Archive for November, 2010

History of Building Construction

Building construction is an eternal human activity. It developed with the wholly practical need for a controlled environment to moderate the effects of climate. Constructed shelters were one means by which human beings were able to adapt themselves to the great variety of weather conditions and become a global species.

Human abodes were at first very simple and perhaps lasted only a few days or months. Over time, however, even semi-permanent structures evolved into such highly refined forms as the igloo. Over time more durable structures began to appear, particularly after the advent of farming, when people began to remain in one place for long periods. The early structures, but later other functions, such as food storage and ceremony, were placed in other structures. Some buildings began to have symbolic as well as functional value, marking the start of the distinction between architecture and building.

The history of building is marked by several trends. One is the increasing durability of the materials used. Early construction materials were flimsy, such as leaves, branches, and animal hides. Later, more durable natural materials—eg clay, stone, and timber—and, finally, synthetic materials—such as brick, concrete, metals, and plastics—were used. Another is the desire for structures of ever greater height and span; this was made possible by the development of stronger materials and by knowledge of how materials behave and how to exploit them to greater advantage. Another major trend involves the degree of control exercised over the interior environment of buildings: increasingly precise regulation of air temperature, light and sound levels, humidity, odours, air speed, and other elements that affect our comfort has been made possible. Yet another factor is the change in energy available to the building process, starting with human muscle power and moving toward the powerful machinery used today.

The present state of home construction is complex. There is a wide range of building products and systems which are aimed specifically at classes of building types or markets. The design process for buildings is very well organised and calls upon research establishments which study material properties and performance, code officials who develop and enforce safety standards, and design professionals who determine user needs and design a building to meet those needs. The construction process is also highly organised; it includes the manufacturers of building products and systems, the craftsmen who assemble them on the building site, the contractors who hire and coordinate the work of the craftsmen, and consultants who have expertise in such aspects as building management, quality control, and insurance.

Building construction today is an important part of modern culture, a product of its range and complexity and a measure of its control of natural forces, which can produce a widely varied built environment to serve the diverse needs of society. This article first outlines the history of building construction, then looks at its development at the present time.

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Retail Shopfitting: Making Your Business Work for You

Getting ahead of your competitors is important -particularly when setting up a business, so what better way to implement this than to use the services of retail shopfitting companies? These companies work by helping you with the planning, designing and planning of construction of your shop within a short period of time and well within the range of your budget so your business can start working for you as soon as possible. This can include lighting, flooring, security and a host of other services that are most necessary in the behind-the-curtains operations of the shop.

With retail shopfitting, you are guaranteed to have a store that is customer and employee-friendly to better place your business in the right track. Whether you are setting up a retail clothing outlet, a restaurant, a bar or a business center, shopfitting companies are able to create the perfect ambience for everyone. Just imagine what satisfied customers and employees will do for your business. It is a rule of thumb that when your employees are happy with their working environment, they will become more productive, thus increasing your profit in the long run. To make sure that your employees are well taken care of, give them a working environment that they will surely enjoy.

If you want to attract more customers to your shop, then keep in mind that first impressions matter. Retail shopfitting companies ensure that the interior of your store will attract your customers and are sure to leave an impression in their minds. Not only that, but these companies can create a layout for your shop that will make it easier for them to find all the things they want so your employees will have more time to do their job.

The best thing about using retail shopfitters for your business is that they can guarantee quality work all the time. Not only that, but they will be working round the clock to be able to meet the time frame you have in mind so you can open your business immediately. Retail shopfitting is definitely one of the best options that you can opt for.

Make your store or business the talk of the town and leave a lasting impression with your clients and employees by setting up a place that they can enjoy. You will see how improved your business can be in just a short period of time. Start earning today with the help of these shopfit companies.

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Four Essential Art Supplies for Professional and Budding Painters

Before you can create the best artworks that reflect your unique painting style, you will need to secure four essential art supplies that can help you define your deepest feelings onto the canvas. Once you have obtained these important tools, you can already explore the world of art without anything holding you back. Here are the necessary supplies that can help you to create your very own masterpiece.

Paintbrushes
Every painter needs a brush to convey a feeling to his or her audience. Start collecting different kinds of brushes that can assist you while you are exploring different painting techniques. Start with a flat synthetic brush to create simple works of art. As your skills continue to improve, look for other art supplies such as flat bristle brushes, Filbert brushes, and sable brushes (and think outside of the box, trying items such as rubber wedges, potato/lino cut shapes}. All of these tools can add variety to every idea you were able to put into paintings.

Palettes and palette knives
While you are using oil-based paint, you will need to use a wood palette to hold them. Do not forget to clean your palette at the end of all your painting sessions. If you want to use acrylic paints, use a paper palette or any plastic surface instead of a wooden palette.

You can use palette knives to mix the paint on your wooden or paper palette. Try to look for trowel-shaped palette knives that you can use to remove the paint from your canvas or palette.

Oil paint and special mediums
Oil paint is one of the most common art supplies used for painting images with tactile textures. Their versatile nature can help you use thin and thick textures for your artworks. Since they tend to dry slowly, you will have enough time to work the oil paint on the canvas and to scrape some of the paint off for revisions.

You will also need special mediums to thin the oil paint every time it becomes too thick. You can also use it for cleaning your brushes and using special techniques such as glazing.

Artist’s canvas
When purchasing canvases, you should have the option to purchase a stretched canvas or a canvas board. Stretched canvases are conveniently mounted on stretcher bars, and can be displayed on walls even when they are not framed.

If you have a limited budget, try using canvas boards as an alternative to high-end stretched canvases. Although they are cheaper than stretched canvases, they can deliver better results with their durable card panels and versatile surfaces.

With these four key art supplies, you are ready share the beautiful images you were able to visualise by preserving them into an exceptional work of art.

If you are looking for art supplies, including school art supplies, make sure you check out Discount Art. The range of art supply specials is extensive and as a member you get a 10 percent discount.

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The Importance of Branding for Businesses

Branding is a crucial part of any enterprise. It clearly defines what your business is all about and it differentiates you from other businesses in that industry. Whatever the nature of your business is, be it non-profit or SME, it is important to pay attention to branding as this reflects how your business is run and it will also determine how it will grow in the next few years.

While numerous senior managers ignore the importance of branding because they prefer to pay more attention to other areas such as issuing of sales, restructuring and cost-cutting, it is still important to pay attention to the brand of the business as this is how your customers are going to define you. It is a known fact that a lot of people are very particular about brands, they don’t shop aimlessly; they look for their favorite brands. Since most people seek well-established brands when they go out shopping, it has become a common notion among many businessmen that to begin anew can be detrimental to a business because it would be difficult to compete with existing brands in the industry. This is not true at all. In fact, people are always looking for new and fresh brands.

The Internet alone offers enough of a testament to the importance of branding. The accomplishment of your product online depends not only on the visibility and its visual appeal -how your brand is portrayed is also important. Keep in mind that first impressions are generally made by brands.

Branding focuses primarily on perception. A brand that has a reputation for being dependable would most likely gain more sales with fewer risks whereas brands that have gotten a reputation for taking their customers for granted would immediately be avoided by most consumers.

A number of businesses these days consider their brand an essential asset. Those that have been in business for quite some time have brands that make up a good portion of the company’s stocks.

There are also several companies that use their brand as an organising principle with their chief executive as the primary promoter of that brand. This is how some managers and CEOs of particular companies are associated with their brands. Regardless of whether you own the company or you are a manager, you can get numerous advantages from promoting yourself along with your brand. This is different from self-promotion because you are not looking to gain personal rewards. Instead, your aim is to show your customers that your brand has more value because you are promoting it yourself.

Aspects of branding include brochure design and web design. Brisbane has many choices when it comes to brand image including producting and formatting your company annual report.

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The Life of Artist Jackson Pollock

An American painter who was an exponential leader of Abstract Expressionism, an art movement made iconic by the impulsive gestures in paint sometimes called “action painting.” Throughout his life he received widespread commentary and top recognition for the radical “poured” or “drip” technique he mastered to create his major paintings. Among his contemporaries, he was acknowledged for his deeply personal and completely indestructible commitment to his work. His work had exceptional influence on the artists of the time and on varied following art movements in the States. He was also one of the first American painters to be acknowledged during his lifetime and posthumously as a peer of 20th-century European founders in revolutionary art.

Early life and work
Paul Jackson Pollock was the fifth and youngest son of Stella May McClure and LeRoy Pollock, who were both of Scotch-Irish extraction (LeRoy’s original surname was McCoy previous to his adoption about 1890 by the family Pollock) and he was born and raised in Iowa. The family moved from Cody, Wyoming, 11 months after Jackson’s birth; he would know Cody only by photographs. Throughout the subsequent sixteen years his family lived in California and Arizona, though going on to move nine times. In 1928 the Pollock family moved to Los Angeles, where Pollock enrolled at the Manual Arts High School. At school he was taught by Frederick John de St. Vrain Schwankovsky, a painter and illustrator who belonged to the Theosophical Society, a sect that promoted metaphysical and occult spirituality. Schwankovsky passed onto Pollock some essential technique in drawing and painting, introduced him to sophisticated trends of European contemporary art, and encouraged his curiosity in theosophical works. At the same time, Pollock – who had been raised as an agnostic – went to the camp meetings of the premier messiah of the theosophists, Jiddu Krishnamurti, also a personal friend of Schwankovsky. The spiritual explorations allowed him to recognise the ideas of the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung and the exploration of unconscious imagery in his paintings during the following years.

In fall, 1930, Pollock followed his brother Charles who in 1922 had decided to study art in New York, where he enrolled at the Art Students League under his brother’s teacher, the regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton. (Jackson left off his birth name, Paul, about his time in New York.) He studied life drawing, painting, and composition with Benton for the subsequent two and one-half years, leaving the league in the early part of 1933. For the subsequent two years Pollock lived in poverty, first with Charles and, by fall in 1934, with his brother Sanford. He went on to share an apartment in Greenwich Village with Sanford and his wife until 1942.

Pollock was employed by the WPA Federal Art Project in the 1935 fall as an easel painter. This job gave him financial security during the last few years of the Great Depression as well as the possibility to develop his art. From his time with Benton to 1938, Pollock’s technique was heavily impacted by the compositional methods and regionalist subject matter of his teacher and by the lyrically expressionist vision of the American painter Albert Pinkham Ryder. It involved a majority of small landscapes and figurative scenes for example Going West (1934–35), in which Pollock utilized motifs borrowed from photos of his birthplacein Cody.

In 1937 Pollock began psychiatric treatment for alcoholism, and he suffered a nervous breakdown in 1938, which caused him to be institutionalized for about four months. After these experiences, his work became semiabstract and showed the assimilation of motifs from the modern Spanish artists Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró, as well as the Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco. Jungian symbolism and the Surrealist exploration of the unconscious also influenced his works of this period; indeed, from 1939 through 1941 he was in treatment with two successive Jungian psychoanalysts who used Pollock’s own drawings in the therapy sessions.

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What is Action painting?

Action painting is a direct, instinctive, and extremely dynamic kind of technique that takes the erratic application of fast paced, generous brushstrokes and the chance effects of dripping and spilling paint all over the work. The term was first coined by the American art critic Harold Rosenberg in attempting to categorise the art from a group of American Abstract Expressionists (see Abstract Expressionism) who utilized the method since 1950. Action painting is distinguishable from the especially conceptual pieces of the “abstract imagists” and “colour-field” painters, which consists of the other primary direction seen in Abstract Expressionism and parallels Action painting only in their shared absolute significance to unfettered personal expression free of traditional aesthetic and/or social values.

The paintings of the Action painters Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Bradley Walker Tomlin, and Jack Tworkov highlight the significance of the “automatic” techniques that developed in Europe in the 1920s and ’30s by the Surrealists. While Surrealist automatism (q.v.), which were scribblings performed without the artist’s conscious design, was conceptually used to awaken unconscious associations in the viewer, the automatic technique of the Action painters was rather conceived as a means of giving the artist’s instinctive creative forces freedom and of exposing these forces directly to the viewer. In Action painting, the act of painting itself being the point of the artist’s physical contact with his piece, was as remarkable as the completed painting.

It is well understood that Jackson Pollock’s abstract drip paintings, executed from 1947, opened painting to the bolder, gestural techniques that are particular to Action painting. The fast-paced brushstrokes of de Kooning’s “Woman” series, begun in the early fifties, successfully evolved a deliciously emotive, expressive form. Action painting was of major influence during the fifties in Abstract Expressionism, with the most influential art movement happening in the US. By the 1960s, however, leadership of the movement had shifted to the colour-field and abstract imagist painters, whose followers in the 1960s leaned against the irrationality of the Action painters.

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What Country in the World has the Best Quality of Life?

While the question of which country has the foremost quality of life is often approached subjectively, a careful analysis of several factors is important to be able to dispose which one is the greatest objectively speaking. An objective approach would be to rate the superbness of life through the Human development index (HDI), which is an annual report, go on by the United Nations Development Fund.

According to the latest human development report by the United Nations, the country that has the sky-high quality of life in terms of HDI is Norway. The HDI goes beyond the GDP (Gross domestic product) to measure how developed a country is. It takes into account three important factors; life expectancy, adult literacy and education, and standard of living measured by purchasing power parity (PPP).

It provides a tortuous view of the relationship between income and well-being.

Norway ranks number one in the human development index due to the following reasons:
Norway scored a 0.98 in the HDI, with 1.00 being the highest. The country has the highest purchasing effectiveness parity.

Norway also has one of the lowest emigration rates. With only 3.9% of its citizens migrating to other countries.

As of the 2010 report, Norway has a total population of 4,898,600, which is pretty low compared to other countries. A good number of their population has high PPP rates.

Public education in the country is free, regardless of nationality. This means that everyone is given access to free education regardless of culture, religion, race and stature in life.

Norway has the second highest GDP per capita next to Luxembourg and the third highest GDP in terms of Purchasing power parity in the world.
The country is flushin natural resources including; petroleum, minerals, hydropower, marine life and forests.

While the cost of living in Norway is roughly around 30% higher than in the United States and about 25% higher than the United Kingdom, Norway still holds a place as one of the countries with the sky-scraping standard of living in the world.

Norway has also been ranked to be the world’s most well-functioning and stable country.

Based on the aforementioned reasons, there is no doubt that Norway is indeed the country that offers the best quality of life in the whole world. With a well-functioning economy, excellent public school system and excellent purchasing power parity, there is no dubiety that Norway would remain on top even for the next years to come.

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