Parker Morris and the Fordist House

6.00 pm. If people like watching T.V. while they are eating their evening meal, space for a low table is needed (Ministry of Housing and Local Government, Space in the Home, 1963, p. 4).

This paper re-examines the 1961 Parker Morris report on housing standards in Britain. It explores the origins, scope, text and iconography of the report and suggests that these not only express a particularly modernist conception of space but one which presupposed very specific economic conditions and geographies.

Also known as Homes for Today and Tomorrow Parker Morris attempted, through the application of scientific principles, to define the minimum living space standards needed to accommodate household activities. But while early modernist research into notions of existenzminimum were the work of avant-garde architects and thinkers, Homes for Today and Tomorrow and its sister design manual Space in the Home were commissioned by the British State. This normalization of scientific enquiry into space can be considered not only as a response to new conditions in the mass production of housing – economies of scale, prefabrication, system-building and modular coordination – but also to the post-war boom in consumer goods. In this, it is suggested that the domestic interior was assigned a key role as a privileged site of mass consumption as the production and micro-management of space in Britain became integral to the development of a planned national economy underpinned by Fordist principles. Parker Morris, therefore, sought to accommodate activities which were pre-determined not so much by traditional social or familial ties but rather by recently introduced commodities such as the television set, white goods, table tennis tables and train sets. This relationship between the domestic interior and the national economy are emblematized by the series of placeless and scale-less diagrams executed by Gordon Cullen in Space in the Home. Here, walls dissolve as space flows from inside to outside in a homogenized and ephemeral landscape whose limits are perhaps only the boundaries of the nation state and the circuits of capital.

In Britain, Parker Morris was the last explicit State-sponsored attempt to prescribe a normative spatial programme for national living. The calm neutral efficiency of family-life expressed in its diagrams was almost immediately problematised by the rise of 1960s counter-culture, the feminist movement and the oil crisis of 1972 which altered perhaps forever the spatial, temporal and economic conditions it had taken for granted. The debate on space-standards, however, continues.

An analysis of implied volatility jump dynamics: Novel functional data representation in crude oil markets

The predominant fear in capital markets is that of a price spike. Commodity markets differ in that there is a fear of both upward and down jumps, this results in implied volatility curves displaying distinct shapes when compared to equity markets. The use of a novel functional data analysis (FDA) approach, provides a framework to produce and interpret functional objects that characterise the underlying dynamics of oil future options. We use the FDA framework to examine implied volatility, jump risk, and pricing dynamics within crude oil markets. Examining a WTI crude oil sample for the 2007–2013 period, which includes the global financial crisis and the Arab Spring, strong evidence is found of converse jump dynamics during periods of demand and supply side weakness. This is used as a basis for an FDA-derived Merton (1976) jump diffusion optimised delta hedging strategy, which exhibits superior portfolio management results over traditional methods.

Deactivation of Oxidation Catalysts by Oil-Derived Sulphur

The most common mode of deactivation suffered by catalysts fitted to two-stroke engines has traditionally been thermal degradation, or even meltdown, of the washcoat and substrate. The high temperatures experienced by these catalysts are caused by excessively high concentrations of HC and CO in the exhaust gas which are, in turn, caused by a rich AFR and the loss of neat fuel to the exhaust during the scavenging period. The effects of catalyst poisoning due to additives in the oil is often regarded as a secondary, or even negligible, deactivating mechanism in two-stroke catalysts and has therefore received little attention. However, with the introduction of direct in-cylinder fuel injection to some larger versions of this engine, the quantities of HC escaping to the exhaust can be reduced to levels similar to those found on four-stroke gasoline engines. Under these conditions, the effects of poisoning are much more significant to catalyst durability, particularly for crankcase scavenged derivatives which allow considerable quantities of oil to escape into the exhaust in a neat, or partially burned form. In this paper the effects of oil-derived sulphur on catalyst performance are examined using specialised test apparatus. The oil used throughout the study was formulated specifically for a two-stroke engine fitted with direct in-cylinder fuel injection. The sulphur content of this oil was 0.21% by mass and particular attention was paid to the role of this element in the resulting deactivation. The catalyst was also designed for two-stroke applications and contained a high palladium loading of 300g/ft3 (28g/l) to prolong the life of the catalyst. It was found that the sulphur caused permanent deactivation of the CO reaction and increased the light-off temperature by around 40oC after oiling for 60 hours. This deactivation was progressive and led to a reduction in surface area of the washcoat, particularly in the micropores of around 5Å diameter. By using a validated catalyst model the change in surface area of the precious metal was estimated. It was found that the simulated palladium surface area had to be reduced by a factor of around 7.5 to produce the light-off temperature of the deactivated catalyst. Conversely, the light-off temperature of the C3H6 reaction was barely affected by the deactivation.