Digital Commons Network^™

Buildings With Brain Power: Library Architecture In Neural Terms., Hannah Bennett

Hannah Bennett

The connection between neuroscience and the built environment is a fairly new interdisciplinary field and one in which both fields, in their respective pursuits, have worked to understand the relationship between design choices, human behavior, and biological processes. Taken together and applied in tandem, these two activities have potential to vastly improve the effectiveness of buildings designed with the healthcare facilities, laboratories, or elementary schools, all of which share objectives of healing and intellectual cultivation. This paper will extend the dialogue to library design, perhaps the most representationally loaded expression of “mental space.” The library has seen profound changes in …

Unit Of Luminous Flux: Mario Botta's Centre Dürrenmatt Neuchâtel, Andreas Luescher

Andreas Luescher

This paper examines the Centre Dürrenmatt Neuchâtel (CDN), which opened in 2000, as the site of a “dialogue” between the ideas and practice of Switzerland’s best-known Italian-speaking architect and designer, Mario Botta, and the country’s best-known German-speaking playwright, Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921-1990). The CDN becomes a double portrait of two Swiss artists, separated by parole but not Sprache. Both felt peripheral to Swiss society, yet each was a product of the cantonal principle of strong regionalism aerated by the Federation’s facilitation of cosmopolitanism aligned in an environmental ecology that literally and figuratively mixed their respective media: the concrete for the ephemeral …

Greta Place As A Historic District, William Riggs

William W. Riggs

This report, forwarded to the City of San Luis Obispo's Cultural Heritage Commission proposes Greta Place as a mid-century modern historic district. Greta is a small street located centrally in San Luis Obispo, CA (See Figure 1). It has a unique and distinct mid-century presence that is both a well-preserved and concentrated example of a collection of Mid-century single-family homes produced in San Luis Obispo as the City began to expand in the 1950s. It specifically called out in the City’s Historic Context Statement when it describes the street as “a cohesive collection of one-story Mid-century Modern houses along Greta …

Not-I/Thou: The Other Subject Of Art And Architecture, Gavin W. Keeney

Gavin W Keeney

Not-I/Thou: The Other Subject of Art and Architecture is a series of essays delineating the gray areas and black zones in present-day cultural production with, in Part One (The Gray and the Black), an implicit critique of neoliberal capitalism and its assault on the humanities through the pseudo-scientific and pseudo-empirical biases of academic and professional disciplines. Initially surveying the shift from Cultural Ecology to Cultural Studies to Cognitive Capitalism, the essays of Part Two (What is “Franciscan” Ontology?) return to certain lost causes in the historical development of modernity and post-modernity, foremost the recourse to artistic production as both a …

Travelling In Turkey, Fathi Habashi

Fathi Habashi

The peninsula that lies between the Black and Mediterranean seas, called Asia Minor by the Romans and Anatolia by the Greeks, was one of the crossroads of ancient civilizations. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 was a turning point in the history of mankind. Visits to Istanbul, Ankara, Eskisehir given together with the history of the country. Mineral resources of the country is briefly outlined.

Embodying Law In The Garden: An Autoethnographic Account Of An Office Of Law, Matilda Arvidsson

Dr Matilda Arvidsson

Based on an autoethnographical study of the office of the tingsnotarie this article questions the relation between the ethical self and the act of taking up a judicial office, employing the question of how I can live with (my) law. While the office and the ethical self are kept apart, often by recourse to persona, I make a case for the attendance to the self in examinations of ethical responsibility when pursuing an office of law. I propose that the garden, and in particular the practices and notions of (en)closure, (loss of) direction, cultivation, (dis)order, authorship and care-for-the-other which are …

Redevelopment Of Urban Village In Shenzhen, Hang Zhou

hang@art.umass.edu

Urban Villages are a specific phenomenon raised in modern China due to the high-speed economic development and urbanization in recent three decades. And there are social, economic, cultural and architectural transformations happened in these villages during these years. They appear on both the outskirts and the downtown segments of major cities, and surrounded by skyscrapers, transportation infrastructures, and other modern urban constructions. They are commonly inhabited by the poor and transient.

Most of Urban Villages are heavily populated, overdeveloped, and lack of basic infrastructure. Some villages' building density is higher than 70%. They are composed of overcrowded multi-story buildings from …