225 research outputs found
Ricomposizioni urbane. Per un ordine della trasformazione
No full textIl tema della ricerca si occupa dell’unità minima urbana con riferimento all’inversione topologica, riguardante il rapporto tra ‘pieni’ e ‘vuoti’, che la città ha subito nelle sue grammatiche connotative,
dopo il XX secolo, strutturandosi mediante grandi isolati ‘aperti’. Tale unità morfologica – definita parte elementare – si vuole intendere come unità insediativa compiuta e reiterabile data dall’insieme di diverse architetture poste tra loro in una relazione ‘necessaria’ e rispondenti quindi a principi insediativi diversi dagli isolati ‘chiusi’ che, per secoli, hanno dettato la costruzione e la forma della città storica secondo principi di ripetizione e variazione.
Si ritiene che la parte elementare sia determinante come principio d’ordine per la costruzione di parti urbane di grado superiore, per la trasformazione delle logiche sintattiche dei luoghi e per la risignificazione dello spazio urbano aperto nell’idea di città-natura. L’obiettivo dell’indagine è duplice: da un lato si intende arrivare alla definizione delle componenti costitutive della parte elementare, ponendo l’attenzione sul rapporto relazionale tra esse; dall’altro lato si intende validare l’ipotesi che la parte elementare – verificate le modalità di insediamento, di aggregazione, di variazione e di adattabilità ai contesti – possa riconfigurare ‘per parti’ la città restituendo ai luoghi un proprio ordine riconoscibile.
La parte elementare può dunque intendersi anche come principio teorico – di interpretazione e di costruzione della città del nostro tempo – assecondante le aspirazioni alla ricerca di forme capaci di rappresentare un’idea di città e insieme di abitare
WHY A THEORY OF SOCIETY CANNOT BE FOUNDED ON A THEORY OF ACTION: ON THE LEGACY OF SCIENTIFIC PROGRAMME SIXTY YEARS AFTER "THE STRUCTURE"
No full textAfter an examination of Parsons's theory of social action, the author demonstrate that sociology need to pass over to a new paradigm. This because Parsons' theory of general system of action shows that a theory of society cannot be based on a theory of action. It is investigate the possibility of finding grounds for a theory of society not based on a concept of action, as has already been suggested by a theory of social autopoietic systems by Niklas Luhmann
Heat resistance of Escherichia coli in goat milk: a comparison between the sealed capillary tube technique and laboratory slug flow heat exchanger
No full textEutopias. The art of building future cities
No full textThe dissociation and the detachment between architecture and city have made not immediate the reference to an idea of city for the near future. In the urban contemporary, increasingly indifferent to the settlement design, the provision lack of spatial and infrastructural arrangements has necessarily repercussions on the city’s image, on what are its connotative elements and its constitutive structures.
Thinking about the future city, what can we expect after the massive nineteenth-century urban overhaul, or after the potentially infinite homologation of the modernity or even after the most recent smartization led by the global? Although in a way these temporal simplifications appear approximate and a little reductive, as generalized classification, the author focuses her attention on some central, and not at all rhetorical, themes of the current urban debate: questioning thought and imagination about the city’s idea we would like, or the value of places and spaces, or the way to preserve an urban memory or, more generally, on the idea of the community and society that we, as citizens, aspire to build are all important issues for the architectural and urban disciplines.
In the city’s utopias the desire has almost been placed above reality, the idea before the solution, the vision before the actual realization. Proceeding by opposition or by accentuation of some particular aspect, the image of the city was abstractly constructed, often idealizing it to the point of considering it a lot of times unreal.
Is it possible, therefore, to “establish a concrete eutopia that arises from the real conditions of the everyday environment and at the same time returns to it by creatively modifying it in order to make it closer to our desires (Mumford, 1962)”?
The essay discusses the role that creativity has as the driving force behind the invention and as an active tool in the positive and wise transformation of the physical reality in which we operate as architects. Even if the contemporary suggests the renunciation of considering the city a project's matter, we should not stop imagining the future of the cities to come
Ship side damage due to collision with icebergs
No full textABSTRACT: The growth of the LNG shipping market in arctic seas, due to the discovery of new gas fields in Northern regions, is a main motivation for research in the area of ice loads for ship structures.
The focus of the present work is on accidental loads due to collisions with icebergs. More precisely, the scenario investigated includes an impact between small size iceberg shapes (modeled as rigid bodies) and the side of a LNG ship (realized in two different scantling versions: DNV class notation ICE-1A and standard class). Numerical simulations of these collisions are carried out using the non linear finite element software ABAQUS. The paper discusses the approximations made in order to model the impact within the software ambient. The final output of the work is represented by graphs providing the damage levels in the structures (penetration of the colliding object) as a function of the mass and shape of the iceberg and of the ship speed
Critical random graphs : limiting constructions and distributional properties
No full textWe consider the Erdos-Renyi random graph G(n, p) inside the critical window, where p = 1/n + lambda n(-4/3) for some lambda is an element of R. We proved in Addario-Berry et al. [2009+] that considering the connected components of G(n, p) as a sequence of metric spaces with the graph distance rescaled by n(-1/3) and letting n -> infinity yields a non-trivial sequence of limit metric spaces C = (C-1, C-2,...). These limit metric spaces can be constructed from certain random real trees with vertex-identifications. For a single such metric space, we give here two equivalent constructions, both of which are in terms of more standard probabilistic objects. The first is a global construction using Dirichlet random variables and Aldous' Brownian continuum random tree. The second is a recursive construction from an inhomogeneous Poisson point process on R+. These constructions allow us to characterize the distributions of the masses and lengths in the constituent parts of a limit component when it is decomposed according to its cycle structure. In particular, this strengthens results of Luczak et al. [1994] by providing precise distributional convergence for the lengths of paths between kernel vertices and the length of a shortest cycle, within any fixed limit component
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