1,721,266 research outputs found
Landscape in Fragments: A study of an Albanian landscape corridor from Shkoder to the Adriatic Sea
No full textThe Albanian landscape is fractured into paradoxical parts. These fragments are palatable during the drive from the city of Shkodra to the Adriatic coast along Rruga Shkodër - Velipojë. As one leaves the dense urban environment of Shkodra and crosses the confluence of the Drin and Bojana River the landscape opens up to a vast horizontal plain of agriculture. Behind is the city of Shkodra rapidly developing in what local scholars and architects refer to as “turbo urbanism”, ahead is the agricultural ruins of the failed communist government (Figure01).
Albania’s history is one of conflict, occupation, and isolated communist dictatorships. Enver Hoxha was the authoritarian leader of communist Albania for decades, and following his death in 1985 Albania’s government collapsed in 1990. Albania’s transition to a parliamentary democracy has been difficult and lead to an Albanian diaspora in Italy, western Europe and North America. The many political upheavals have left broken or nonexistent public infrastructure fostering a strong distrust of public development by the populous. Today, after a decade of relative stability and new monetary investments, architects and designers are facing conflicting and paradoxical choices.
This paper seeks understanding of the Albania context through a case study of a landscape of fragments between the northern city of Shkodra and the Adriatic Sea (figure02). The study was carried out by an international cohort of architects and urban planners from Albania, Italy and the United Sates. The researchers sought to interrogate the social and political factors that shaped the landscape and to seek to clarify what contributions can be made by architects in a context that is geographically proximate but culturally remote.
Highlighted will be the forces that shaped the landscape as we find it today. With pressure coming from uncontrolled urbanization and a constant threat of flooding, Shkodra serves as an example of how ecosystems react when exceeding their ability to regenerate. When viewed from above, the land is subdivided in large plots by mechanized irrigation ditches (figure03). The order provided by the former communist government does not seem to rule this land today. Greenhouses scaled to service large areas of land stand broken, altered, or abandoned adjacent to poorly engineered and ineffective levees. The land does not adhere to polyculture agriculture, nor does it operate as an efficient mechanized farming operation. Settlements are no longer planned, rather informally developed, many times located in areas that are both ecologically damaging and unsafe (figure04)
The research and analysis concludes with modest design propositions that are intended to tease out the potential of the context. The proposals do not pretend to fix or rebuild the landscape but only to provide small but meaningful interventions. Most significantly, new insights are provided on the landscape of Albania, where the limit between proximate and remote is regulated by a fragile edge of ever changing fragments (figure05
Digital Risk, Materialization of Digital Media
No full textTo practice architecture today is to reach across centuries of disciplinary divisions that have removed us
from material. It is not surprising that many celebrated contemporary projects are clearly derived from the
shaping of a visual experience. The tactile and the haptic have been degraded in favour of productivity,
technology and unlimited virtual iterations. Recent developments in digital fabrication applications have
opened new opportunities for designers to reengage with tools and materials. For architects that have
leveraged this technology, there still exist digital protections that do less for the value of their outcomes
and more for their industrialized efficiency. When one pushes for the optical and practices only the
theoretical component of design, it is done at the expense of matter in space1 (Adamson, 2007). While
computers can simulate architectural space with efficiency, they do not account for the human sensory
feedback required to diligently craft material. In an impressive argument, Malcom McCullough has
asserted that the operation of digital technology defines a new dematerialized craft2 (McCullough, 1996).
The tactile shaping of material was viewed to have a parallel digital equal in computer clicks and bits.
McCullough maintains that the act of craft can occur entirely in the virtual realm, regardless if the work
results in a physical artefact. Although widely accepted within the discipline of architecture, McCullough’s
assertion negates the inherent resistance realized by the use of material and the productive failure
induced by making. In a pre-digital context, David Pye clarified related distinctions between craft and
industry by defining the craftsmanship of risk and the craftsmanship of certainty3 (Pye, 1968). The
craftsmanship of risk achieves quality through a calculated risk of personal skill, while the craftsmanship
of certainty requires preplanning and careful mechanical implementation. Digital media described by
McCullough further mitigates what Pye defines as risk by subjugating material awareness with safe digital
simulation. This paper will engage both the digital and the analogue through a case study that provides
insights into the role of digital tools that embrace both material risk and digital control. The digital tool is
based on an open-source Delta 3D printer configured to print ceramic clay (figure 1). The principle that
guided the tool’s design was to have distinct tasks relegated to the computer and to the human hand. The
3D printer’s design intentionally allows risk, it embraces failure and negates standardization. The
craftsperson is not simply an ‘operator’ of a computer tool, but is instead engaged in a risky negotiation
between the material and the digital. There is value in looking closely at dematerialized and traditional
craft, not only through the lens of outcomes and their quality but also how said qualities negotiate the
benefits of risk. The insights of both Pye and McCullough are now converging in a post-digital context that
raise new questions about how risk is defined and used in the creation of craft objects. The case study
profiled will suggest that digital craft need not subjugate material knowledge, and will translate how digital
risk can be used to extend our understanding of craft
The Interstitial Challenge: Understanding Manifestations of Terrain Vague through an Inquiry into the Social and Environmental Dilemmas of Detroit USA and Clichy-Sous-Bois Paris
No full textChapter explores the manifestatios of terrain vague through an inquirey into the scial and enviormental dilemmas of Detroit, USA and Clichy-sous-Bois, Paris
Post-Digital Craft: Defining Digital Risk
No full textThis thesis seeks to define what the research refers to as digital risk. Risk in the making of an artifact was mostly eliminated with Fordist principles of manufacturing and efficiency. However, in a post-digital era, these principles no longer fully apply. Although mass-customization and micro-manufacturing still do not rival large industry, the process is demonstrating promise. The shifting to customization allows designers now to reengage in the production of custom artifacts with the aid of digital applications and fabrication techniques. Digital fabrication has been researched and is continuing to develop, but the unique post-digital question of this thesis is how risk, an element all but eliminated from our process, can be reintroduced productively. Intentionally taking risks while working with digital applications does yield results not otherwise achieved. This thesis demonstrates that digital risk is a valuable principle within post-digital processes.
The experiment in this thesis, Digital Ceramic Risk (Section 4), explores the entanglement of the post-digital and post-human condition by examining risk through the crafting of a hybridized digital and physically made artifact. These experiments were conducted in three phases. Phase one profiles the creation of a digital tool that enabled hybridized manual and digital ceramic printing. Using this 3D printer, the research Identified risk variables through documented tests. Variables such as material failure, tool failure, and digital errors were tracked and analyzed. Phase two demonstrates a high level of skill and craft through the use of hybridized methods. By applying the identified risk factors from Phase one, the outcomes of the experiments generated newly crafted forms that otherwise would not have been realized through an only digital process. Phase three demonstrated optimized printing skills and craft through sustained practice and improved digital tools. The outcomes of this phase created a visually distinct collection of vessels. Each vessel was modified as it was printed to create a version of the control vessel that was digitally modeled, and that generated the g-code controlling the 3D printer. These improvised artifacts were re-digitized and dimensionally quantified into data. This data was encoded into an Artificial Intelligence (AI) database for the propagation of an infinite number of new vessels. This extension of the handmade object into an AI database is a human infusion into the post-human cybernetic network. The case studies and experiments contained within this thesis demonstrate how craftspeople can now both exist in the material world while still existing in the broader post-digital and post-human condition
The circumstellar environments of Be stars in X-ray binaries
No full textSIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:DXN040581 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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