various fields of research and by inventory of the specific resources of the Manned Spacecraft Center, Houston. To determine the proportions of the functional areas to each other. This required the use of a computer and the development of a computer program capable of determining these proportions. To determine the limits of variation for each proportional relationship by analysis of the proportions provided by the computer. Finally, to test this growth principle and its determinants by applying them in a demonstration of a design for a space science laboratory system.
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    Topography and urban form
    (1966) Kurt, Charles Martin; Sobel, Robert
    Man is more drastically changing the face of the earth: also his structures are beginning to challenge those which nature provides. The city is, and will continue to be, the largest of these structures. The relationship of the city to the landforms is changing because some of the basic reasons for their importance to the city have changed. And functionally a much greater freedom exists for both the location and the form of the urban agglomeration. Thus a new responsibility exists as well. This responsibility involves a new appraisal as to what landforms meant to man and his urban form in the past and an analysis of what qualities they have which can be beneficial to the city today. In short, how they can be employed as design elements. This problem of the changing scale of man’s activities has been voiced by many writers from many different fields and has been of special concern since the turn of the century. Their views have been both of man’s influence on the earth itself and, of greater concern, the significance of natural land features which man has or has not recognized in giving a character and discipline to this urban form. In order to understand the present and propose for the future in man’s use of the earth form as it relates to his urban form, one must know what factors have changed. Man’s close identification with the earth began in the earth itself, the cave, as his first permanent shelter. Until the relatively recent times, topography remained unthreatened as the major three-dimensional element both of his everyday nomadic life and later his urban environment. He depended on land features for guiding his trails, orienting him to his hunting grounds, observation and protection from his enemy, and even serving as the basis of his religious beliefs. If the urban planner can inject some of this simplicity in approach into the complexity of the city, those surviving elements of this simplicity may suggest a framework for present and future town-building. Topography has since slowly become a passive agent; it permits, but it no longer compels. Industrialization has overcome the functional limitations. Now it is man's structures which attempt to give form to the urban environment. The only means he has to retain a semblance of the natural world in the ever increasing scale and artificiality of the urban form unrelated to it is to visualize a new urban form as a recognition, appraisal, expression, and reinforcement of the characteristic topographical features in his particular urban environment, an approach to city building as an art of the place rather than as a technique. The demonstration illustrates the existing and the possible role of topography in the urban environment of Dubuque, Iowa. It consists of two phases: first, a historical and critical topographic survey examining the influence of the topographical features in its present composition; a proposal in view of changing technology employing the topographic features as a new framework.
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    Visual simulation in time
    (1968) Gardner, Frederick C.; Sobel, Robert
    Architectural design has always been limited to static procedures of study. The means of study has a profound effect on the shape and form of the result. The discovery of perspective drawing during the 15th century had a strong influence on Renaissance architecture. Buildings and spaces were designed to be seen from static, fixed viewpoints. Space was regarded as a two-dimensional or pictorial composition. Today we are witnessing the effect on architecture of another media: the chipboard model. Buildings are springing up with blank planes of natural concrete and detailing that makes them look like blown up chipboard models. Motion is becoming an ever more important factor in architectural design as the architect must deal with spaces through which the viewer will be moving at a specific rate of speed (flying, driving, walking). Space can no longer be thought of as pictorial, from a static viewpoint. The fact that the viewer is moving and that he is moving at a given rate, not only has a profound effect on the way the spatial envelope is perceived but on the way a building itself is perceived. This paper describes a tool developed at Rice University which enables the architect to study, represent and communicate his designs in terms of movement.