El Coliseo romano será restaurado a fin de este año

El Coliseo Romano. Foto bajada de Google images

El Coliseo de Roma, símbolo de la capital italiana y uno de los monumentos más visitados del mundo, será restaurado a fin de este año, en virtud de un acuerdo entre el Ministerio de Bienes Culturales de Italia y el grupo de calzado italiano Tod's.

La firma de calzado, del empresario italiano Andrea Della Valle, destinará 25 millones de euros (unos 33 millones de dólares) para llevar a cabo los trabajos de restauración, explicó el Ministerio de Bienes Culturales en una nota, después de haberse abierto un concurso público para recibir proyectos de restauración para el Coliseo y de que varias propuestas no se ajustaran a los requisitos.

El subsecretario de Estado de Bienes y Actividades Culturales, Francesco Giro, especificó que los trabajos comenzarán a fin de año y durarán entre 24 y 36 meses, según el diario La Repubblica .

Está prevista la restauración de las fachadas norte y sur del anfiteatro, las galerías y el hipogeo (galerías subterráneas). Además, se mejorará el sistema de iluminación, se revisará la seguridad de las instalaciones, con la sustitución de las cancelas actuales por un nuevo modelo, y se creará un centro de servicios en el exterior del monumento, que albergará boleterías, baños, librería y cafetería.

Durante el desarrollo de las obras de restauración, el Coliseo permanecerá abierto al público.

Con estos trabajos se pretende mejorar las condiciones de conservación de uno de los monumentos históricos más visitados de Italia y del mundo, y evitar derrumbes como los registrados durante el año pasado en lugares emblemáticos del país, entre ellos el propio Coliseo, la Domus Aurea de Roma o en el enclave arqueológico de Pompeya.

FUENTE:

La Nación, sección Cultura

http://www.lanacion.com.ar/nota.asp?nota_id=1343558&origen=NLCult&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=titulares&utm_campaign=NLCult

Architectural Humanities Research Association Conference 2011. CALL FOR PAPERS

Submission: 15-Feb-2011

Opening: 27-Oct-2011

Closing: 29-Oct-2011

Queen’s University Belfast

School of Planning, Architecture & Civil Engineering (SPACE)

Peripheries

Peripheries are increasingly considered in contemporary culture, research and practice. This shift in focus challenges the idea that the centre primarily influences the periphery, giving way to an understanding of reciprocal influences. These principles have permeated into a wide range of areas of study and practice, transforming the way we approach research and spatio-temporal relations.

The 2011 AHRA Queen's Belfast Peripheries conference will invite discussion via papers and short films on the multiple aspects periphery represents -- temporal, spatial, intellectual, technological, cultural, pedagogical and political – with, as a foundation for development, the following themes:

Peripheral practices

Practice-based research

Urban peripheries

Non-metropolitan contexts

Peripheral positions

From these themes might arise a series of questions:

* How do notions of periphery and proximity impact on the construction of cultural memory?

* Is globalization facilitating the inclusiveness of peripheries or denying their local value to favour the centre?

* How does architecture respond to the challenges of temporal peripheries in varying historical, spatial and political contexts

* Does being on the edge heighten or transform architectural practice?

* What infrastructure is required for peripheral positions to exist? How are peripheries networked to one another and to centres?

* Can architecture support peripheral populations, and can these voices offer critique of architectural practice?

* How does interdisciplinarity -- the communication between perceived peripheral disciplines -- affect architectural practice?

* What are the shifting boundaries of alternative or peripheral currents of education, research and practice? Do architecture schools recognize the importance of peripheral subjects in their teaching?

http://www.qub.ac.uk/sites/Peripheries2011Conference/

http://designophy.com/calendar/article.php?UIN=1000000236&sec=conference

Preservation Education & Research. CALL FOR PAPERS

Mayan preservation. Image from miradorbasin.com

The editors of Preservation Research Education invite paper proposals for the fourth (2011) edition of the journal. Papers on all topics related to preservation education, research, and scholarship are considered.

The deadline for submission of papers (4500-6000 words) is FEBRUARY 15, 2011. Papers will be blind reviewed and authors notified of publication status by April 2011.

In addition, the editors introduce a new section entitled PER Forum, where short essays (800-1000 words) written as responses or critiques of reports or articles in the previous edition the journal can continue a constructive and scholarly dialogue. We encourage readers with interest and expertise in the topics covered in the third edition to consider writing a PER Forum essay.

The deadline will be May 1, 2011. These contributions will be reviewed for acceptance and edited by PER editorial staff and, in some case, sent out for peer review.

Complete guidelines for paper and PER Forum essay submissions can be accessed on NCPE website (http://www.ncpe.us) or are available through the co- editors, Anat Geva and Kevin Glowacki, Texas University (PERjournal@gmail.com).

Memories from the Simons Brick Co.

Simons Brick Co. Picture from usgwarchives.net

View of part of the flooded clay pit of the Simons Brick Company in Santa Monica, 1939.
The power conveyor carried raw clay from the pit up to the plant. Courtesy of the
Santa Monica Public Library Image Archives, City Collection. From http://www.calbricks.netfirms.com/brick.simonssm.html

¨The Simons brothers simply began to build barrack-like housing adjacent to the deep pit where workers mined the reddish clay good for molding into bricks. By the late spring of 1907, the newly christened Mexican Village of Simons (...) had become a fully engaged brick-making company town, turning out as many as 160,000 bricks a day.(...) Built of rough-hewn lumber, the houses stood in worked out clay deposits. Houses had no foundations: moisture seeped upwards and invaded in the winter. The houses had no electricity, gas, or plumbing; electricity did not arrive in some until the 1930s. Newspapers covered the interior walls of many (all the houses were single-wall construction) as makeshift wallpaper.¨

From Whitewashed Adobe. By William Deverell. Chapter ¨The color of brickwork is brown¨. California, 2004

Giant Interactive Group. Offices by Morphosis in Shangai

¨When Mayne and his team first visited the site, they found farms and a flat landscape. Other architects might have seen a featureless setting, but Mayne envisioned the land playing an active role in the project.Since learning about Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, and other “earth artists” in the 1980s, Mayne had designed a number of projects — including the Crawford Residence in Santa Monica (1990) and the Diamond Ranch School in Pomona (1999) — that dug into and engaged their sites. “Giant is the culmination of this train of thought,” states Mayne.(...)Working with the landscape architecture firm SWA, which had master-planned the 44.5-acre site as a parklike setting with a new lake connected to existing canals, Morphosis designed the building as a series of snaking forms burrowing under and through the land. Almost all of the western half of the building (containing shared elements such as an indoor pool, a gymnasium, and a hotel for corporate guests) sits below a 164,000-square-foot green roof, which reads from afar as a faceted hill or folded meadow. The east half of the complex (containing the general offices, executive offices, auditorium, cafe, and library) jumps over a highway bisecting the site and reaches out to the lake. In a dramatic flourish, the east wing cantilevers out 115 feet, hovering above the lake with a glass floor offering views of the rippling water below.(...)While the enormous green roof, the lake, and a series of plazas and courtyards carved into the building offer employees ample opportunities to enjoy the outdoors, Mayne’s approach to nature is anything but naturalistic. “It’s an augmented landscape,” says the architect.¨

Excerpt from the article by Clifford A. Pearson. For Architectural Record

http://archrecord.construction.com/projects/portfolio/2011/01/giant_interactive.asp

All pictures downloaded from Architectural Record

Spain's extravagant City of Culture

¨Spain's latest architectural extravagance was finally opened to the public today amid complaints that the massive new City of Culture in Santiago de Compostela is a huge and expensive white elephant.

American architect Peter Eisenman describes his €400m (£332m) hilltop complex overlooking one of Spain's most picturesque and historic cities as something that is meant to appear as though it has "erupted and heaved up" from the ground.

But others see the complex of six buildings in Galicia as a monument to the vanity of the region's former rightwing premier, Manuel Fraga, and an anachronism at a time of austerity. The project, still only half-built, has already cost four times more than originally planned.(...)

City of Culture. A design by Peter Eisenman´s studio. Photo by Inigo Bujedo

A 3D massive model of the City of Culture. Image from pinklenses.com

Aerial view of City of Culture. From archinect.com

Eisenman said the project could only be compared in scale to the Getty Centre in Los Angeles. "And that took 15 years to complete," he told the Faro de Vigo newspaper. "The size of the project has been increased several times over the past 10 years, so it is not surprising that the costs have increased.(...)Critics complain that the whole project reflects a state of mind that saw signature cultural buildings such as Bilbao's Guggenheim Museum rise in cities across the country during an economic bonanza. Such buildings, they say, are now inappropriate in a country with 20% unemployment and a 9% budget deficit.¨

Excerpts from Spain's extravagant City of Culture opens amid criticism- Article by Giles Tremlett

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/jan/11/galicia-city-of-culture-opens

Read more about this project

http://archinect.com/features/article_print.php?id=91086_0_23_0_M

The Japan Series. Poles pictures by Andreas Gefeller

So many times we talk about visual contamination in the cities, and we specifically refer to advertisement on walls. But, if we look higher, there´s more to see. Here is an artistic example, by Andreas Gefeller.

 http://www.andreasgefeller.com/the-japan-series/works

Haiti damaged concrete could be recycled

Earthquake in Haiti. Image from blogwatch.missionary-blogs.com

Haiti could safely and economically recycle damaged concrete and rubble from the 2010 earthquake into strong new construction material, U.S. researchers say.

Researchers at Georgia Tech say new concrete can be made from recycled rubble and other indigenous raw materials that meets or exceeds minimum strength standard used in the United States, an article in the Bulletin of the American Ceramic Society reported.

With most of the damaged areas of Haiti still in ruins a year after the 7.0 temblor, researchers say the method could provide a successful and sustainable strategy for managing an unprecedented amount of waste, estimated to be 20 million cubic yards.

"The commodious piles of concrete rubble and construction debris form huge impediments to reconstruction and are often contaminated," Reginald DesRoches, professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Georgia Tech says. "There are political and economic dilemmas as well, but we have found we can turn one of the dilemmas -- the rubble -- into a solution via some fairly simple methods of recycling the rubble and debris into new concrete."

Excerpt from Engineering News Record.com

http://enr.construction.com/yb/enr/article.aspx?story_id=154198749