Architectural Reality. In the words of Rumiko Handa

Bernardo Bellotto´s Cappriccio with the Colosseum. From famous-painters.org

The notion that architecture is complete when the construction is finished is problematic because, first of all, it does not reflect the reality. In fact the “afterlife” is the very “life” of the building. Take, for example, the Colosseum in Rome, one of the most celebrated pieces of architecture from antiquity and whose meaning changed from a place for spectacles to a temple of the sun god, a Christian site of martyrdom, and a place of romantic rumination, till it became a site of archaeology, tourism, and entertainment. Its physical properties served as a source of building materials, a backbone for squatter houses and fortresses, a specimen of classical architecture, a medium of growing flora, and a stage for Fascist propaganda. The building changed physically and metaphysically as it took part in politics, economics, and religion through the course of time.

From Learning from the Ruins: Theorizing the Performance of the Incomplete, Imperfect, and Impermanent. By Rumiko Handa
http://www.acsforum.org/symposium2012/papers/handa.pdf

Orange County: private landscape on the public beach

This is really interesting for me, leaving so close to the seaside of Sunset Beach. I promise to take pictures and complete the post, Sunset Beach seemed to be land of nowhere, between Los Angeles and Orange County, until the annexation to Huntington Beach. Being not so fancy as Newport Beach, the homeowners at the seaside front show respect for the public beach, usually there´s a low tree trunks fence at the property line, and though irregular, one can understand they are not invading the public sands.

Today I´m reading the news at LA Times about Coastal Commission sending letters to homeowners in Newport Beach, and, believe me, a letter from them is scary: 

On the tip of Balboa Peninsula, where multimillion-dollar homes sit snug against the sand and the legendary waves draw crowds of bodysurfers, an unlikely battle is taking shape. At the center are the lawns, lounge chairs, hedges and playground equipment — even a rusty metal shark sculpture — that for years have sprawled out from oceanfront homes onto the public sand. It's all illegal, says the state of California, which has ordered homeowners along some of Orange County's most coveted coastline to rip out the landscaping, sprinklers and all the other upgrades that have crept steadily seaward. The order from the state Coastal Commission reignites the perennial clash between the government and homeowners up and down the coast who have sought to claim the sand next to their homes and, in so doing, given visitors the impression that the public beach is their private backyard. Some of the incursions are extensive. There are full lawns, stone walkways, flower beds, fire pits, birdbaths and colorful displays of cactuses and succulents extending far beyond the public property line. Fences and irrigation systems have been installed, landscapers brought in, gardeners hired. At night, some yards are illuminated with outdoor lights. 

 When Newport Beach put up "public welcome" signs several years ago to remind people whom the beach really belonged to, most disappeared in the middle of the night. "I insisted on those signs being up because I think it's intimidating to the public to see a lawn and a lawn chair and not realize that that's still the public's land," City Manager Dave Kiff said. "And the public has a right to throw a picnic blanket on it and have a picnic." 

 Some neighbors said they are mobilizing as a community and hiring a lawyer to fight the crackdown. One woman, a longtime resident who — like others here — declined to give her name for fear of retribution from the Coastal Commission, said the plot of grass she maintains on the public beach protects her home from blowing sand and shields her from beachgoers. "We know it's not our property, but there's really no reason whatsoever to make us take the grass away. It's nothing," she said. "There's so much beach already that anyone can walk on."

Read the full story:

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-beach-sprawl-20120508,0,4001262,full.story

A book on Frank Lloyd Wright´s graphic designs

I´m sharing an excerpt of the review by Maria Popova on the book Frank Lloyd Wright. Graphic Artist.

I´d love to have this book, I have two already with the works of the great architect, but didn´t know too much about his work on graphic design.

¨Frank Lloyd Wright is considered by many the most influential architect in modern history, but despite his enormous cultural recognition, the full extent of his contribution to design — posters, brochures, typography, murals, book and magazine covers — remains relatively obscure. In Frank Lloyd Wright: Graphic Artist (public library), Penny Fowler examines Wright’s ingenious and bold graphic work — his covers for Liberty (some of which were so radical the magazine rejected them), his mural designs for Midway Gardens, his photographic experiments, his hand-drawn typographical studies, the jacket designs for his own publications, including The House Beautiful and An Autobiography, and a wealth more.¨

Read the article in full and enjoy more pictures:

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/05/04/frank-lloyd-wright-graphic-artist/

A conference on sustainability. Hiroshima, Japan. Call for Papers

The International Advisory Board is pleased to announce the Call for Papers for the Ninth International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic and Social Sustainability and the call for submissions to the peer-reviewed International Journal of Environmental, Cultural, Economic and Social Sustainability. http://onsustainability.com/conference-2013/ 

 The International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic and Social Sustainability will be held 23 - 25 January 2013 at the International Conference Center Hiroshima, Hiroshima, Japan. This interdisciplinary conference is for scholars, teachers, and practitioners from any professional discipline who share an interest in and concern for sustainability in an holistic perspective, where environmental, cultural, economic and social concerns intersect. 

Proposals are invited that address issues of sustainability through one of the following categories: 

 a) Environmental Sustainability: What have been the forms and effects of human interventions on nature? How can we create a viable home for ourselves and the other lifeforms of the planet? 

 b) Cultural Sustainability: How does culture forge a productive diversity for the human species as well as nurture the sources of cohesion in ways of seeing, ways of thinking, ways of meaning, ways of relating to each other, ways of connecting with nature? 

 c) Economic Sustainability: How can we create economic systems which are environmentally, culturally, and socially viable? 

 d) Social Sustainability: What allows for all our participation as autonomous yet social beings? How do we promote good citizenship and ensure justice? How do we integrate the four fundamentals of environment, culture, economy and society so we can address our human futures and live to the full our human potentials? Proposals for paper presentations, workshops, posters/exhibits, or colloquia are invited. 

 The deadline for the next round in the call for papers (a title and short abstract) is 24 May 2012. Future deadlines will be announced on the conference website after this date. Full details of the conference, including an online proposal submission form, may be found at the conference website - 

http://onsustainability.com/conference-2013/

 Presenters may also choose to submit written papers for publication in the fully refereed International reviewed International Journal of Environmental, Cultural, Economic and Social Sustainability. If you are unable to attend the conference in person, virtual registrations are also available which allow you to submit a paper for refereeing and possible publication, as well as access to the journal. We look forward to receiving your proposal and hope you will be able to join us in Hiroshima in January 2013.

conference@onsustainability.com

A design competition on “Spiritual Space in a Contemporary World”

This new annual competition from anonymous.d wishes to challenge creative individuals and teams from around the world to re-imagine the design of a spiritual space in the 21st century. The design of a religious/spiritual building is a highly complex task. Different eras symbolize different architectural manifestations based on their spiritual affiliation. A Japanese temple and a Gothic Cathedral are both structures designed and built for man in service to his spiritual philosophy. But one is humanly scaled and harmoniously integrated in oceans of nature; the other is richly ornamented and heroically scaled structure showcasing power and technical genius. Along history, religious spaces were always a place for architectural and structural investigations. A place where new aesthetics were born and new technologies were introduced. Some are known for their extraordinary structural performances , some showcase the balance between mass and void and others express their spiritual philosophy by a minimalistic use of light and shadows. Some of the world's most renowned structures are places of worship. 

 The task is to examine social, cultural, economical and historical aspects related to different faiths and societies and propose an architectural response that takes into consideration the effects of globalization, advances in technology and sustainability and other architectural and urban strategies. The proposed work should investigate ideas related to the technical complexity of the building, the symbolic expression of the space and the role of spiritual places in our society and implement them to current and future experiences, spatial organizations, functionalities and aesthetics. 

 Spiritual spaces - Where should we integrate them in our cities if at all? In what configuration? Should they be part of our homes or public infrastructures? should they be a vacation destination?... The purpose of spiritual.(d) annual competition is to encourage creative individuals and teams from around the world to participate in an open architectural and philosophical debate, to nurture the architectural evolution of our environment and to redefine the role of the spiritual space in the contemporary world. 

 For more visit the website:

http://www.anonymousd.com/index.php

Is the set of Mandelbrot discovered or invented?

Set of Mandelbrot

As you can see in my CV, my line of research is Fractal Urban Morphology. That´s why I´m so interested in fractals. I´m still reading Pi in the Sky, by John D. Barrow and I´ve already ordered The Artful Universe, same author, it seems promising to me.

Well, in Chapter ¨Footsteps through Plato´s footnotes¨ Barrow says that Pythagoreans began to see things solely as numbers, that are immanent property of things; that is numbers are ¨in¨ things and cannot be separated or distinguished from them in any way. As  a contrary point of view, I read that Plato maintained that we discover the truths and theorems of mathematics: we do not simply invent them; for him, mathematics is an  (wonderful) example of a particular form of knowledge that owed nothing to the process of human recognition.

Then, in chapter ¨The Platonic world of mathematics¨ (p. 261), Barrow says that the most famous exponent of Platonism was undoubtedly Kurt Gödel. And, what ´s more important for me ¨Most recently, the belief in ¨Pi in the sky¨ Platonism in mathematics has  been forcefully restated by Roger Penrose who uses the example of the intricacy of structure displayed by fractals like the Mandelbrot set, which he claims ¨is not an invention of the human mind: it was a discovery. Like Mount Everest,... it is just there¨, to argue that this bottomless structure is not invented by the mind, rather,

though defined in an entirely abstract mathematical way, nevertheless (it has) a reality about it that seems to go beyond any particular mathematician´s conceptions and beyond the technology of any particular computer... it seems clearly to be ¨there¨, somewhere, quite independently of us or our machines.¨ (P.262)

Above, the set of Mandelbrot and three variations. All fractals generated by arq. Myriam Mahiques

Vertical gardens in Mexico

I remember many years ago, when the newspapers published that Mexican women traveled to the country to give birth to their babies, because of the terrible pollution in the City.

At least, some effort is shown to find a solution. From New York Times, by Damien Cave:

 “We must cultivate our garden,” Voltaire famously wrote at the end of “Candide,” but even he could not have imagined this: a towering arch of 50,000 plants rising over a traffic-clogged avenue in a metropolis once called “Mexsicko City” because of its pollution.

The vertical garden aims to scrub away both the filth and the image. One of three eco-sculptures installed across the city by a nonprofit called VerdMX, the arch is both art and oxygenator. It catches the eye. And it also helps clean the air.

“The main priority for vertical gardens is to transform the city,” said Fernando Ortiz Monasterio, 30, the architect who designed the sculptures. “It’s a way to intervene in the environment.”(.....)

“Both L.A. and Mexico City have improved but in Mexico City, the change has been a lot more,” said Luisa Molina, a research scientist with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who has done extensive pollution comparisons. Mexico “is very advanced not just in terms of Latin America, but around the world. When I go to China, they all want to hear the story of Mexico.”

Partly, it is policy. Starting in the 1980s, Mexico’s government created mandates that reformulated gasoline, closed or moved toxic factories, and banned most drivers from using their cars one day a week. More recently, Mexico City added a popular free bicycle loan program and expanded public transportation systems.

The Eco sculpture. Photo by Rodrigo Cruz

Picture from verdmx. com

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/10/world/americas/vertical-gardens-in-mexico-a-symbol-of-progress.html?_r=3&partner=rss&emc=rss

Toronto, the first city in North America to require the installation of green roofs

Today I´m sharing an interesting article by Kaid Benfield, published at theatlanticcities.com:

In January of 2010, Toronto became the first city in North America to require the installation of green roofs on new commercial, institutional, and multifamily residential developments across the city. Next week, the requirement will expand to apply to new industrial development as well. Simply put, a green roof is a rooftop that is vegetated. Green roofs produce multiple environmental benefits by reducing the urban heat island effect and associated energy demand, absorbing rainwater before it becomes runoff, improving air quality, and bringing nature and natural diversity into urban environments. In many cases, green roofs can also be enjoyed by the public much as a park can be. Toronto’s requirements are embodied in a municipal bylaw that includes standards for when a green roof is required and what elements are required in the design. Generally speaking, smaller residential and commercial buildings (such as apartment buildings less than six stories tall) are exempt; from there, the larger the building, the larger the vegetated portion of the roof must be. For the largest buildings, 60 percent of available space on the roof must be vegetated. (...) 

The triptych image above was developed by students at the University of Toronto to illustrate changes that could ensue from ten years of progress under the city’s requirements. Prior to the bylaw, Toronto was second among North American cities (after Chicago) in its total amount of green roof coverage.

READ IT IN FULL:

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/design/2012/04/what-cities-can-learn-torontos-green-roof-policy/1846/