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211 research outputs found
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Sound absorbing glass: transparent solution for poor acoustics of monumental spaces
Full text linkMonumental buildings are demolished when they lose their traditional function. These historical monuments can be maintained by repurposing them for modern use, like lectures and musical events. This results in a demand for different acoustic conditions. However, monuments are subject to strict building intervention regulations; any intervention concerning changes to the original elements are often prohibited. This creates a demand for demountable and adaptable product design, repurposing monumental buildings by alleviating acoustical problems without distorting the view towards the monumental elements.
This research focused on developing sound absorption panels based on the micro-perforation principle: manufacturing these in thin glass panels, evaluating their influence on strength and transparency, optimizing sound absorption (perforation diameter and ratio) using a tailor-made computational model, and creating a pattern of perforations that optimizes strength
The role of durational art strategies in urban regeneration in Budapest
Full text linkThe presented strategy reflects on the theme of sustainable urban regeneration, focusing on the importance of the role of public spaces in creating liveable cities. The theoretical background of the strategy deals with the changes taking place in the fields of public art and urban rehabilitation methodologies. The parallel drawn between the evolvement of the two fields leads to the introduction of a method which integrates public art interventions into the process of urban rehabilitation. Public art interventions become platforms that enable people to take an active role in creating and forming their future, and enable future landscape/public space design elements to become more site-specific and unique
Unfamiliar territory: alternative landscape reading of disturbed sites’ particularities
Full text linkIn an age when it is becoming increasingly apparent that disturbed sites (or any other sites for that matter) can never be fully managed, nor can their future development be entirely predetermined, this paper looks at disturbed sites’ landscape as a complex and metastable system. While it deals with disturbed sites in particular, more broadly it aims to encourage a general re-examination of landscape design that relies on the world in harmonious balance and the experience of visual pleasure, which, according to long-established structures, may please or offer timeless experiences but in most cases hold little power and no potential to change, enhance or diminish (our own) bodily capacities to act – to stimulate thought, influence ideas, judgements and desires.
In order to explore ways of moving away from the desire for a stable portrayal of ‘the natural’ that often motivates disturbed sites’ immediate ecological remediation and later programmatic transformation, the paper firstly, in order to clarify the understanding of the proposed alternative, imagines landscapes where such an approach is driven to extreme. Next, it places focus on the concept of territory and through the processes behind territory-making argues for a rethinking of the common ways of reading, intervening in and representing complex (in this case disturbed) sites. Alongside this, it proposes a reinterpretation of the notion of place, presents an alternative search for ‘the specific’ and questions what could specificity, once cleared of any ‘essence’, actually stand for.
Ideas and concepts developed throughout this paper begin with writings on territory by Deleuze and Guattari on one side, with further elaborations by Bogue, Brighenti, Grosz, and others. On the other side, ideas of post-humanism and new materialism provide a new view on disturbed sites to broaden the conception of territory as a relational, process-driven and open-ended mode of organization. They are accompanied by diagrammatic mappings that describe and analyse a very particular place – Fort de Vaujours, an abandoned uranium-contaminated site near Paris
Gothenborg’s Jublieumsparken 0.5 and Frihamnen: explorations into the aesthetic of DIY
Full text linkThis design critique explores how a top-down approach of conventional planning coincides with a do-it-(y)ourself project that evolved from the site and is facilitated by a designated mediator working within in city administration with the purpose of bridging the city’s disconnected departments. Hence, the project called Jubileumsparken 0.5 was instigated in 2013 as a place making project in concurrence with urban planning undertakings in order to facilitate a redevelopment of the harbour area of Frihamnen in Gothenburg, Sweden. The purpose of this ongoing project is to make use of the intervening period to explore the site and its specific qualities and relationships, and to test these through prototypes and events before plans and protocols are set in stone. Only three years later, at a point when this specific time period is starting to run out and the first development plans are being drafted, this article demonstrates – through a transformation analysis – that the abandoned site has been turned into a particular place through people’s engagement and the processes of building together. Furthermore, it shows that the embedded narratives of these actions are starting to challenge the planners' otherwise distant and abstract understanding of this place.  
Defined by deviations: the Traveling Transect as a bodily research approach to appropriate and disseminate places
Full text linkBased on a Travelling Transect approach, this paper explores how ample interpretations and opportunities for new thoughts about sites are developed, especially when these sites are explored along a combined material and immaterial predefined linear path that is distorted, challenged and redefined by bodily encounters and sensations on site. By using the Travelling Transect as an approach to do research and develop new understandings of sites, possible overlooked qualities manifest themselves in a series of registrations collected or inspired by encounters on site. Illustrated through a design research study around the Öresund strait, researchers exemplify how data becomes unlocked and re-interpreted through the approach. In short, the aesthetic values identified in a map, in a geometry or a static composition are displaced by the approach to values connected to an experience of site’s audio or material surroundings, time-space relations and on-site reflections and sensations connected to movement
Experiential mappings: approaching the landscape through atmosphere
Full text linkThis paper argues that the opening up of landscape analysis to variables that exceed the 'tangible' or traditionally 'parameterized' values provides alternative access to the specificities of the landscape. In particular, the concept of 'atmosphere' as a particular dimension of the embodied experience, is proposed as an operative vehicle for the enrichment of the cartographic interpretation of the landscape. By placing the emphasis on atmosphere in terms of its causes, rather than its effects on our emotional sensibility, cartography enhances the identification of the particular by interpreting the specific manner that the properties of the landscape configure the experience. The paper is structured in two parts. The first part is a theoretical inquiry of the inter-subjective patterns of perception that define 'atmosphere', with the objective to bring the concept of atmosphere into the professional practice and discourse of landscape architecture through the agency of mapping. In the second part, the proposed approach to atmosphere is tested through a series of mappings of an agrarian, ordinary landscape, situated in Catalonia, Spain. The cartographic exercises point towards the identification of spatial patterns that potentially function as activators of atmospheres, as indicators for the presence of particular modes of landscape experience
Providing a stage for atmospheric encounters: Brattøra’s seafront by SLA
Full text linkThe article addresses the theme of ‘particular places’ in the contemporary landscape metropolis by focusing on the temporal, climatic and geographic specificity that determines each place as unique. In particular, it explores how design can support the appreciation of a ‘particular place’ by enhancing the readability of its temporal, climatic and geographic constituents through an engagement with local weather phenomena.
The article considers the capacity of design to foreground the particularity of a place by connecting to its weather through a critical reading of SLA’s redesign of the seafront of Brattøra in the city of Trondheim in Norway. My critical approach to the project juxtaposes a personal investigation of the design work based on primary experience and the insights of a conversation with SLA’s principal Stig Lennart Andersson, performed and transcribed in 2012 as part of my doctoral thesis. Elaborating on this conversation, the article is articulated in three successive thematic sections, dealing respectively with the concepts of ground, exposure and wonder. Albeit specific to the project, these notions afford the possibility to expand upon more universal considerations of the capacity of design to foreground diffuse, changing and immaterial components of space in human experience. In the conclusive part of the article, I attempt to verbalise why SLA’s work can be considered a valuable reference for the design of ‘particular places’ in the contemporary landscape metropolis
A story of three: a narrative approach to reading atmosphere and making place
Full text linkThis article explores a site-specific, narrative approach to placemaking in order to reveal ways of reading and reacting to spatial atmospheres. The contribution presents an MSc Architecture project that results in the design of three particular places on the fringes of the Dutch urban landscape by means of utilizing a narrative approach to reading and analysing the existing site-specific atmospheres. The three architectural follies designed within the landscape present opportunities for the insertion of narrative through experience, illuminating the contents within the existing context. The intention of the project was to explore how an architectural installation could serve as a locus for the generation of new trajectories of perception and understanding. Through a sequencing of events within each landscape folly, the existing site is revealed to the reader in a new way, establishing new circumstances to engage with the landscape. The implementation of narrative within the processes of placemaking allowed for the overlay of subjective interpretations through personal experience, creating spaces saturated with personal signification and interpretation. The three projects demonstrate the necessity of freedom of imagination and interpretation in placemaking and how a narrative approach to design can allow one to be fully involved in the creation of personal and particular place
Big cities – ‘quiet places’: tracing relationships between material and immaterial qualities of urban spaces
Full text linkThis paper investigates the theme particular places from the perspective of ‘quiet places’, by examining potential links between material and immaterial qualities of four distinct typologies of urban spaces in the landscape metropolis, and offering five thematic lenses to sharpen our view for the particular. While the relationship between green spaces and restorative qualities for humans has long been acknowledged, the present research investigates other types of urban spaces, not focusing on ‘green’ or dB ratio as such but instead on confluences of soundscape, cityscape, flowscape, and other ‘scapes’ i.e. ‘material-immaterial landscapes’ in particular places in the two cities. This kind of particularity is an under-researched field also in methodological terms. We therefore set up a survey, in which we asked people about their appreciations of various material and immaterial qualities of the place; the conceptualisation of which derived partly from a pilot study and partly from a structured literature review. The responses revealed noticeable differences between the four typologies and less between similar types in the two cities. The results of the survey also showed a variety of expressions, deepening our understanding of the experienced qualities and simultaneously opening up for a new vocabulary addressing this interaction and its importance for ‘quiet places’, discussed in relation to methodological considerations.
 
Place Mapping – transect walks in Arctic urban landscapes
Full text linkThis article investigates how experimental forms of urban mapping can reveal the particularity of places in non-standard urban situations with the intention of moving beyond the reductivism of still-dominant modernist modes of mapping and associated forms of planning. In order to do so, it reports on the emergence of a methodology involving transect walks, with the purpose of mapping the peculiarities of cultural landscapes. The study is located in cities and communities in the Arctic that are undergoing rapid transformation and are in urgent need of new conceptual approaches capable of enabling future thinking and strategic action. The article specifically asks how such a methodology works to includes the ephemeral and emergent, but also digital, dimensions of urban landscapes, and results in a complex reflexive method of critically reading and writing, of moving and locating, of seeing and picturing place mapping