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Fig. 3: Niagara Bridge, 1855. While Roebling worked on his first designs for the Niagara Bridge he registered a patent for his air-spinning process. The cables were thereafter directly produced at the site. His method is still used today.
In a joint research project with Beijing Tsinghua Heritage Institute for Digitization THID (Tsinghua University, Beijing), he is currently exploring the Western Buildings of the Old Summer Palace in Beijing. Among the central issues to be elucidated are the questions as to how Western building forms interacted with Chinese conceptions of architecture, how Chinese builders constructed these palaces by combining indigenous and imported methods of construction and how this intercultural translation was received (Schlimme 2013). In recent years the institute was also a cooperating partner in the collaborative project “Epistemic History of Architecture” (see “Collaborative research” below) (Renn, Osthues and Schlimme 2014). The focus on construction history was central to the international workshop “Italy in China. The Western Buildings in the Old Summer Palace Yuanmingyuan in Beijing”, organized by Hermann Schlimme in March 2014. Other conferences regularly touch upon issues of construction history, such as the symposia “‘Inventor e luce della buona e vera Architettura’: Bramante e gli ordini nuovi’ nell’architettura del Cinquecento e oltre” and “Carlo Fontana 16381714. Celebrato architetto”, both held in Rome in 2014. Among the case studies from recent years pertinent to this field, the work on the international patents of François Hennebique (Schlimme 2012) (Fig. 4) and on the construction of domes in Italy in the early modern period should be mentioned (Schlimme 2011). Max Planck Institute for the History of Science [MPIWG], Berlin MPIWG (http://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/de/index.html) in Berlin, founded in 1994, engages in a broad range of projects studying scientific thinking and practice as historical phenomena. Research addresses the evolution of new categories of thought, proof and experience to produce a historic epistemology. This approach is exemplified, both in terms of the issues raised and the methods employed, by the integration of the institute into DFG Collaborative Research Centre 644 “Transformationen der Antike” [Transformations of Antiquity] (www.sfb-antike.de). This Berlin-based cooperation boasts some 90 researchers from MPIWG plus altogether six departments from the Humboldt-Universität, the Freie Universität