Creating Shapes in Civil and Naval Architecture

The 14 articles of this collection were offered at the December 2006 Workshop held at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany. Though they discuss construction of ships and buildings over a wide span of time, from the ancient Mediterranean world of the Hittites, Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans to the late Middle Ages, the papers are unified by a common focus on the issue of shape creation, making the collection coherent and useful to a broad range of readers. Individual paper topics include analysis of the use of geometry on the late Roman ships in Mainz, Germany; classical approaches to curvature in Corinthian capitals and amphitheaters; and late medieval vault geometry. Several of the articles detail methodologies for the study of shape creation and building replicas. Appendices are included on technical aspects such as molds and curves and a bibliography of historical metrology. Over 50 color plates supplement the text. Annotation c2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Horst Nowacki, Dr.-Ing. (1963) in Naval Architecture, Technical University of Berlin, Prof. of Ship Design at TU Berlin (1974-1998), has published about 200 articles and books on naval architecture and ship theory including Computational Geometry for Ships, co-authored with M.I.G. Bloor and B. Oleksiewicz (World Scientific Publ., Singapore, 1995).Wolfgang Lefevre, Ph.D. (1972) in Philosophy, Freie Universitat Berlin, Professor for Philosophy at the Freie Universitat Berlin and Senior Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, until 2006. He has published extensively on history of philosophy, science, and technology including Picturing Machines (MIT Press, 2004).