IX Feria de Ciencias de la Universidad de Palermo: trabajos sobre sustentabilidad y análisis morfológico urbano, por los alumnos del Instituto Cristo Obrero

Al centro, profesora Ana María Arias Roig

A la izquierda, profesora Miriam Grippo.

En tantos años dedicada a la investigación sobre morfología urbana, he pensado muchas formas de aplicación y transmisión de conocimientos, en un terreno tal vez un poco oscuro en manos de un grupo reducido de investigadores universitarios que adoran la interdisciplina, y saltan del arte a la ciencia, a la sociología, a la física, a la historia, urbanismo y arquitectura.

Lo que jamás imaginé es que el tema podría ser tratado por adolescentes, tan interesados como yo y mis colegas, desde una perspectiva fresca e innovadora.

La responsable de tan maravillosa labor es la profesora de matemática y licenciada en sistemas Ana María Arias Roig.

Luego de varias experiencias en matemática aplicada, este año se propuso a un grupo de alumnos de 4º, 5º, y 6º año del Instituto Cristo Obrero de Villa Soldati, analizar el barrio Soldati en Sur de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires, desde dos puntos de vista relacionados entre sí:

.- La casa sustentable: cuyo objetivo yace en concientizar la posibilidad del cuidado del medioambiente a través de una serie de medidas  tomadas desde el hogar, como el aprovechamiento del agua, los materiales y espacios de la vivienda. Este tema a cargo de la profesora Miriam Grippo.

.- Análisis geométrico-espacial del conjunto basado en la geometría fractal. Este tema a cargo de la profesora Ana María Arias Roig.

He tenido el placer de haber sido contactada por Arias Roig para opinar sobre las conclusiones e intercambiar ideas muy productivas sobre la morfología urbana del barrio citado.

Fotografía aérea del conjunto Soldati

Primera instancia de análisis fotográfico para pasar a imagen binaria

El conjunto habitacional Soldati fue creado en el ámbito del Plan Alborada, que buscaba cubrir el déficit de viviendas entre los grupos de escasos y medianos recursos, sumado al plan de erradicación de villas de emergencia.

Habiendo trabajado en la cátedra del arquitecto Goldemberg del grupo Staff (Goldemberg-Bielus-Krasuk), he conocido muy bien las premisas de diseño de estos conjuntos, entre los cuales también debería mencionar el de Ciudadela, que lleva el triste mote de ¨Fuerte Apache¨. La trama girada responde al asoleamiento y ventilación de los ambientes, y la articulación creaba espacios intermedios que se esperaba fueran de disfrute familiar. La tritorre articuladora fue una innovación del grupo Staff. Lamentablemente, con el paso de los años, estos barrios fueron ocupados por malvivientes que rentaron a sus verdaderos dueños y el deterioro se hizo notable.

Si bien el conjunto se asemeja a las primeras recursiones de algunos fractales como la carpeta de Sierpinski, se concluyó que el conjunto no era un fractal, desde el punto de vista determinista, pero sí tenía tendencia a la fractalidad. Los alumnos encontraron que la dimensión fractal D multiescalar variaba en aproximadamente 1.60 a 1.40 según el grado de detalle considerado; lo cual, es un resultado sorprendente para una geometría que se gestó en una época donde la palabra ¨fractal¨ no se conocía, pero sí era hábito trabajar con traslación y rotación de volúmenes.

Los resultados se graficaron y expusieron en la IX Feria de Ciencias de la Universidad de Palermo, dentro del marco del Primer Congreso de Ingeniería Sustentable y Ecología Urbana. El tema no quedó ahí, los alumnos propusieron otras actividades paralelas, como un rompecabezas fractal. Se prepararon videos, se tomaron fotos, algunas de las cuales reproduzco con el permiso de la profesora Arias Roig.

Los alumnos participantes son:                                     

Sofía Mailén Ballato, Melisa Fe Fourmantí, y Marión Tatiana Aviza, para el grupo de sustentabilidad.

Florencia Vaccaro, Ignacio Gutiérrez, Iván Zarate, Frei Ulloa, Belén Vera, Florencia Mónaco, Dalma Huanca para el grupo de morfología urbana. Cabe citar que estos alumnos son habitantes del barrio, y su análisis ha sido exhaustivo.

Como un plus, ellos analizaron también las trazas de la ciudad de La Plata -como importante ejemplo de ciudad sustentable- y de San Clemente del Tuyú, ésta última por su trazado alejado del damero tradicional, lo cual permite que tenga playas más anchas y sin tanta erosión.

Desde ya, me siento feliz por el emprendimiento, y felicito a las profesoras y alumnos por una labor tan profesional. Ahora espero que otras voces se les unan y la gente se concientice y los ayude a mejorar su habitat, que en definitiva es el de todos.

Small scale, big change. At MOMA, New York

¨Architecture is rediscovering its social conscience. That’s the message behind “Small Scale, Big Change: New Architectures of Social Engagement,” an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.

The show, which looks at 11 projects around the world that have had major social impacts despite modest budgets and sizes, is a rebuttal to the familiar complaint that the profession is too focused on aesthetic experimentation and not enough on the lives of ordinary people. Not incidentally, it is also part of a philosophical shift in the museum’s architecture and design department, which, for most of the eight decades since its founding by Philip Johnson, famously championed architecture’s artistic merits over its social value.

Given that, the big surprise of the show is that so many of the projects are actually good. Organized by Andres Lepik and Margot Weller, the exhibition makes a powerful case that it is possible to create work that is both socially uplifting and architecturally compelling. It’s a notion that dominated architectural thought for much of the first half of the 20th century but that seems so out of keeping with the ethos of the practice today, particularly in New York, that it’s almost jarring.

The show opens with a subtle but clear political message. A wall in the first gallery is dominated by a big photograph of a mud-brick primary school shaded by a cluster of trees in an otherwise barren landscape in Burkina Faso. Designed by Diébédo Francis Kéré and completed in 2001, it’s an appealing building, with a wood truss roof that has the lightness of a tree canopy. But the first impression is of something precariously close to a cliché of socially committed architecture.¨

REFERENCE: Excerpt from the article Real-Life Design: Erecting Solutions to Social Problems. By Nicolai Ouroussoff. For New York Times. Pictures downloaded from the article.

Keep on reading:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/15/arts/design/15change.html

Benoit Mandelbrot, Mathematician, Dies at 85

Mandelbrot´s fractal, generated by Myriam B. Mahiques

All researchers on urban morphology must know Mandelbrot´s name, the mathematician who invented the term ¨fractal¨ and who clearly explained the fractals´ properties: complexity, a fine structure, autosimilarity.

Today, I´ve learnt that he has died. One could think that some genious would never die........ Here, more examples of autosimilarity that I developed with Fractal Explorer and the full article from New York Times.

Benoît B. Mandelbrot, a maverick mathematician who developed an innovative theory of roughness and applied it to physics, biology, finance and many other fields, died on Thursday in Cambridge, Mass. He was 85.

His death was caused by pancreatic cancer, his wife, Aliette, said. He had lived in Cambridge.

Dr. Mandelbrot coined the term “fractal” to refer to a new class of mathematical shapes whose uneven contours could mimic the irregularities found in nature.

“Applied mathematics had been concentrating for a century on phenomena which were smooth, but many things were not like that: the more you blew them up with a microscope the more complexity you found,” said David Mumford, a professor of mathematics at Brown University. “He was one of the primary people who realized these were legitimate objects of study.”

In a seminal book, “The Fractal Geometry of Nature,” published in 1982, Dr. Mandelbrot defended mathematical objects that he said others had dismissed as “monstrous” and “pathological.” Using fractal geometry, he argued, the complex outlines of clouds and coastlines, once considered unmeasurable, could now “be approached in rigorous and vigorous quantitative fashion.”

For most of his career, Dr. Mandelbrot had a reputation as an outsider to the mathematical establishment. From his perch as a researcher for I.B.M. in New York, where he worked for decades before accepting a position at Yale University, he noticed patterns that other researchers may have overlooked in their own data, then often swooped in to collaborate.

“He knew everybody, with interests going off in every possible direction,” Professor Mumford said. “Every time he gave a talk, it was about something different.”

Dr. Mandelbrot traced his work on fractals to a question he first encountered as a young researcher: how long is the coast of Britain? The answer, he was surprised to discover, depends on how closely one looks. On a map an island may appear smooth, but zooming in will reveal jagged edges that add up to a longer coast. Zooming in further will reveal even more coastline.

“Here is a question, a staple of grade-school geometry that, if you think about it, is impossible,” Dr. Mandelbrot told The New York Times earlier this year in an interview. “The length of the coastline, in a sense, is infinite.”

In the 1950s, Dr. Mandelbrot proposed a simple but radical way to quantify the crookedness of such an object by assigning it a “fractal dimension,” an insight that has proved useful well beyond the field of cartography.

Over nearly seven decades, working with dozens of scientists, Dr. Mandelbrot contributed to the fields of geology, medicine, cosmology and engineering. He used the geometry of fractals to explain how galaxies cluster, how wheat prices change over time and how mammalian brains fold as they grow, among other phenomena.

His influence has also been felt within the field of geometry, where he was one of the first to use computer graphics to study mathematical objects like the Mandelbrot set, which was named in his honor.

“I decided to go into fields where mathematicians would never go because the problems were badly stated,” Dr. Mandelbrot said. “I have played a strange role that none of my students dare to take.”

Benoît B. Mandelbrot (he added the middle initial himself, though it does not stand for a middle name) was born on Nov. 20, 1924, to a Lithuanian Jewish family in Warsaw. In 1936 his family fled the Nazis, first to Paris and then to the south of France, where he tended horses and fixed tools.

After the war he enrolled in the École Polytechnique in Paris, where his sharp eye compensated for a lack of conventional education. His career soon spanned the Atlantic. He earned a master’s degree in aeronautics at the California Institute of Technology, returned to Paris for his doctorate in mathematics in 1952, then went on to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., for a postdoctoral degree under the mathematician John von Neumann.

After several years spent largely at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris, Dr. Mandelbrot was hired by I.B.M. in 1958 to work at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. Although he worked frequently with academic researchers and served as a visiting professor at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it was not until 1987 that he began to teach at Yale, where he earned tenure in 1999.

Dr. Mandelbrot received more than 15 honorary doctorates and served on the board of many scientific journals, as well as the Mandelbrot Foundation for Fractals. Instead of rigorously proving his insights in each field, he said he preferred to “stimulate the field by making bold and crazy conjectures” — and then move on before his claims had been verified. This habit earned him some skepticism in mathematical circles.

“He doesn’t spend months or years proving what he has observed,” said Heinz-Otto Peitgen, a professor of mathematics and biomedical sciences at the University of Bremen. And for that, he said, Dr. Mandelbrot “has received quite a bit of criticism.”

“But if we talk about impact inside mathematics, and applications in the sciences,” Professor Peitgen said, “he is one of the most important figures of the last 50 years.”

Besides his wife, Dr. Mandelbrot is survived by two sons, Laurent, of Paris, and Didier, of Newton, Mass., and three grandchildren.

When asked to look back on his career, Dr. Mandelbrot compared his own trajectory to the rough outlines of clouds and coastlines that drew him into the study of fractals in the 1950s.

“If you take the beginning and the end, I have had a conventional career,” he said, referring to his prestigious appointments in Paris and at Yale. “But it was not a straight line between the beginning and the end. It was a very crooked line.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/us/17mandelbrot.html?_r=2

El feliz ascenso de los mineros chilenos

Los festejos

Muchos se preguntarán qué tiene que ver esta noticia de repercusión mundial en un blog de arquitectura y urbanismo. Pero, como decía en el post anterior, una ciudad no se constituye de edificios nada más, sino de la gente que la habita, la sufre y disfruta. Dicen que San José en Chile, ahora vivirá de visitas turísticas, y las minas, of course...

Volviendo al tema de los mineros, me encuentro feliz de su gran rescate, me alegra enormemente el apoyo y la experiencia de los ingenieros en una empresa tan difícil. Y, finalmente me alegra la reunión de gente en todo Chile, las plazas, los pueblos rebozantes de gente festejando. Eso es urbanismo o, digamos urbanidad, desde mi punto de vista.

Las fotos están publicadas en el diario argentino Clarín.

El festejo que tuvo su epicentro aquí en el campamento Esperanza cuando Luis Urzúa, el último de los mineros emergió de la cápsula, se ha expandido a todas las plazas de pueblos y ciudades chilenas.

Los familiares, rescatistas y aún varios periodistas del campamento estallaron en gritos de júbilo. Se llegaba al fin de casi 23 horas de tensos esfuerzos por llevar a cabo una proeza técnica nunca antes alcanzada.

El éxito de la Operación San Lorenzo generó un fuerte brote patriótico y en todo Chile el himno es cantado a viva voz por hombres, mujeres y niños. La gente hace sonar bocinas y lanza pirotecnia. También se bailan cuecas, el tradicional baile chileno.

En la plaza de armas de Copiapó, la ciudad más cercana a la mina, se ha montado un festejo improvisado, pero que amenaza con perdurar toda la noche. Sin importar las bajas temperaturas que imperan en las noches del desierto de Atacama.

"Chile es hoy día un país más respetado y más valorado en el mundo entero", dijo Sebastián Piñera, consciente de la cobertura que tuvo el rescate y el rédito que significó para su país. Más teniendo en cuenta que Chile celebró su Bicentenario hace menos de un mes. 

Pero esto es sólo el comienzo. Los familiares de varios de los mineros ya han adelantado que realizarán grandes festejos cuando ellos obtengan el alta médica y puedan volver a sus pueblos y barrios, donde serán recibidos como héroes.

Fuente:

http://www.clarin.com/mundo/Mineros_atrapados_0_352764990.html

Capela Dos Ossos (Church of St Francis, Portugal)

I had never seen this chapel before and I was astonished when I found it on line. This is not the only  example of bones used for decoration and construction, but anyway, I selected this chapel from the site sacred destinations.com, which I´ve found really interesting. All pictures were downloaded from the site, same for the excerpts here:

¨The Church of St. Francis itself was built in the Gothic style with Manueline influences between 1460 and 1510. Its Capela dos Ossos was created by a few Franciscan monks in the 16th century as a practical solution to a problem - as many as 42 monastic cemeteries were taking up valuable space in Evora, so they moved all the bones to a single consecrated chapel. Seeing an opportunity to contemplate and communicate the inevitability of death, the monks chose to display the bones prominently rather than storing them away. Inside, human bones and skulls completely cover the chapel's walls and pillars - the number of skeletons has been estimated at 5,000. Legend has it the bones come from soldiers of a major battle or plague victims, but in reality they are people from all walks of life who were buried in Evora's medieval cemeteries.

Interestingly, the bones of the monks who assembled the chapel are not on display - they are kept in a small white coffin in the chapel. In addition to all the bones, there are two full corpses hanging high on a wall. Their identities are unknown, but there are plenty of legends: one popular story says they are an adulterous man and his infant son, cursed by his jealous wife.¨

http://www.sacred-destinations.com/

New Songdo City

¨Approached from the 7 1⁄2-mile-long suspension bridge connecting to the airport, NSC emerges from the coastal fog like a mirage. The most striking feature is KPF’s 68-story Northeast Asia Trade Tower, South Korea’s tallest building to date. Multiblock housing by HOK and the tree-studded Central Park gradually come into focus as the air clears. But they vie for attention with vast stretches of still-empty land and the broad boulevards binding everything together. Already well trafficked, the roads are the most visibly populated part of town. Though NSC has yet to acquire the vibe of a bustling urban center, it is also hard to imagine that only a few years ago, the 1,500-acre reclaimed site did not exist.

While South Korea has been engaged in large-scale landfill construction since the 1970s, necessitated by a shortage of buildable area near the nation’s capital, the impetus for building NSC came after the South Korean economy hit the skids in 1997. At the urging of the International Monetary Fund, the South Korean government designated the site as a free economic zone with a full-fledged city to attract foreign investment. To jump-start the influx of money from abroad, the government made an unprecedented move by selling the land to this private, international joint venture and putting the new owners in charge of the city’s development. “Basically, it is a free-market experiment,” says KPF principal James von Klemperer, FAIA.

Given its lack of overseas experience, Gale was an unlikely partner for POSCO. But the challenge and opportunity to build a whole city from scratch — schools, museums, shopping, and entertainment, as well as housing and offices — was too good for the American developer to pass up.

The firm’s approach entailed synthesizing a number of complex conditions, such as building codes and infrastructure elements prescribed by local authorities; programmatic requirements stipulated by the client with guidance from the South Korean government; and common market practices, including the South Korean penchant for multilane roads and megablocks many times the size of their Manhattan counterparts. Not to mention an ambitious conceptual agenda that championed architectural innovation and sustainability. “Because NSC is a kind of entrance to South Korea and meant to showcase the free economic zone, we had high standards for building quality,” explains S.J. Lee, professor of architecture and engineering at Yonsei University and a former government design review board member.

KPF’s design process began with the development of a hypothetical master plan authored by a small team of architects, engineers, and client representatives. Ten new teams then produced 18-blocks worth of building prototypes to probe the scheme’s strengths and weaknesses. “We needed to test densities, scale, and the feeling of material,” explains von Klemperer. Based on the findings, KPF adjusted its model, discarded the temporary architecture, and, in 2004, got approval from South Korean authorities to proceed.

Inspired by precedents from around the globe, KPF’s cityscape brings to mind London’s garden squares, Paris’s tree-lined boulevards, and the canals that once riddled Seoul. As in New York, the heart of the city is Central Park. Adapting traditional South Korean landscaping, KPF’s 100-acre green space incorporates indigenous geographic features in miniature — craggy granite mounds, topiaries shaped like tea bushes, and a saltwater canal symbolizing the country’s extensive waterfront.

A retail and entertainment center designed by Studio Daniel Libeskind

The city’s tent-shaped density distribution peaks near the park, which is ringed with NSC’s tallest buildings. “In every major city, the most expensive real estate surrounds a park,” comments Charles Reid, executive vice president of design and construction at Gale International. Here, too, high-end office and residential towers face its greenery but will taper off as the city propagates outward, ending in a golf course at one end and a hospital at the other.

While this formation will yield a coherent, Manhattan-style skyline, KPF’s “planned heterogeneity” forms the guiding principle at ground level. It consists of a patchwork of distinct neighborhoods, each one traversable on foot in under 15 minutes and linked by public transportation. Within each sector, KPF specified volume and mass restrictions plus street-wall requirements, but left architectural decisions largely up to the local and foreign firms in charge of individual buildings.

“For us, a pedestrian city is the first measure of sustainability,” says von Klemperer. Because green thinking is fairly new to South Korea, the team adopted the American LEED system as its ecological design standard. In addition to designating 40 percent of the land area as open green space, the central, saltwater canal neither utilizes potable water nor freezes in winter, enabling it to host water taxis year-round. And the reuse of gray water plus a citywide, pneumatic garbage collection system are just two ways that NSC will handle waste efficiently. “Sustainability is no longer a footnote,” says Daniel Libeskind, the architect of Riverstone, a 1 1⁄2-million-square-foot shopping center slated to begin soon.

But high-quality, environmentally sensitive architecture and urban planning alone do not a city make. A lot of square footage was built here in a short time, yet NSC still needs a viable downtown where people do business. Despite brisk sales of housing units, the townscape seems underinhabited. Although the international school is poised to open, the city is short on cultural, entertainment, and shopping facilities. And unless the tax code changes, NSC is not likely to become the next Singapore anytime soon. Unquestionably, the economic downturn has not helped the cause. Yet construction has slowed, not stopped. “Based on satellite cities around Seoul, I think it is almost inevitable that people will move here,” says Lee. That may be. But whether NSC will reach its ambitious goals remains to be seen¨.

REFERENCE: 

Paragraphs from Naomi R. Pollock´s article, at Architectural Record.com

http://archrecord.construction.com/features/new_songdo_city/default.asp

St. Bonaventure´s fair, Huntington Beach

Another example of instant settlement: every year, the catholic church of Saint Bonaventure, in Huntington Beach, California, organizes a great fair to raise funds.  The fair lasts a couple of days, and as one of my daughter´s friends put it ¨it is to gather all people we haven´t seen in 10,000 years¨. That was a nice comment, because it´s a kind of true. Everybody is together, regardless religion, celebrating and having fun. The event brings lots of people together and they socialize while playing and eating. Congratulations to St. Bonaventure´s!

All pictures by Myriam B. Mahiques

3D artistic creations by arch. Luis Makianich

In his own words this is ¨extreme architecture¨. All rights reserved.

Euclidean Structure II. All rights reserved.