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The balancing act: How public construction clients safeguard public values in a changing construction industry
Get PDFPublic bodies acting in the construction industry have to deal with major transitional issues, such as globalization and urbanization, population ageing, climate change and digitalization. Moreover, the public domain, private parties and society are becoming increasingly interdependent. As a result, safeguarding public values in the built environment has become ever more complex. Public bodies face the challenge to adhere to collective public values while confronted with private and societal values of external partners. This means that they have to deal with value pluralism and value-conflicts. In research, scarce attention has been paid to providing guidance to practitioners for dealing with multi-value trade-offs in operational processes. Hence, this research provides a construction-sector specific operationalization and a network perspective to the field of public value research. This research highlights the important role to be played by public commissioning in terms of safeguarding public values. It consists of three qualitative studies that utilize a range of different methods, including interviews, observations and document analysis. By this the research provides a contemporary perspective through which to study and execute the safeguarding of public values by public clients in the transition towards network governance in the construction industry. The dynamics of the sector-specific value interests of public construction clients, the occurrence of value conflicts in commissioning, and the safeguarding processes within both internal and external commissioning are studied. The practical implications derived from the research were translated into a value dialogue tool that can be used by public construction clients to professionalize safeguarding in their daily practice
Site-Archive-Medium: VR, Architectural History, Pedagogy and the Case of Lifta
Get PDFAbstract:
The Palestinian village of Lifta, located beneath the western entrance to the city of Jerusalem, holds a deep history within its site. Evacuated by the newly established Israeli military forces during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war – or the Nakba (‘The Catastrophe’) as it is referred to by the Palestinian population – the village and its remains are a unique locus of conflicted histories, archaeology and landscape, and of collective memories. This article presents the work conducted during an experimental design research workshop within the MIT School of Architecture and Planning. Taking Lifta’s site, as well as it historical and archaeological complexity, both real and imagined, as its archive, students developed their thematics following site-visits, interviews and research, and designed virtual experiences of the village, its multiple histories and narratives. The efforts provide epistemological and experiential cross-sections through the problematics of the site’s complex history. In the process of designing a possible platform for a critical historiography of Lifta, the projects aim to further the potential of immersive technologies as a pedagogical tool.
Keywords:
Architecture, History, Lifta, Israel-Palestine, Virtual Realit
In the Midst of the Revolution: The \u27Rond-Point\u27 as Media of Contention
No full textAbstract
The purpose of this essay is to explore the political agency of the rond-point, an element of infrastructural design which, since the 1980s, has become a ubiquitous feature of urban planning across the French territoire. Doesn’t the fact that the gilets jaunesseem to choose the peripheral roundabouts as their preferred sites of political contestation – while ignoring the square in the town centre – attest to a proverbial political unconscious? What makes the centres of the roundabouts amidst the informal peri-urban space such attractive mediators for the political causes of the gilets jaunes? The fact that thousands of yellow vests perseveringly chose to assemble at or on roundabouts requires us to come up with alternative ways of thinking the spatial settings for the appearance, the representation and the practice of ‘the political’, the res publicaor public matter.
Keywords
Architectural theory, political theory, contention, infrastructur
How to Spatially Mediate Conflicts?
Get PDFVarious forms of violence and conflict continue to shape our habitats. What historically has been straightforward and even obvious two-way dependency, in recent years took more subtle and covert form due to sophisticated technological advancements in the fields of media, surveillance and armament. Recognising the detrimental effects of these new developments on the way we experience, conceptualise and build our environments, Footprint27 proposes artistic reflections, cross-media inquiry and counter-tactics as new powerful tools to rethink the complex relationship between conflict, space and mediation. On one hand, the aim of this issue is to deepen and expand theoretical considerations that substantiate investigations of spatial conflicts by making them truly interdisciplinary. On the other, it seeks to empower architects and artists in their pursuit of exposing, critiquing and fighting spatial violence by reclaiming/unlocking the enormous potential of media tools
Multi-agent programming to enhance resiliency of earthquake-prone old metropolitan areas by transit-oriented development under public-private partnership
Get PDFDeteriorated urban areas in large cities have poor living standards, are inaccessible and small-sized, and have unstable building structures. Earthquake hazards may turn such situations into human disasters. In most cases, neither the governments nor the owners of these properties have enough budgets for renovating them. The purpose of this paper is to take advantage of Transit Oriented Development concepts to simultaneously solve two major urban area problems: (a) renovation of deteriorated urban areas and prevention of urban sprawl, and (b) design of transit network and promotion of transit-oriented development to reduce traffic congestion, pollution, and other unwanted outcomes of the extensive automobile use in large metropolitan areas. This paper proposes a bilevel multi-agent programming in which each agent maximizes the respective benefits while being subjected to the results of the decisions by others. We formulate the problem and solve it by a novel meta-heuristic algorithm. After analyzing the set of solutions to a test problem, we apply the algorithm on this rather large, real case urban area, and discuss the results. The solution results indicate that the proposed methodology: (a) reduces the total travel time in transportation networks of the city, (b) turns the deteriorated urban developments into a new and attractive environment, (c) provides a profitable investment for the construction industries in the context of Build-Operate-Transfer scheme, and (d) upgrades urban life for the city in general, and alleviates earthquake hazards for the inhabitants of the deteriorated urban areas, in particular
Passenger Flows at Escalators – Arriving at Count Interval for Design Flow Estimation
No full textSelection of a count interval to extract flow data on pedestrian facilities seems to be governed by the operational environment of the facility and context of the study. Based on the flow condition, which may be intermittent, uniform, or periodic, the count interval has been found varying between 1 minute and 5 minutes. For instantaneous peaks, it is reduced to even 10s. The selection of a count interval will impact the flow values and subsequently the design requirements and operational efficiency. Present study, in this light, focusses on escalators located at metro rail stations. The study region is Delhi, India. Based on the analysis, the count interval for data extraction is recommended as 24 seconds, which is expected to result in a flow that does not cause unnecessary increase in facility size and keep it usable for most of the time. The absolute design flow value may be considered between 140–148 ped/m/min, which is the 5th highest rank order peak flow. The results are expected to optimize the resources, both for data collection and size of a facility
How to Speak? A Conversation with Alberto Perez-Gomez about the Necessity of Language to Understand and Practice Architecture
Get PDFElaborating on a host of historical and theoretical references, in this conversation Alberto Pérez-Gómez suggests a course of action for the development of the architectural discipline; opposing the banality of scientism and rationalism, and recognizing instead the need for a degree of obscurity and ambiguity as essential to the full exercise of our humanity in relation to what we build and inhabit. Metaphors, myths, stories and poems, he notes, are not only useful instruments to represent architecture’s aesthetics and purpose, but elemental human practices that define who we are and how we know. Tense between different polarities, the conversation explores architecture as a way to find sense and meaning by relying on timeless wisdom in the face of the many distractions and distortions that characterize our time. 
Space layout and energy performance: Parametric optimisation of space layout for the energy performance of office buildings
Get PDFStudies have shown that space layout design can impact the building energy performance (BEP). However, its isolated effect on the BEP has not been identified yet. Performative computational architecture has proven to be effective to improve the BEP. However, only a few studies have tried to apply the performative computational architecture to space layout design. This research aims to investigate how space layout affects BEP, and to develop a computational optimisation method for space layout to improve the BEP of office buildings. Firstly, the mechanism on how space layout affects the BEP and how much energy is affected by space layout were identified through literature review and simulation. 11 layouts with different function allocations were simulated and compared. The outcome showed that layout variance affected lighting the most, and the maximum difference happened in Harbin, being 46% without shading and 35% with shading. As a follow-up, another literature review was conducted, which identified the functional requirements of space layout design, methods for automatic generation of space layout, and requirements for energy performance optimisation. In addition, a computational method was developed to optimise space layout design for energy performance improvement, regardless of functional requirements. As a result, the relationship between space layout and energy demands were recognised. In conclusion, space layout has proven to be a significant influence on the BEP, and conscientious design can improve it. For optimal energy performance, manual design of space layout is not feasible; in order to do that, a computational approach is needed
Architecture as a Visual Resource: An Aesthetic Reflection on the Aftermath of War
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In early 1999 the conflict in Kosovo led to the apocalyptic scenario of NATO-sanctioned bombings of the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. One of the targets was the complex of buildings comprising the military headquarters in Belgrade: the Generalštab. Over the past twenty years no intervention has been made to repair and protect this cultural monument damaged by war, but its mental image has inevitably changed, transgressing the identity of the historical event. The drawing project The Generalštab Building as Image: A History Decomposeddeals with an aesthetic reflection on political bodies and conditions, asking how they have re-territorialised the material reality of the Generalštab building as a cultural artifact into the performativity of its political function.
Keywords:
War, cultural monument, visual narratives, perception
From Cybernetics to Systems Theory in the First Space Age: Observations on the Pilot Problem
Get PDFThe first space age offers a remarkable context to scrutinise the inverse fates of cybernetics and systems theory in the 1960–70s, the latter taking the place of the former thanks to its operational effectiveness. Both fields appeared to tackle the pilot problem head-on, either to shoot a pilot down (cybernetics in World War II) – or to send some to the moon and back (systems engineering and management in the Apollo programme). The study of three US institutions (TRW, SDC and NASA) demonstrates an intense alliance between them, with a persistent focus on the issues of automation and systems thinking. A selection of written documents produced by each entity shows with utmost clarity their high degree of involvement in a post-cybernetics systemic approach. Incidentally, those analyses also show how the differences and similarities between old space and new space reveal themselves in light of the pilot problem. Overall, the pilot’s role reconfigured the man/machine assemblage as much as the pilot was reconfigured by that assemblage, with the critical assistance of computation
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