Meal machine, experimental laboratory, status symbol, domestic prison, or the creative and spiritual heart of the home? Over the course of the past century no other room has been the focus of such intensive aesthetic and technological innovation, or as loaded with cultural significance. Kitchen design has been both a central concern of modernism and fundamental to our concept of modern life (Mo...

On Human Rights Day 1992, the United Nations proclaimed an International Year of the World’s Indigenous People. A Decade for Indigenous Peoples was subsequently launched, to run from 1995 to 2004, and a Forum of Indigenous Peoples established. The inaugural meeting of the Forum, held in Geneva in 1996, was unfortunately disrupted by gate-crashers. A self-styled delegation of South African Boers...

Edge-notched eccentrically compressed fracture specimens made of aggregate of reduced size are loaded in standard creep test frames. Measurements of the time rate of crack mouth opening in notched concrete specimens subjected to constant load of almost one month duration are reported and analyzed. To reveal the size effect, geometrically similar specimens of four sizes in the ratio I :2:4:8 are...

A simplified fracture-mechanics-based model of compression failure of centrically or eccentrically loaded quasi-brittle columns is presented and the size effect on the nominal strength of a column is predicted. Failure is modeled as propagation of a band of axial splitting cracks in a direction orthogonal or inclined with respect to the column axis. The maximum load is calculated from the condi...