880 research outputs found
Compliant Architecture Regulatory Limits and the Materiality of Risk
Get PDF“Compliant Architecture” is a project that combines three strands: historical research into the emergence of building regulations; design research illustrating the limits they pose for practitioners; and teaching-led research exploring the architectural potential of these limits. In this paper, Liam Ross offers a digest of this project, conducted at the University of Edinburgh since 2009. Ross inverts the ubiquitous critique of regulation among architects, suggesting that the disciplinary challenge posed by regulation is not the limits it sets, but the freedoms it offers. Ross advocates an architectural practice that works with and through regulatory limits to dramatize, rather than negate, the inherent risk of building, since it is only through exposure to risk that we develop subjectivity. The author makes this argument through a detailed study of a specific regulation, British Standard 8213-1: 2004. Windows, doors and rooflights, accompanied by diagrammatic studies and speculative window designs. Several student projects supervised by Ross explore the design potential of additional regulations
ENGG 390 - Abstract (Liam Ross)
No full textQlik, a business intelligence platform, offers a suite of products across both data integration and analytics. Their Customer Success Organization is in the middle of a digital transformation in the hopes to help more customers help themselves using curated self-service resources. My contribution towards this venture was specifically in redesigning the business systems used throughout a customer’s journey since the current state revealed numerous internal breakdowns. My proposed business architecture combines customer usage data collection models with existing organizational systems to ultimately improve user onboarding
Liam Rector, 14th Annual ODU Literary Festival
No full textLiam Rector is the author of The Sorrow of Architecture, a book of poems. He\u27s also the editor of The Day I Was Older: On the Poetry of Donald Hall. He has taught at Old Dominion University, George Mason, Goucher College, and Phillips Academy at Andover. In addition, he has administered literary programs at the Folger Academy of American Poets. Currently, Liam Rector is executive director of Associated Writing Programs, which has lately taken a leading role in defending the 1st amendment. Rector has been awarded both NEA and Guggenheim fellowships for poetry
Liam Rector, 12th Annual ODU Literary Festival
No full textLiam Rector is the author of a book of poetry, The Sorrow of Architecture, 1984, and editor of The Day I Was Older: On the Poetry of Donald Hall, 1989, and is currently working on a second book of poems, tentatively titled The Persistence of Virginia. He is executive director of the Associated Writing Programs, located at Old Dominion University
Fire Space: London
No full textDegree Show Catalogue from an ESALA MArch (Modular Pathway) studio ‘Fire Space: London’. Studio Leader: Liam Ross. Tutor: Tolulope Onabolu. 2019-2020
10 Projects for a Compliant Architecture
No full text'Compliant Architecture' is a design, research and teaching project based at the University of Edinburgh. It conducts text-based research into the emergence of building regulations, design-research that illustrates the limits they impose, and taught design modules that explore the architectural potential of those limits. This document presents selected projects from a 10 week architectural design studio completed as part of the MA Architectural Design programme at the University of Edinburgh, 2008-09. Each projects begins with an analysis of a single clause of the Scottish Building Standards. Students provide a brief verbal and diagrammatic description of the regulation, coming to understand the hazard it represents, and seeks to limit; trips and slips on stairs and ramps, falls from height while cleaning windows, or lack of access to daylight. The projects continue by identifying an architectural potential in the limitation of these risks; that a regulated stair acts as an index of the familiarity of its users, that a window choreographs and represents the everyday act of its cleaning, that a window negotiates and represents a relation between programme and context. Each project concludes through the design of a mixed-use building in the centre of Edinburgh that enjoys playing-out the implications of the regulation in a range of circumstances
Venice Take Away: The British Pavilion at the 13th Venice Architecture Bienalle / RIBA Ideas to Change British Architecture Season:British Standard Lagos Exception
No full textIn Britain’s current architectural climate many practices consider the industry to be over-regulated. Architects argue that burdensome building standards stifle innovation and creativity, resulting in monotonous design. At the same time practitioners acknowledge a need for the state to take responsibility for the population’s health and safety. Architects Liam Ross and Tolulope Onabolu travelled to Lagos, Nigeria to reframe this debate and offer an alternative critique of regulation through an examination of risk, personal responsibility and sovereignty. The exploration compares Edinburgh and Lagos – two quite different legislative structures – and reflects on the different ways they distribute risk and responsibility between the state and individual. Their research provides a critique of the inclusive and universalist rhetoric of British building regulations and suggests that the purpose of rules is actually to generate the possibility of exceptions
Standard side effects: on the accidental architectures of fire-safety legislation
Get PDFThis dissertation reflects on building standardisation as a mode of
design. Eschewing the architect’s conventional disdain for regulation
- as an external constraint on creative freedom - the ambition
here is to ask; by way of their standardisation, how do buildings
exert a shaping effect on government? The research presented has
been framed through a focus on fire-safety standards and is presented
through a series of city case-studies.
Each city study has an historical dimension. They begin by reviewing
historical accounts of specific fires, identifying the governmental
response that those fires prompted. That is, standards are presented
here as historically and geographically specific instruments.
Read together these studies offer insight into the plurality of means
through which regulators and building designers have responded to
the common concern of fire.
The city studies each include an element of by-design analysis,
studying the marks that fire-safety standards make on the built environment,
and the way they interact with other shaping factors in
building design. The ambition here is to explore the unintended
consequences of regulation, and the way they come to be ‘captured’,
redirected to novel ends. That process of capture is taken to be politically
ambivalent; the effects and side-effects of standardisation
are shown to be highly contingent, shaped by the interests of those
actors that work closely with them. Finally, each city study has a theoretical dimension. Fire-safety
standardisation is used here as a means to broker dialogue between
two related discourses, Governmentality Studies and Infrastructure
Studies. Key terms and concepts are drawn from those fields as a
means to reflect on the challenges and opportunities provided by
the built environment as an instrument of technologically mediated
government.
Accident plays an important role in this reflection: programmes of
standardisation are shown to respond to accidents, often those that
occur in or around buildings; the design process is seen to have an
accidental character, shaped by the aggregate of decisions made by
different people, in different places, at different times, and with different
interests; and buildings themselves are seen to be comprised
of accidental qualities, properties that appear essential to some
stakeholders, not to others. All these forms of accident shape the
thesis findings; drawing on the work of Susan Leigh Star, standardisation
is here construed as the construction of a ‘Boundary Object’,
a means to navigate, through material things, the overlapping concerns
of diverse actors, so as to facilitate their ‘collaboration without
consent’. The critical potential of this framing is to highlight the
way building reveals fault-lines and powers of consolidation within
particular ways of thinking.
The concluding chapter reflects on the role that fire has played in
shaping our govern-mentalities. It borrows a term from sociologists
John Law and Anne-Marie Mol to describe the ‘fire-space’ of standards;
it suggests that governmental ambitions, laws, and building
designs interact, spread, and change in a fire-like way. Through a
post-script, it uses this metaphor to engage with the ongoing Grenfell
Tower Inquiry, and the way this threatens to shape future governmental,
legal and physical architectures in the UK. That conditions
of political possibility are shaped by buildings, fires, and fire-safety
standards is brought into sharp relief by this particular case
Project Triton : A study into delivering targeted information to an individual based on implicit and explicit data.
No full textThe World Wide Web is frequently seen as a source of knowledge, however much of this remains undiscovered by its users. In recent times, recommender systems (e.g. Digg and Last.fm) have attempted to bridge this gap, alerting users to previously untapped knowledge. As more socially oriented services appear on the Web (e.g. Facebook and MySpace), it has never been easier to obtain information pertaining to an individual’s interests. At present, solutions for automated data recommendation tend to be highly topic specific (recommending only a certain topic such as news) and often only allow access to the system using monolithic interfaces. This report hopes to detail the stages from research to evaluation involved in creating an extensible framework, which will operate without the need for human intervention. The framework will feature several proof-of-concept plugins residing in a custom workflow, which target information that is useful to the user. Information will be retrieved automatically through plugins involved with data gathering (such as feed processing and page scraping), while users’ interests will be obtained implicitly (for example, using header information to derive location) or explicitly (taking advantage of Social Network APIs such as Facebook Connect). Finally, Third Parties will be able to integrate the framework into their own solutions using the customisable XML API (written in PHP), so that their products can provide custom user interfaces without style constraints
Design, fabrication and molecular modeling of protein subunits for use in a novel hydrogel:
No full textUse of bioinspired, genetically engineered proteins in tissue engineering scaffolds represents a new opportunity for engineering these constructs. However, the production and rational modification of new, artificial proteins is hindered by significant gaps in knowledge regarding expression of artificial gene constructs in E. coli and their molecular modeling. This thesis focuses on the production of a novel hydrogel scaffold composed of four self-assembling protein modules and their rational modification using Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulations. Two of the modules are based on the ABA triblock copolymer design. In this triblock, a hydrophilic, random coiled region is flanked by 28 amino-acid α−helical endblocks. The purpose of these endblocks is to function as virtual crosslinkers and support network formation. The length of the endblocks can be changed by the addition of two unlinked, fiber-forming peptides and thus potentially alter the gelation and melting points of the hydrogel. We evaluate the efficacy of production of these endblocks by two separate expression strategies in E. coli and demonstrate their ability to form hydrogels. Furthermore, we analyze the Gibbs free energy of formation of oligomeric intermediates that arise early on during fibrillogenesis from the unlinked peptides using the MM/PBSA module of Amber 9. Thermodynamic data demonstrates changes in the primary structure of these peptides affect the stability of the intermediate that seeds fiber formation. This analysis also suggests a shift in the fiber forming mechanism from monomer addition to protofibril addition. We offer how this data can be used to improve interhelical interactions between endblocks and unlinked peptides and how to develop coarse-grain models of fiber formation.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical referencesby Christopher Liam Gaugha
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