The current study focuses on the development of silanized graphene oxide reinforced basalt fiber/epoxy composites for enhanced tribological and viscoelastic properties. The modified-graphene oxide nanoplatelets were characterized using energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy, and Raman analyses. Pin-on-disk wear test and dynamic mechanical thermal analysis were conducted to determine the tribological and viscoelastic properties of the fabricated specimens with different silanized-graphene oxide loadings in the matrix (0–0.5 wt.% at a step of 0.1). The multiscale specimens were fabricated using the hand lay-up technique. The best silanized-graphene oxide loading for effectively enhancing the tribological properties was found to be 0.4 wt.%, whose wear rate and friction coefficient were 62% and 44%, respectively lower than those of the neat basalt/epoxy composite. The examination of the worn surfaces showed the enhanced basalt fiber/epoxy bonding in graphene oxide-reinforced specimen. From the results of dynamic mechanical thermal analysis, the specimen filled with 0.4 wt.% silanized-graphene oxide demonstrated the highest increase of 130% and 13.6℃ in the storage modulus and glass transition temperature as compared to the neat composite. This study indicated that the addition of silanized-graphene oxide considerably enhanced the tribological and viscoelastic properties of the fibrous composites. ... Read more

When life itself becomes a political project, any distinction between space of action and dwelling ceases to exist. This differentiation indeed is tended to neutralise the life itself. The emergence of such forms of life has progressively eroded the strict division between public and private space, between the space of living and space of political action. The city becomes at the same time a continuous field of exteriorised publicity and a sequence of autonomous, privatised interiors. Tehran is a paradigmatic case of the latter phenomenon; the house is the place where all the economic, political, social, theological and class conflicts are deployed. In Tehran, parallel to the Post- World War II political movements (1943-63), the immediate need for massive reconstruction not only resulted in developing new construction techniques and planning regulations, but also paved the way for direct implementation of series of political projects. Those attempts are commonly seen as political projects to instrumentalise new technology and modernist architectural and planning principles in order to tame the socio-political tensions. However the paper tends to read the first post- WWII housing projects in Tehran as instruments of social and political mobilisation, through which the city’s working class and middle-class re-established their social and spatial autonomy, through a dialectical process of action and resistance. ... Read more

Along with creativity, optimism and will, the early 1970’s London architecture scene was a moment of ideological conflict between political factions over which direction progress should be oriented. Instead of a victor being declared and a single vector followed, what resulted, at the Architectural Association at least, was an academic framework set up to preserve and even encourage such tendencies for conflict and divergence. Behemoth Press introduces here a text by Elia Zenghelis first published in 1975 that was originally written as a polemical response to a growing movement for unionization; a political form of labor that surely threatens the great productive potentials of competition and precarity. ... Read more