Looking at the ribbed vault of a Gothic Cathedral. Mirando la bóveda de nervaduras de una catedral gótica

It´s an artistic representation, of course this is not structurally exactly like a ribbed vault. 

¨The intersection of two or three barrel vaults produces a rib vault or ribbed vault when they are edged with an armature of piped masonry often carved in decorative patterns; compare groin vault, an older form of vault construction. While the mechanics of the weight of a groin vault and its transmission outwards to the supporting pillars remained as it had been, the new use of rib vaults demonstrates the skill of the masons and the grandeur of the new ideas circulating at the introduction of Gothic architecture in the end of the eleventh century.¨

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rib_vault

Looking at the ribbed vault of a Gothic Cathedral by Myriam B. Mahiques is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

" Culture, mind and brain.Emerging Concepts, Methods, Applications" Interdisciplinary conference

Katherine Sherwood, Vesalius' Pump, 2006.

UCLA Los Angeles. October 19-20 2012

Highlights emerging concepts, methods, and applications in the study of culture, mind, brain, with attention to cutting-edge research, the context in which methods are used, and the collaborations that advance interdisciplinary training.

Organized by: The Foundation for Psychocultural Research

Read more:

http://www.thefpr.org/conference2012/index.php

Fractal urban tissue. A simulation

Order and chaos in a digital simulation. Woods and parks mixed in the fractal urban tissue.

Fractal urban tissue. A simulation by Myriam B. Mahiques is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Metabolism, the City of the Future. The exhibition at the Mori Art Museum

Kenzo Tange´s Yamanashi Culture Hall

From NYTimes magazine on line:

“Metabolism, the City of the Future: Dreams and Visions of Reconstruction in Postwar and Present-Day Japan” (September 17, 2011 – January 15, 2012) was a sprawling introduction to the Metabolism architecture movement of the 1960s and ’70s. It was the first exhibition organized at the Mori Art Museum (one of Tokyo’s two most prominent contemporary art institutions) since the March 2011 disaster, and as such illustrated an avant-garde yet pervasive facet of the country’s long history of building and rebuilding. The Metabolism Group was founded in 1960 (some of its members are still at work today) on the belief that architecture should emulate organic life and allow for continual growth and change. Sustainability and scale were paramount and they channeled these values not through a lens of austerity but of sci-fi dreams.

The projects chronicled in the exhibition attempted to express harmony with much more rhetorical purity. Many of the most fantastic plans were drafted in the 1960s and never realized. Kenzo Tange’s “A Plan for Tokyo” (1960) proposed an entire city be erected over Tokyo Bay. Another project suggested building contiguously between Tokyo and Osaka so that the two cities would become an uninterrupted megalopolis: the island of Japan imagined as a body and the new mega-city as its essential hub. Arata Isozaki’s “Shinjuku Project: City in the Air” (1961) and “Shibuya Project: City in the Air” (1962) used the Metabolist trope of vertical, cylindrical, central “cores” to access a complex of units built high in the air. It’s likely that many of the projects that were indeed built during this time, like Kiyonori Kikutake’s Hotel Tokoen (1965) and Miyakonojo Civic Center (1966), were funded because they somewhat inverted outsize Metabolist ambitions by collapsing the logic of an entire city into the design of a single building. Metabolism reached a fever pitch around the Expo ’70 in Osaka, where Tange masterminded a model city showcasing all the movement’s most colorful dynamics for a worldwide audience that extended far beyond connoisseurs of architecture.¨

Installation of a kitchen at the Mori Art Museum.

Arata Isozaki´s city in the air (Shibuya Project)

Read the review in full:

http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/03/out-there-metabolic-pathways/?scp=4&sq=urban%20planning&st=cse

All pictures downloaded from the article at the NYTimes magazine.

A grid analysis by Fanis Grammenos

The turning radius of a team of four oxen pulling a four-wheel cart determined the width of the streets in Salt Lake City. (Image source: Wikipedia)

I´ve been reading the article by Fanis Grammenos at Planetizen.com, which I´ve found highly interesting, specially for me that have been living in Buenos Aires´ grid for so many years.

He writes about the pros and cons of the grid, first of all, he shows two charts of developable land compared to right of way (ROW) and size of block for some cities in USA.

Then, he gives us examples of critics from urbanists, beginning from those who defend urban fractal morphology. At this point, I should make a separate note. As an example ¨in between¨, Buenos Aires is a strict grid but seen in 3D or seen by a pedestrian, it is highly fractal; I wrote many articles about it. So, articulations and scaling are not lost.

A sampling of 3 simple grids and their corresponding percentage of land used for ROWs.

¨Olmstead in the 1800s abandoned orthogonal planning and introduced curvilinear streets that were to become the model for innumerable subdivisions. Camillo Sitte portrays the grid as unimaginative and unworthy of consideration for new towns. Raymond Unwin in his writings and works rejects the simple, open grid, succeeds in ushering the cul-de-sac through the British parliament and lays out plans free of the rigidity and repetitiveness of the simple grid.

As contemporary theory embraces the city as an organism that obeys fractal laws (seen in the works of Alexander, Salingaros, Mehaffy, Mashall and Salat), more fundamental weaknesses of the uniform grid emerged. For example we read that: “Making a line straight, or regularizing a street, as 19th century urbanism has often done, eliminated intermediary scales and hence the possibility of geometric interaction and coupling of smaller scales. In other words it killed life. For thousands of years, historical cities avoided straight lines, creating multiply connected rich structures by way of slight discontinuities in relation to straight lines.”(Salat)¨

Then, Grammenos explains that some blocks length are the product of the need for a team of four oxen pulling a cart to turn around within the street; and of course, a modern adaptation is needed.

We cannot copy good examples from another countries, to prioritize pedestrians; what is good for Middle East, is not good for fast avenues in California, right?

Finally, he proposes a middle-term solution, which I like very much, it´s a block with partitions as needed for vehicles and pedestrians.

Savannah´s composite

Grammenos´conclusion:

Breaking the convenient, but outdated, uniformity of the 18th and 19th Century American grids would be a first step in recovering the land efficiency mandated by current ecological and economic imperatives. Pointing in that direction, Savannah’s composite, cellular grid includes variable size streets and blocks for private, civic and religious functions. A second step would be to include block sizes that can accommodate building types and sizes unknown in the 1800s, again defying block uniformity. A third step would be to adapt its streets for the now universal motorized mobility, of cars, buses, trucks, trams and motorcycles, that is radically different from when oxen, equine and legs shared the transport of goods and people.

In summary, examining the simple grids in this set serves as an introduction to optimizing land use, people circulation and the movement of goods. The resulting challenge is to use these insights to develop patterns that accommodate contemporary urban land economics, transportation, environmental priorities and citizen aspirations as these patterns may have done in their time.

Read the article in full:

http://www.planetizen.com/node/54477

More from tactical urbanism!

I´ve been looking at some pictures from theatlanticcities.com of urban guerrillas (in the good sense of the word), organized groups of people trying to make the cities more livable for everybody; that is called ¨Tactical Urbanism.¨ The examples are really interesting, some of them a little shocking, it´s impossible for the authorities not to pay attention to the inhabitants´ necessities.

¨In mid-January, a group calling themselves Walk Raleigh posted 27 such signs at three intersections around the city, and we hear (by reading their Facebook page), that the stunt has actually caught the eye of city officials who may look to make the signs permanent. This is tactical urbanism at its best: a fly-by-night citizen-led escapade whose whimsy could ultimately prompt real improvements to city amenities.(....)This got us thinking about some of our other favorite tactical urbanism capers: yarn bombing, chair bombing – and guerrilla gardening, of course.¨


Read the full article:

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2012/02/guerilla-wayfinding-raleigh/1139/

Memorias de la Piedra

Un libro que me gustaría tener. Comparto algunos párrafos del artículo de Cecilia Macón para La Nación:

http://www.lanacion.com.ar/1446771-espacios-con-historia

Los doce artículos reunidos en Memorias de la piedra por Béatrice Fleury y Jacques Walter -ambos a cargo del centro especializado en la Universidad de Metz- no sólo refieren a debates teóricos y disputas sobre casos específicos de manera inspiradora, sino que son capaces de ampliar la cuestión más allá de sus consecuencias más evidentes. A esto ayuda el prólogo de la argentina Claudia Feld dedicado a exponer los procesos de calificación -es decir, de la institución de un sentido- y descalificación -la condena al olvido- de espacios como los campos de exterminio en términos más que sutiles.(...)

La actualidad del enfoque elegido enriquece muy especialmente trabajos que son el resultado de coloquios realizados entre 2007 y 2010. La cuestión de la mundialización de la memoria, que obliga a reconstruir el pasado para que sea foco de interés a escala mundial, se abre a la tensión entre lo global y lo local, a la constitución de un espacio público transnacional y a la dificultad de establecer relatos definitivos en un mundo incierto. El recorrido por los distintos casos lleva a también a una pregunta inevitable: ¿en qué medida el turismo memorialista ya instituido colabora con los procesos de memoria y hasta qué punto los desnaturaliza? Es ante estas preguntas que Philippe Mesnard y Joanna Teklik argumentan sobre el peligro del turismo cultural que escinde el presente de los individuos y neutraliza su sentido crítico. Los análisis de los pabellones nacionales en el Museo de Auschwitz -muy especialmente las disputas alrededor del belga- y del memorial al genocidio armenio en Montreal sacan a la luz la naturaleza política de la memoria pública y su tensión con la lógica empresarial del turismo.

Es esa inevitabilidad de lo político la que surge con virulencia del recorrido por las disputas recientes sobre dos sitios de memoria dedicados en Francia a la Guerra de Argelia. ¿A quiénes corresponde conmemorar?, ¿cómo establecer la dicotomía víctimas/victimarios? Las respuestas a estas preguntas tienden a ser formuladas haciendo a un lado cualquier intento de heroificación.

Lea el prólogo:

http://www.ejercitarlamemoria.com.ar/pdf/prolog_memorias.pdf

The rooms in Poe´s The Masque of the Red Death

The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Alan Poe is one of my favorites, specially the part that describe the rooms in different colors. It has always been intriguing for me, the way they were arranged. I can understand they were connected by side hallways, arranged like a labyrinth, considering nobody could access from one room to the other in a straight direction.

I use the plural for hallways, because he says the Gothic windows are on the right and left, facing the corridors. And, if there is no possibility to see two rooms completely at one time, it means that they are intertwined and most probably without doors, I imagine them like alternating chambers.

Maybe I have to make a sketch to solve this spatial problem, re read the following paragraphs from the story and figure out the layout.

Anyway, nothing could be so misinterpreted as the scenography of the 1964 British movie, with horror star Vincent Price.

Here, one room is directly next to the other, suppose the doors are open, you would have the one point of view perspective that Poe said was not for the Prince´s bizarre preference.

There are candelabra everywhere, and the phantasmagorical effect due to the fire light entering through the windows is nonexistent.

I took this shots from the movie and was astonished to see that specially the yellow and the white rooms are so terribly domestic, I think Poe would be very disappointed....  ABSOLUTE WHITE???.

¨It was a voluptuous scene, that masquerade. But first let me tell of the rooms in which it was held. There were seven -- an imperial suite. In many palaces, however, such suites form a long and straight vista, while the folding doors slide back nearly to the walls on either hand, so that the view of the whole extent is scarcely impeded. Here the case was very different; as might have been expected from the duke's love of the bizarre. The apartments were so irregularly disposed that the vision embraced but little more than one at a time. There was a sharp turn at every twenty or thirty yards, and at each turn a novel effect. To the right and left, in the middle of each wall, a tall and narrow Gothic window looked out upon a closed corridor which pursued the windings of the suite. These windows were of stained glass whose color varied in accordance with the prevailing hue of the decorations of the chamber into which it opened. That at the eastern extremity was hung, for example, in blue -- and vividly blue were its windows. The second chamber was purple in its ornaments and tapestries, and here the panes were purple. The third was green throughout, and so were the casements. The fourth was furnished and lighted with orange -- the fifth with white -- the sixth with violet. The seventh apartment was closely shrouded in black velvet tapestries that hung all over the ceiling and down the walls, falling in heavy folds upon a carpet of the same material and hue. But in this chamber only, the color of the windows failed to correspond with the decorations. The panes here were scarlet -- a deep blood color. Now in no one of the seven apartments was there any lamp or candelabrum, amid the profusion of golden ornaments that lay scattered to and fro or depended from the roof. There was no light of any kind emanating from lamp or candle within the suite of chambers. But in the corridors that followed the suite, there stood, opposite to each window, a heavy tripod, bearing a brazier of fire that protected its rays through the tinted glass and so glaringly illumined the room. And thus were produced a multitude of gaudy and fantastic appearances. But in the western or black chamber the effect of the fire-light that streamed upon the dark hangings through the blood-tinted panes, was ghastly in the extreme, and produced so wild a look upon the countenances of those who entered, that there were few of the company bold enough to set foot within its precincts at all.¨

Enjoy the story in full:

http://www.online-literature.com/poe/36/