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The House Gone Missing: The Digital Turn and the Architecture of Dwelling
Get PDFThe digital turn in architecture seems to have displaced the house as a paradigm for architectural theory. Omitting the house, and with it, housing and dwelling as key sites for the reconstitution of the discipline, recent theorisations of the digital in architecture have almost exclusively focused on new methods of production and notions of materiality alongside profound changes to the urban and social dimensions of the built environment. The Covid-19 pandemic has unveiled the multifaceted dimensions of the impact of the new digital technologies on dwelling as private houses transformed into online workspaces. It calls for a reflection on the question of dwelling as formulated by Martin Heidegger in 1951, when he suggested that answers won’t be found in technology and quantitative approaches to the pressing housing urgency of the time, but rather in a rethinking of culture through existentialist philosophy. The question of dwelling after the digital turn leads to scrutiny of the history of the digitisation of the house and the shifting nature of domesticity, and to an exploration of involved motivations and values, oscillating between a techno-utopianism to a techno-capitalism. While the boundaries between real and virtual realms are blurred, the house and dwelling find a reconceptualisation in ecological and relational terms, thereby dissolving the house as a discrete object or entity. Privacy, autonomy, and physicality are in need of a rebalancing
Climate Change and the Resilience of Collective Memories: The Case Study of Fındıklı in Rize, Türkiye
Get PDFVernacular heritage sites encompass customs, practices, places, objects, artistic expressions, and values that are innate to a particular place and time. Climate knowledge of the particular place and time is embedded in vernacular settlements and lifestyles along with other environmental, cultural, and societal determinants of the place. Rebuilt, restored, and adapted, vernacular settlements evolved with changing climate, cultural practices, community aspirations, and a gradual influx of modernization and urbanization. However, its legacy —as represented by traditional houses from the pre-industrial period that were built by laypeople— is challenged by climate and disaster risks, e.g., loss of lands, food sources, water resources, intangible values, and displacement. Although the impacts of climate change combined with anthropic influences have been recognized as a threat to cultural heritage by scholars, this underappreciated form of cultural heritage has not been the focus of the integrated understanding risks of climate and disaster discussions. The aim of this dissertation, therefore, is to reveal the deteriorations caused by changing climate and anthropic interventions on vernacular heritage at both spatial planning decisions such as urban development projects and at local level practices such as maladaptation from the case of Fındıklı of Rize in Turkiye. The factors behind the deterioration of vernacular heritage sites under changing climate and the ways to achieve climate resilience are analysed through interviews with local people, the observations of on-site visits conducted in January and July 2019 in addition to mapping
Locating Automated Parcel Lockers (APL) with known customers’ demand: a mixed approach proposal
Get PDFLogistics Service Providers (LSP) are increasingly adopting Automated Parcel Lockers (APLs) to mitigate the operational pressure of last-mile logistics. The optimal location of APL stations is key for reaching customers’ demand while keeping the investment reasonable. Previous studies developed optimization algorithms and applied them to virtual instances of the problem, lacking applicability to real-life situations encountered by LSPs who aim to serve an urban area with such technology. This study proposes a novel solution to the APLs location problem by combining mixed-integer linear programming and greedy heuristics algorithms. The study tested the propose solution on real customers’ demand data related to Turin, Italy. Results show that covering 90% of the estimated potential demand requires 10 to 11 APLs, on average. The adopted approach enables finding an optimal solution grounded in a real geographical context without requiring time-consuming optimization
Dirty Work
Get PDFThere is a tradition in architecture and art – proclaimed by Leon Battista Alberti, Adolf Loos and others – to refrain from dirt. According to such an understanding, architectural and creative thinking and making are conceived as an intellectual and pure endeavor. Dirt, impurity, contamination are, however, inevitable when firmly grounding architecture and other ways of worldmaking in our complex reality. I therefore advocate “dirty work” as a modus operandi that is more suitable for the enormous challenges that we are facing. Dirty work demands active material and bodily engagements with places and environments instead of idealizations and abstractions from a distance. It relies on fieldwork as a practice of working in, with and through the field, its materiality and the immaterial relations that it is made up of
From Planning for Rural Development to Planning for Deliberation: Reflecting the Mehr als Wohnen 4.0 Project
Get PDFThis article is a twofold reflection. It narrates the reflections going on during the first phase of a project within the wider context of shrinkage and pro-growth regional planning and in the course shows the little shifts in action and adjustments of attention that happened in consequence. It presents a tailored participatory approach that links the local and the regional scale and, in doing so, highlights the challenges of working within fixed geographical and regulatory boundaries as well as within established planning goals and strategies. Based on these experiences surrounding the development of a regional vision for “more than housing” in eastern upper Styria, the article offers a critical analysis on the reach of the project
Taking Place: Reflections from the Fieldworker
Get PDFThis issue of Writingplace Journal moves into the field, exploring the moment when reflection turns into action, and questions how knowledge produced via research is appraised and applied on the ground. In the articles, authors reflect upon their concrete experiences where insights regarding the city and its narratives have been made operational. Understanding the urban as a complex expression of social, historical, material, spatial and temporal relations between people and their built environment, we argue that this comprehension of places demands and envisions action, by which active and transformative processes take place in the real world. Fieldwork is in this sense both research and event, both investigative process and performative project
Landscape Policies ‘by Design’
Get PDFWhat role do policies play in shaping landscapes, especially in the context of the climate crises, considering the specific geographical and historical history of landscape practices? The first part of the essay discusses “operative landscapes” (Brenner) and “reciprocal landscapes” (Hutton) as a framework to look at the global exploitation of hinterland landscapes shaped by policies. We interrogate the role that both landscape images and landscape policies have historically played in today’s urban-rural divides, displacements and dependencies. Through cartographic examples, we propose the notion of policy palimpsests to look critically at the overlapping of forms of territorialisation through policies over time. In this framework, we interrogate the role and agency of landscape-oriented designers in policy-making to re-imagine and re-think alternative relations between nature and society. In the second part, we look at two examples from the work of Groundlab, demonstrating instances where designers actively participate in transdisciplinary teams to co-produce future visions through policy advocacy. These ways of seeing are encapsulated in the landscape visions that bring to the fore the labour and materials that sustain urban agglomerations
On the design of bank revetments at inland waterways subjected to ship-induced water level drawdown: A probabilistic infinite slope analysis
Get PDFTo protect embankments along German inland waterways against local slope sliding failure caused by ship-induced water level drawdown, they are mainly secured by bank revetments. Often, large embankment sections are designed on the basis of a limited number of field and laboratory tests. Thus, uncertainties arise with regard to the mechanical and hydraulic ground properties. Current design standards account for these uncertainties by conservative design assumptions and empirical knowledge. This paper investigates the effects of vertically non-homogeneous ground properties on the required armour layer thickness using 1D random fields and an infinite slope model, which was modified to account for ship-induced drawdowns. Within the limitations of the infinite slope assumptions, the effects of a spatially variable friction angle and hydraulic conductivity are investigated and compared to deterministic benchmark cases. The investigations show that the level of safety obtained with the deterministic design depends strongly on the choice of the characteristic values. Particularly, the hydraulic conductivity determines the reliability of the design. In some cases, the 5 % quantile of the hydraulic conductivity does not yield a conservative estimate of the required armour layer thickness. In the case of the effective friction angle, the 5 % quantile may overestimate the required armour layer thickness for permeable soils. For less permeable soils, the 5 % quantile meets the solution of the random field analyses. For the combination of random effective friction angle and random hydraulic conductivity, all investigated benchmark studies seem to ensure engineering safety, but on different reliability levels. Based on these findings, recommendations regarding site exploration and choice of characteristic values of hydraulic conductivity and effective friction angle are provided
Wave environment analysis at Norwegian harbours for land-based aquaculture facilities using a combined phase-averaging and phase-resolving numerical modelling approach
Get PDFNumerical wave modelling of Norwegian coastal areas is challenging due to the drastically varying bathymetry, irregular coastline, and large domains of interest. The widely used phase-averaging models are limited by such bathymetric and topographic conditions. Phase-resolving models provide higher accuracy regarding strong nonlinear wave transformations with the trade-off of a higher computational cost. This study provides a combined phase-averaging and phase-resolving modelling approach to analyse the wave conditions for on-shore aquaculture facilities at the site candidates Fiskenes and Breivik, Andøya, Norway. The phase-averaging spectral model SWAN is used for the offshore sea state analysis based on the offshore hind-cast data. The analysis is performed on cascade nested grids, with increasing accuracy closer to the proposed harbour locations. A novel interpolation algorithm is proposed to provide comprehensive sea state information with every offshore wave directions without requiring additional simulations. The critical wave conditions are identified from SWAN and used as input to the open-source phase-resolving fully nonlinear potential flow model REEF3D::FNPF. Four scenarios are investigated and densely spaced wave gauges in the entire computational domain provide the distribution of significant wave height. The combined and cascade simulation approach helps to achieve a balance between computational efficiency and accuracy for large-scale marine environment assessment. The results show detailed wave statistics in the entire area of relevance near both harbours and provide a quantitative reference for both the site choice and the harbour design
Investigating hydraulic loads on a crossbar block ramp using two different computational fluid dynamics models and a physical validation model
Get PDFCrossbar block ramps provide bed stability and facilitate ecological connectivity in rivers. Two major sources of uncertainty in determining their design loads are their massively turbulent flow and backwater influence.
Here, they were addressed using two computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models (created with OpenFOAM) of a complete crossbar block ramp by recording loads (forces and moments) on single crossbars. To model turbulence, the first model used the Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) approach, and the second model used Large Eddy Simulation (LES). The flow in both models was transient and the free surface was tracked. Their mesh was identical and consisted of about 30.3 million cells distributed on 480 processor cores. The computed sampling interval was 180 s. The CFD models were tested against measurements of water level and pressure from a physical model. All models were in the same scale, 1: 20/3. Three discharges representing three typical flow regimes were studied in each model.
Characteristics of the flow regimes were reproduced in all models. The RANS model was up to 5.3 times faster, but produced excessive waves, which likely caused over- and underestimation of crossbar loads. The LES model showed good agreement to the physical model and could be used for load predictions. However, a longer sampling interval as well as a larger variety of discharges would be required to obtain stochastically reliable estimations for the maximum loads. Both models indicated that unsteady waves in the wake-interference flow regime must be considered to find critical loads. The results can support decisions on the methods for future investigations of hydraulic loads on crossbar block ramps