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SUBJECT AREA: Electricity, Mechanical, pneumatic and hydraulic engineering, Public utilities

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Kaplan was educated at the Realschule in Vienna and went on to the Technische Hochschule to study machine construction, gaining his engineer's diploma in 1900. He spent a year in voluntary service in the Navy before entering Ganz \& Co. at Lebersdorf, where he was engaged in the manufacture of diesel engines. In 1903 he turned to an academic career, first with a professorship in kinematics, theoretical machine studies and machine construction at the Technische Hochschule in Brunn (now Brno). In 1918 he became Professor of Water Turbine Construction, remaining as such until his early retirement for health reasons in 1931.

Kaplan's first publication on turbines, in 1908, was an extension of work carried out for his doctorate at the Technische Hochschule in Vienna and concerned the Francis-type turbine. Kaplan went on to develop and patent the form of water turbine that came to bear his name. It is a reaction turbine which uses a large flow on a low head and which is made like a ship's propeller with variable-pitch vanes running in a close-fitting casing. Its application was neglected at first, but since the 1920s it has become the basic turbine for most high-powered hydroelectric plant: the turbines have been capable of around 85 per cent efficiency and modern developments have raised this figure still further. Perhaps the most impressive application of the Kaplan turbine and its derivatives is the great tidal-power scheme in the estuary of the Rance by St-Malo in France, completed in 1966. The turbines probably have to meet a greater demand for flexibility than any others, for they must operate at constant speed with variable head, as the tide ebbs and flows.

SUBJECT AREA: Paper and printing, Photography, film and optics

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Klic, sometimes known by the germanized form of his name Karl Klietsch, gained a knowledge of chemistry from his chemist father. However, he inclined towards the arts, preferring to mix paints rather than chemicals, and he trained in art at the Academy of Painting in Prague. His father thought to combine the chemical with the artistic by setting up his son in a photographic studio in Brno, but the arts won and in 1867 Klic moved to Vienna to practise as an illustrator and caricaturist. He also acquired skill as an etcher, and this led him to print works of art reproduced by photography by means of an intaglio process. He perfected the process c.1878 and, through it, Vienna became for a while the world centre for high-quality art reproductions. The prints were made by hand from flat plates, but Klic then proposed that the images should be etched onto power-driven cylinders. He found little support for rotary gravure, or rotogravure, on the European continent, but learning that Storey Brothers, textile printers of Lancaster, England, were working in a similar direction, he went there in 1890 to perfect his idea. Rotogravure printing on textiles began in 1893. They then turned to printing art reproductions on paper by rotogravure and in 1895 formed the Rembrandt Intaglio Printing Company. Their photogra-vures attracted worldwide attention when they appeared in the Magazine of Art. Klic saw photogravure as a small-scale medium for the art lover and not for mass-circulation publications, so he did not patent his invention and thought to control it by secrecy. That had the usual result, however, and knowledge of the process leaked out from Storey's, spreading to other countries in Europe and, from 1903, to the USA. Klic lived on in a modest way in Vienna, his later years troubled by failing sight. He hardly earned the credit for the invention, let alone the fortune reaped by others who used, and still use, photogravure for printing long runs of copy such as newspaper colour supplements.

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SUBJECT AREA: Architecture and building

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Loos was the son of a sculptor and trained as a mason before studying architecture at Dresden College of Technology between 1890 and 1893. He then spent three years in America in such diverse areas as New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and St Louis. He became a devotee of America and of building there, and he was particularly impressed by the work of Louis Sullivan. He returned to Austria in 1896 and set up practice in Vienna. His early work there was in line with the current Sezessionist mode, but he quickly came to disassociate himself from this trend and increasingly insisted upon very plain and functionalist designs: by 1908 he is quoted as saying that "the evolution of culture marches with the elimination of ornament from useful objects". By this time Loos had become the pace-setter for modern ideas and was designing houses constructed from modern materials in as severe and cubic a style as Le Corbusier (Charles-Edouard Jeanneret) was soon to do. Adolf Loos made many designs, but only a small proportion were translated into building. Of his notable interiors the Kartner Bau (1907) in Vienna had pride of place, while his Steiner Haus (1910) there is regarded as the earliest truly modern house in Europe. Cubic in form and with simplified fenestration, this was the forerunner of inter-war architecture. In 1920 Loos was appointed Chief Housing Architect for Vienna, but he resigned two years later. He spent some time in Paris mixing with avant-garde artists and architects and lectured for a time at the Sorbonne. His last commissions, after he had returned to Vienna in 1928, included some of his best work, notably the Muller House (1930) in Prague.

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SUBJECT AREA: Architecture and building

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Mies van der Rohe was the son of a stonemason and his early constructional training came from his father. As a young man he gained experience of the modern school from study of the architecture of the earlier leaders, notably Peter Behrens, Hendrik Berlage and Frank Lloyd Wright. He commenced architectural practice in 1913 and soon after the First World War was establishing his own version of modern architecture. His building materials were always of the highest quality, of marble, stone, glass and, especially, steel. He stripped his designs of all extraneous decoration: more than any of his contemporaries he followed the theme of elegance, functionalism and an ascetic concentration on essentials. He believed that architectural design should not look backwards but should reflect the contemporary achievement of advanced technology in both its construction and the materials used, and he began early in his career to act upon these beliefs. Typical was his early concrete and glass office building of 1922, after which, more importantly, came his designs for the German Pavilion at the Barcelona Exposition of 1929. These designs included his famous Barcelona chair, made from chrome steel and leather in a geometrical design, one which has survived as a classic and is still in production. Another milestone was his Tugendhat House in Brno (1930), a long, low, rectilinear structure in glass and steel that set a pattern for many later buildings of this type. In 1930 Mies followed his colleagues as third Director of the Bauhaus, but due to the rise of National Socialism in Germany it was closed in 1933. He finally left Germany for the USA in 1937, and the following year he took up his post as Director of Architecture in Chicago at what is now known as the Illinois Institute of Technology and where he remained for twenty years. In America Mies van der Rohe continued to develop his work upon his original thesis. His buildings are always recognizable for their elegance, fine proportions, high-quality materials and clean, geometrical forms; nearly all are of glass and steel in rectangular shapes. The structure and design evolved according to the individual needs of each commission, and there were three fundamental types of design. One type was the single or grouped high-rise tower, built for apartments for the wealthy, as in his Lake Shore Drive Apartments in Chicago (1948–51), or for city-centre offices, as in his Seagram Building in New York (1954–8, with Philip Johnson) or his Chicago Federal Centre (1964). Another form was the long, low rectangle based upon the earlier Tugendhat House and seen again in the New National Gallery in Berlin (1965–8). Third, there were the grouped schemes when the commission called for buildings of varied purpose on a single, large site. Here Mies van der Rohe achieved a variety and interest in the different shapes and heights of buildings set out in spatial harmony of landscape. Some examples of this type of scheme were housing estates (Lafayette Park Housing Development in Detroit, 1955–6), while others were for educational, commercial or shopping requirements, as at the Toronto Dominion Centre (1963–9).

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