Beauty definition x 2

Santa Maria Novella. Facade by Leon B. Alberti. From http://m.eb.com/assembly/15888

¨We cannot reflectively think of beauty as an intrinsic quality in physical objects or even in human actions or dispositions, but only as a relation of them to the sensibilities of this or that person.¨

Edgar Carritt aprox. 1914

¨I shall define Beauty to be a harmony of all the parts, in whatsoever subject it appears, fitted together with such proportion and connection, that nothing could be added, diminished or altered, but for the worse.¨

Leon Battista Alberty, SXV

What is a reasonable accommodation?

Richard Pimentel. From nihrecord.od.nih.gov

Yesterday I´ve been watching Music Within, the story of how Richard Pimentel became involved with ADA applications, resumed in an urban-architectural code for handicap people that can be downloaded on line.

Richard Pimentel is a disability rights activist who developed significant training materials aimed to help employers integrate persons with disabilities into the workplace, and was a strong advocate for the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Pimentel)

Pimentel is a partner of Milt Wright & Associates, Inc., and from their papers, I´ve selected this question and answer (below), because, as the movie shows, some retails´ tenants or owners do not want to upgrade their facilities under the ADA Code, and some of them want to, but the upgrade has to be a reasonable one.

If the facilities have been approved years ago, without ADA implications, they are still fine, but, once the retail is rented again under a change of use, all the rigor of the current Codes falls upon them. But, the City official would understand if any issue of the upgrade couldn´t be done for a hardship reason, as explained below.

I had a case that was pretty weird for us. A tuxedo rental with two stories, where the factory (the sewing machines) had to be on the second floor, the exhibition room was all the first floor. Incredibly, the plan checker asked for handicap facilities in the second floor, even when per Building and Safety Code no elevator was needed.

And the owner said, how could I hire a blind person, or anybody in a wheelchair with these machines? The very nature of the job made it impossible for a handicap to apply to work with the sewing machines. Maybe you´d like to remember another movie, Dancer in the Dark, the lady was becoming blind and it was too dangerous for her to keep on working with the machines.

Question: What is a reasonable accommodation?

Answer:

Basically it is some change in the job or the interview/evaluation process that takes into consideration your disability job-related limitations and enables you to still do the job or be properly and fairly evaluated.

In the interview these accommodations could be providing a sign language interpreter for someone who was deaf or hearing impaired and needed that assistance. It could be giving more time for someone to complete a test if they have a learning disability, or assisting someone to fill out an application if they have cerebral palsy and cannot fill it out on their own.

On the job, an accommodation could be many things. Changing the work schedule for someone who needs medical treatments, buying or changing equipment such as a blinking telephone or TDD for someone who is deaf or hearing impaired, changing the way that work is traditionally done as long as it still gets done. You should study what the ADA says about reasonable accommodation. One important thing to remember is that an employer may be obligated to provide an accommodation only if it is not an undue hardship on the business to do so, and reducing performance standards below that of other employees is not a reasonable accommodation. If an accommodation will not allow you to perform the essential functions of a job, then you are not qualified for the position.

Read the article in full:

http://www.miltwright.com/articles/ArtOfDisclosingYourDisability.pdf

Space perception of the ¨once blind¨ person

The Graeae´s eye. El ojo de las brujas grises. Pintura digital de Myriam B. Mahiques

I´ve begun reading a very interesting book, ¨The Visual Dialogue. An Introduction to the Appreciation of Art¨, by Nathan Knobler. In page 14, he quotes professor J. Z. Young, an English physiologist who experimented with individuals born blind who, in their later years, were enabled to see.

I´d like to reproduce some paragraphs, as we, architects, tend to think that spatial perception is the same for everybody. At least we recognize cultural differences in our way to comprehend the space (let´s say the architectural space) but this is related to knowledge and brain training. Let´s read:

¨The once-blind person, now physiologically normal, does not ¨see¨ the world immediately.

The patient on opening his eyes for the first time gets little or no enjoyment; indeed, he finds the experience painful. He reports only a spinning by sight, to recognize what they are, or to name them. He has no conception of a space with objects in it, although he knows all about objects and their names by touch. ¨Of course,¨ you will say, ¨he must take a little time to learn to recognize them by sight.¨Not a little time, but a very, very long time, in fact, years. His brain has not been trained in the rules of seeing. We are not conscious that there are any such rules; we think that we see, as we say, ¨naturally.¨ But we have in fact learned a whole set of rules during childhood. (*)

Young goes on to say that the once-blind man can learn to ¨see¨ only by  training his brain. By expending a considerable amount of effort, he can gradually understand the visual experiences of color, form, space, and textures.

These experiments suggest that the sensations we receive have no meaning for us until we know how to order them into a coherent perception. Sensation is only one part of perception. Also included in the construction of a percept is the past experience of the observer and his ability to combine sensations into a meaningful form. To perceive something requires that the observer make a selection of the numerous sensations which are significant for the construction of a particular experience and disregard those which are irrelevant. As Young points out, this requires training. The untrained observer cannot make sense out of what he sees before him.¨

(*) J. Z. Young. Doubt and Certainty in Science. Oxford University Press, London, 1951, p. 62

Inhabitants of caves

Sea caves. Grutas marinas. Digital painting by Myriam B. Mahiques

¨the old potentate determined on reform and, setting vigorously to work, ejected whole nests of vagabonds out of the fortress and the gypsy caves with which the surrounding hills are honey combed.¨

W. Irving. Tales of the Alhambra. Governor Manco and the soldier. P. 249. Granada, edition of 1994

W. Irving´s words made me think. In an urban morphology analysis, should we consider the inhabited caves surrounding the city?

What´s the geographical extents of the analysis? 

The urban grid that shaped Manhattan

The view south from Park Avenue and 94th Street around 1882. Museum of the City of New York

“The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan, 1811-2011,” now at the Museum of the City of New York, unearths that 1879 picture of the Brennan Farm among other historic gems. The show celebrates the anniversary of what remains not just a landmark in urban history but in many ways the defining feature of the city.

After all, before it could rise into the sky, Manhattan had to create the streets, avenues and blocks that support the skyscrapers. The grid was big government in action, a commercially minded boon to private development and, almost despite itself, a creative template. With 21st-century problems — environmental, technological, economic and social — now demanding aggressive and socially responsible leadership, the exhibition is a kind of object lesson.

Simeon De Witt, Gouverneur Morris and John Rutherfurd were entrusted with planning the city back in 1811. New York huddled mostly south of Canal Street, but it was booming, its population having tripled to 96,373 since 1790 thanks to the growing port. Civic boosters predicted that 400,000 people would live in the city by 1860. They turned out to be half-right. New York topped 800,000 before the Civil War.

The planners proposed a grid for this future city stretching northward from roughly Houston Street to 155th Street in the faraway heights of Harlem. It was in many respects a heartless plan. There were virtually no parks or plazas. The presumption was that people would gravitate east and west along the numbered streets to the rivers when they wanted open space and fresh air, and not spend lots of time moving north or south. That partly explains why there were only a dozen avenues.

Excerpt from:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/03/arts/design/manhattan-street-grid-at-museum-of-city-of-new-york.html?_r=1

Last two pictures from:

http://www.mcny.org/exhibitions/current/The-Greatest-Grid.html

Lost London: the revival of psychogeography in a game

Image from http://lostlondon.org.uk/

Emilie Giles is an interaction designer who launched Lost London, a pervasive game that focuses on the forgotten places and networks that exist within the city of London. Based on the principles of psychogeography (“the study of the specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals”), Lost London makes use of Foursquare and Twitter to set the pace of the game. Giles chose to use disused Tube stations as starting points, since the participant is already having to open their eyes a bit more, and notice that which is normally not obvious.

REFERENCE:

http://popupcity.net/2010/07/psychogeographic-london/

Image from http://lostlondon.org.uk/

2012 International Human Science Research Conference. Montreal, Canada. CALL FOR PAPERS

Renewing the Encounter between Human Sciences, the Arts, and the Humanities

The 2012 International Human Science Research Conference will take place on the 25th to the 29th of June, on the campus of the University of Quebec at Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

In our preparations for the International Human Science Research Conference of Montreal, 2012, we are guided by the hope that the conference may lead us all to a deeper questionning of the inherent, ancient and interdependent relationship between the human sciences, the arts and the humanities. We therefore warmly invite presentations inspired by that theme, but with the understanding that we do not mean to discourage others from addressing different topics of interest to our community.

Both Husserl and Gadamer –and many others– have extensively commented on the perverse effects of narrow scientism, materialism and objectivism on our culture in general and on the practice of the human sciences in particular. Their criticism remains as relevant today as when it was first formulated by Husserl more than three quarters of a century ago.

The conference at Montreal wants to be an occasion to reflect on the distorting effects of narrowly conceived methods, theories and practices that forever send the human sciences on new paths that do not connect with the older, nor set the stage for future ones.

http://www.ihsrc2012.uqam.ca/

The conference is the perfect occasion to share the product of your researches, your experiences and your reflections with your colleagues from around the world. We invite you to submit your contributions, including academic papers, posters, and other type of scientific report before de January 29th, 2012. Lectures will last 30 minutes, if the number of attendees permits it, and 1.5 hours periods are planned for the symposium. Symposia Organizers will be free to use the 1.5 hours as they wish to accommodate their presentation requirements. Also, they should discuss ahead any particular or unusual proposals with the conference organizers to plan the details of their symposium.

Please submit an abstract of up to 250 words (maximum) if you wish to present a standard talk or poster using the online form below.

For other formats, please attach a brief (up to 500 words) outline of your proposed contribution (including time and space requirements), details of contributors and contact details.

Please take note that the deadline for the submission of abstracts is January, 29th 2012.

http://www.ihsrc2012.uqam.ca/?page_id=371

Should Delhi go vertical?

Projects of towers in India. From http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=610384

Should Delhi go vertical? Town planners believe it is a wrong question to begin with. The question we should ask is how best we can house our people and manage population densities within the city, says author and urban studies expert Gautam Bhan, who is currently pursuing a PhD in urban planning at University of California, Berkeley.

While talk of Delhi going vertical - an idea mooted by urban development minister Kamal Nath - conjures up images of gigantic highrises painted across the Delhi skyline, experts in urban design say the best way to solve Delhi's housing woes lies in high-density low-rises . "When we think of Delhi going vertical, why are we thinking of going from three floors to 45 floors? Why don't we think, instead, of going from three to five floors?'' asks Bhan. He believes that the debate about Delhi going vertical has more to do with the image of the city as a worldclass metro like Manhattan and not about filling the gap in Delhi's housing market.

While Manhattan may have ten times the density that Delhi does, New York, unlike Delhi, has the infrastructure to support high-rises, says AGK Menon, convener, Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (Delhi Chapter).

REFERENCE:

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/Unshackle-land-go-for-high-density/articleshow/11346969.cms