4. Brick

Author(s):  
Adam Sharr

Many global cultures have traditions of clay or mud brick construction. Evidence exists of fired brick being used as long ago as 5000 bce in Mesopotamia. The role of brick in modern architecture differed to those of the technical innovations of iron, steel, and reinforced concrete. The adoption of brick represented instead a challenge to the hard-line view of modernity as a rejection of history, understanding modern architecture as a continuation of history. ‘Brick’ discusses the concepts of local and national architectures and critical regionalism, highlighting the monumentality and order of the work of Louis Kahn, including one of his last projects, the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad.

Author(s):  
Adam Sharr

Modern Architecture: A Very Short Introduction explores the technical innovations that opened up the cultural and intellectual opportunities for modern architecture to happen. It shows how the invention of steel and reinforced concrete radically altered possibilities for shaping buildings, transforming what architects were able to imagine, as did new systems for air-conditioning and lighting. Focusing on a selection of modern buildings that also symbolize bigger cultural ideas, this VSI discusses what modern architecture was like, why it was like that, and how it was imagined. It also demonstrates how modern architecture owes much to the work of some of the historians and critics who helped to shape the field.


2021 ◽  
pp. 001946462110203
Author(s):  
Lourens van Haaften

The start of management education in India in the early 1960s has been dominantly described from the perspective of ‘Americanisation’, characterised by isomorphism and mimicry. Existing scholarship has avoided the question of how management education and knowledge were reconciled and naturalised with India’s specific socio-economic contexts. This article addresses the issue and provides a situated account of this complex history by delving into the establishment of the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, one of India’s first and most prominent management schools. Using the concept of sociotechnical imaginary developed by Jasanoff and Kim, the analysis describes how the development of management education and research was aligned with the objective of nation building. The article shows that the project to start management education did not take off before the capitalist connotations, associated with business education, were subtly removed and a narrative was created that put management education in the context of India’s wider development trajectory. Under influence of a changing political atmosphere in the late 1960s, a particular imaginary on the role of management knowledge and education unfolded in the development of the institute, giving the field in India a distinct character in the early 1970s.


2009 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-70
Author(s):  
Paul Fallon

This essay analyzes how, marginalized by national literatures and threatened by the rise of regional mass media in the 1980s and 1990s, northern Mexican border authors and their texts consistently concerned themselves with the temporalities of representation——particularly in literary narrative. Through their treatment of temporal issues, these writers directed themselves toward a local, transnational reading community and enacted a critical regionalism that articulates local signification within larger processes reshaping the role of literature in contemporary Latin America.


2017 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 138-153 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sebastian Gurtner ◽  
Nadine Hietschold ◽  
María Vaquero Martín

Innovations in health care are costly and risky, but they also provide the opportunity for hospitals to increase quality of care, to distinguish themselves from competitors and to attract patients. While numerous hospitals strive to increase their innovativeness by adopting a costly innovation leader strategy, the question of whether this actually influences the patient’s choice remains unanswered. To understand the role of innovativeness from the patient perspective, this study conceptualizes the construct of innovativeness reputation of hospitals and determines its relevance in patients’ hospital choice decisions. In the pretest, we identified six dimensions of innovativeness reputation such as progressive work procedures and value added services. We then used three different quantitative multi-criteria decision-making methods to evaluate the relative importance of innovativeness reputation in patient choice. We collected data from 355 former German patients who had undergone elective non-emergency surgery. Overall, innovativeness reputation accounts for 11.6%–16.8% of the patient decision. Innovativeness reputation has a moderate influence on hospital choice and should be taken into account by managers. Since technical innovations are costly, hospitals should use other means to enhance their innovative image. Strategies such as emphasizing value added services can enable hospitals to increase their innovativeness reputation efficiently.


2013 ◽  
Vol 56 ◽  
pp. 277-298 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Powers

Exhibition 58: Modern Architecture in England, held between 10 February and 7 March 1937 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), was a notable event. Amidst claims that ‘England leads the world in modern architectural activity’, the exhibition ‘amazed New Yorkers’ and equally surprised English commentators. However, it has not subsequently received any extended investigation. The present purpose is to look at it as a multiple sequence of events, involving other exhibitions, associated publications and the trajectories of individuals and institutions, through which tensions came to the surface about the definition and direction of Modernism in England and elsewhere. Such an analysis throws new light on issues such as the motives for staging the exhibition, the personnel involved and associated questions relating to the role of émigré architects in Britain and the USA, some of which have been misinterpreted in recent commentaries.Hitchcock's unequivocal claim for the importance of English Modernism at this point still arouses disbelief, and raises a question whether it can be accepted at face value or requires explaining in terms of some other hidden intention.


2021 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah L. Reitz ◽  
Max B. Kelz

The role of the hypothalamic preoptic area (POA) in arousal state regulation has been studied since Constantin von Economo first recognized its importance in the early twentieth century. Over the intervening decades, the POA has been shown to modulate arousal in both natural (sleep and wake) as well as drug-induced (anesthetic-induced unconsciousness) states. While the POA is well known for its role in sleep promotion, populations of wake-promoting neurons within the region have also been identified. However, the complexity and molecular heterogeneity of the POA has made distinguishing these two populations difficult. Though multiple lines of evidence demonstrate that general anesthetics modulate the activity of the POA, the region’s heterogeneity has also made it challenging to determine whether the same neurons involved in sleep/wake regulation also modulate arousal in response to general anesthetics. While a number of studies show that sleep-promoting POA neurons are activated by various anesthetics, recent work suggests this is not universal to all arousal-regulating POA neurons. Technical innovations are making it increasingly possible to classify and distinguish the molecular identities of neurons involved in sleep/wake regulation as well as anesthetic-induced unconsciousness. Here, we review the current understanding of the POA’s role in arousal state regulation of both natural and drug-induced forms of unconsciousness, including its molecular organization and connectivity to other known sleep and wake promoting regions. Further insights into the molecular identities and connectivity of arousal-regulating POA neurons will be critical in fully understanding how this complex region regulates arousal states.


2020 ◽  
pp. 6-17
Author(s):  
Beatriz Colomina ◽  
Mark Wigley

The human is an unstable idea; simultaneously an all-powerful creature – capable of transforming the whole ecology of the planet – yet extremely fragile, a murky ghost. Contemporary research into our microbiome portrays the human itself as a mobile ecology constructed by the endless flux of interactions between thousands of different species of bacteria – some of which are millions of years old and others joined us just a few months ago. This challenges conventional understandings of architecture. What does it mean to house the human when we no longer think that the human organism is securely contained within its skin? What is the role of architecture when the humans occupying it are understood to be suspended in clouds of bacteria shared, generated and mobilized by other macro-organisms (pets, plants, insects…) and the building itself; when the human is not a clearly defined organism or in any sense independent; when the architectural client is a massive set of ever-changing trans-species alliances that make the apparent complexity of even the largest of cities seem quaintly uncomplicated. What kind of care do architects offer if we think of ourselves as alliances between bacteria within the apparent limits of the body and throughout the spaces we occupy? What faces 21st century architects in comparison to 20th century architects?


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