Los Angeles is also famous for its murals. Here, I took pictures from an interesting corner at Melrose ave.
All pictures by Myriam B. Mahiques
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Reflexiones sobre la fractalidad aplicada al estudio de la morfología urbana 1
Un círculo que es parte de un fractal.
El círculo como parte del fractal en un zoom
Nos alejamos y el círculo (Euclidiano??? a verificar) se integra en un borde rugoso, tal vez una costa.
Este artículo informal que publicaré en partes, lo hago recordando el comentario de un colega amigo, allá por el 2002, cuando le mostraba los avances incipientes de mi investigación: ¨¿Myriam, vos ves fractales en todas partes?¨ Por supuesto la respuesta fue NO pero esta cuestión requiere una larga explicación.
La primera y más importante: en ese momento, no disponía de softwares de medición fractal. El programa Mandelbrot, costaba mínimo 300 U$S, dinero que no podía invertir en softwares, más con mi próxima emigración a EEUU. De ahí, los precios saltaban a $500 U$S y así elevándose. Busqué apoyo en la FADU, hice un curso de GIS (Geographical Information System) y me enteré que las computadoras no debían ser usadas fuera del horario del curso. Me dispuse a buscar on line, y encontré algunos programas a prueba, un mes, tal vez más, y, en algún momento dí con Arthur y Olga Sirotinsky que son los profesores rusos creadores de Fractal Explorer. Les escribí, contándoles mis inquietudes, y les comenté dónde su programa fallaba (en los filtros) para mis estudios de formas urbanas. Por supuesto, Arthur me dijo que su software no había sido pensado para ¨morfología urbana¨, pero verían de mejorar la aplicación. Así fue, y les estoy agradecida.
No obstante, Fractal Explorer no es para mediciones fractales. En el 2002 y un par de años más, hube de hacer las mediciones dibujando arriba de una fotografía aérea grillas en AutoCad. Y haciendo las cuentas con ayuda de una calculadora y la tabla de logaritmos.
Un proceso engorroso que causa grandes demoras.....
En cada cálculo de D (Dimensión Fractal) la pregunta de mi amigo resonaba en mi mente. Y con razón. Porque algunos colegas ven la forma urbana como un juego donde se agregan, quitan partes, se logra una imagen –fascinante por cierto- y se arriba a un resultado de llenos y vacíos donde la dimensión fractal es similar o igual a la anterior, antes de la intervención urbana. Desde mi punto de vista, esto no es más que un juego de sistemas visuales que no reconoce la cultura de los habitantes, ni las características del lugar donde se ha aplicado. Se ve la fractalidad porque cualquier imagen que es irregular es plausible de ser medida según el Box Counting Method.
Postulado 1: LA APLICACIÓN DE LA FRACTALIDAD EN EL ANÁLISIS MORFOLÓGICO URBANO NO DEBE SER UN JUEGO FORMAL DE COMPOSICIÓN
Volviendo a la pregunta de mi amigo arquitecto, existen los llamados ¨fractal rabbits¨ o ¨conejos fractales¨ que indican fractales ficticios que surgen de escalas en baja definición, incluso cuando la figura analizada es euclidiana. El término lo aplica Brian H. Kaye en su libro ¨A Random Walk Through Fractal Dimensions¨ (pág 24), que si bien es muy específico de fractalidad de partículas finas, la teoría puede ser aplicable en todas las escalas.
El inconveniente de los ¨fractal rabbits¨ se da en extrapolaciones, ya que la figura a estudiar debe ser transformada en pixels (celdas) para utilizar el método de medición de celdas.
Un fractal de partículas que puede ser asociado a morfología urbana basada en densidades
Al acercarnos, las partículas muestran una alineación que no era posible ver a simple vista
Patterns de alineación de partículas. Asimilable a densidades cerca de ríos, carreteras, etc.
Nota: las imágenes fractales fueron generadas por Myriam B. Mahiques a los fines de citar ejemplos. El software utilizado es Fractal Explorer 2.02
Reflexiones sobre la fractalidad aplicada al estudio de la morfología urbana 1 by Myriam B. Mahiques is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Monday, January 16, 2012
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
Sunday, January 15, 2012
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:
Saturday, January 14, 2012
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
Friday, January 13, 2012
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?
Thursday, January 12, 2012
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:
Last two pictures from:
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
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:
Image from http://lostlondon.org.uk/
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