scholarly journals The Last Resort: Building Big Architecture in Big Landscapes

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Cameron Suisted

<p>Accommodating large groups of people typically requires large architecture. However, in precious landscapes, such as National Parks, large architectural interventions are often opposed on the grounds of an aesthetic cost to the landscape. Most of the building activity that has attracted this opposition detracts from the natural environment by both dominating the landscape and being indifferent to it. In attempts to mitigate aesthetic damage, other buildings are composed in such a way that is ‘sympathetic’ with the landscape. Employing strategies of fragmentation, dispersion, miniaturization, and camouflage, the ideal of these approaches is an invisible building. But because no building is invisible, this is an unproductive direction for the discipline. The high-end resort typology would require a relatively large footprint and would suffer the same critique as the approaches noted above. What strategies do architects need to take to develop large buildings in the landscape that are neither invisible nor an aesthetic expense? And, in the pursuit of large architectural interventions, how can these operations enhance the qualities of the landscape, such that the landscape is made more intelligible, more spectacular, more powerful or more dramatic?  Forming the first section of this thesis, a proposed high-end resort development at Waikaremoana critically explores formal solutions that enhance the Urewera landscape. Employing a research through design methodology, a critical analysis of both problematic and exemplary precedents has unearthed a range of formal strategies that enhance and detract from the landscape respectively. A ‘before and after’ comparison technique has been employed throughout this analysis - and the design process - to determine whether the interventions strengthen or weaken the landscape. In response to the densely forested site, the scheme employs cutting as a general formal gesture - generating both an ecological and cultural cross section through the site, while providing pedestrian access from road to lake. Developed through an intuitive design process, the scheme has tested the architectural possibilities of occupying a cut and how such an intervention may enhance the dramatic qualities of the landscape.  Highlighting the intellectual implications of the issues raised throughout the design process, a written argument forms the second section of this thesis. This proposition looks to the cutting formal traditions of land-art, particularly of the 1960s-70s, for insight into architectural forms that enhance the landscape. Reading the cut as “not landscape” and “not architecture,” Rosalind Krauss’s (1979) “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” provides a starting platform for this inquiry. Several overlooked cutting interventions within Te Urewera build on this knowledge, rethinking various aspects of the cut and how it can operate to enhance the landscape. Providing connectivity, security and a place for confrontation, a cutting formal strategy offers opportunities to enhance both architecture and the landscape.</p>

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Cameron Suisted

<p>Accommodating large groups of people typically requires large architecture. However, in precious landscapes, such as National Parks, large architectural interventions are often opposed on the grounds of an aesthetic cost to the landscape. Most of the building activity that has attracted this opposition detracts from the natural environment by both dominating the landscape and being indifferent to it. In attempts to mitigate aesthetic damage, other buildings are composed in such a way that is ‘sympathetic’ with the landscape. Employing strategies of fragmentation, dispersion, miniaturization, and camouflage, the ideal of these approaches is an invisible building. But because no building is invisible, this is an unproductive direction for the discipline. The high-end resort typology would require a relatively large footprint and would suffer the same critique as the approaches noted above. What strategies do architects need to take to develop large buildings in the landscape that are neither invisible nor an aesthetic expense? And, in the pursuit of large architectural interventions, how can these operations enhance the qualities of the landscape, such that the landscape is made more intelligible, more spectacular, more powerful or more dramatic?  Forming the first section of this thesis, a proposed high-end resort development at Waikaremoana critically explores formal solutions that enhance the Urewera landscape. Employing a research through design methodology, a critical analysis of both problematic and exemplary precedents has unearthed a range of formal strategies that enhance and detract from the landscape respectively. A ‘before and after’ comparison technique has been employed throughout this analysis - and the design process - to determine whether the interventions strengthen or weaken the landscape. In response to the densely forested site, the scheme employs cutting as a general formal gesture - generating both an ecological and cultural cross section through the site, while providing pedestrian access from road to lake. Developed through an intuitive design process, the scheme has tested the architectural possibilities of occupying a cut and how such an intervention may enhance the dramatic qualities of the landscape.  Highlighting the intellectual implications of the issues raised throughout the design process, a written argument forms the second section of this thesis. This proposition looks to the cutting formal traditions of land-art, particularly of the 1960s-70s, for insight into architectural forms that enhance the landscape. Reading the cut as “not landscape” and “not architecture,” Rosalind Krauss’s (1979) “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” provides a starting platform for this inquiry. Several overlooked cutting interventions within Te Urewera build on this knowledge, rethinking various aspects of the cut and how it can operate to enhance the landscape. Providing connectivity, security and a place for confrontation, a cutting formal strategy offers opportunities to enhance both architecture and the landscape.</p>


2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 341-361
Author(s):  
Gonzalo Grau-Pérez ◽  
J. Guillermo Milán

In Uruguay, Lacanian ideas arrived in the 1960s, into a context of Kleinian hegemony. Adopting a discursive approach, this study researched the initial reception of these ideas and its effects on clinical practices. We gathered a corpus of discursive data from clinical cases and theoretical-doctrinal articles (from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s). In order to examine the effects of Lacanian ideas, we analysed the difference in the way of interpreting the clinical material before and after Lacan's reception. The results of this research illuminate some epistemological problems of psychoanalysis, especially the relationship between theory and clinical practice.


2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 488-495
Author(s):  
Cláudia Martins ◽  
Sérgio Ferreira

AbstractThe linguistic rights of Mirandese were enshrined in Portugal in 1999, though its “discovery” dates back to the very end of the 19th century at the hands of Leite de Vasconcellos. For centuries, it was the first or only language spoken by people living in the northeast of Portugal, particularly the district of Miranda do Douro. As a minority language, it has always moved among three dimensions. On the one hand, the need to assert and defend this language and have it acknowledged by the country, which proudly believe(d) in their monolingual history. Unavoidably, this has ensued the action of translation, especially active from the mid of the 20th century onwards, with an emphasis on the translation of the Bible and Portuguese canonical literature, as well as other renowned literary forms (e.g. The Adventures of Asterix). Finally, the third axis lies in migration, either within Portugal or abroad. Between the 1950s and the 1960s, Mirandese people were forced to leave Miranda do Douro and villages in the outskirts in the thousands. They fled not only due to the deeply entrenched poverty, but also the almost complete absence of future prospects, enhanced by the fact that they were regarded as not speaking “good” Portuguese, but rather a “charra” language, and as ignorant backward people. This period coincided with the building of dams on the river Douro and the cultural and linguistic shock that stemmed from this forceful contact, which exacerbated their sense of not belonging and of social shame. Bearing all this in mind, we seek to approach the role that migration played not only in the assertion of Mirandese as a language in its own right, but also in the empowerment of new generations of Mirandese people, highly qualified and politically engaged in the defence of this minority language, some of whom were former migrants. Thus, we aim to depict Mirandese’s political situation before and after the endorsement of the Portuguese Law no. 7/99.


Atmosphere ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 36
Author(s):  
Qing Zhang ◽  
Wen Zhang ◽  
Yongqiang Yu ◽  
Tingting Li ◽  
Lijun Yu

Responses of crop growth to climate warming are fundamental to future food security. The response of crops to climate change may be subtly different at their growing stages. Close insights into the differentiated stage-dependent responses of crops are significantly important in making adaptive adjustments of crops’ phenological optimization and cultivar improvement in diverse cropping systems. Using the Agro-C model, we studied the influence of past climate warming on crops in typical cropping systems in China. The results showed that while the temperature had increased distinctly from the 1960s to 2000s, the temperature frequency distributions in the growth season of crops moved to the high-temperature direction. The low temperature days during the crop growth periods that suppress crop growth decreased in the winter wheat area in North and East China, rice and maize areas in Northeast China, and the optimum temperature days increased significantly. As a result, the above ground biomass (AGB) of rice and maize in Northeast China and winter wheat in North and East China increased distinctly, while that of rice in South China had no significant change. A comparison of the key growth periods before and after heading (silking) showed that the warming before heading (silking) made a great contribution to the increase in the AGB, especially for winter wheat.


AMBIO ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Eugene Turner

AbstractVarious air and water pollution issues in the US were confronted in the last 60 years using national policy legislation, notably the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act. I examine changes in the concentrations of bacteria, oxygen, lead, and sulphate at the terminus of the Mississippi River before and after these pollution abatement efforts. Microbial concentrations increased or were stable from 1909 to 1980 but decreased about 3 orders of magnitude after the 1970s, while the average oxygen content increased. A large decline in lead concentration occurred after the 1960s, along with a less dramatic decline in sulphate concentrations. The pH of the river dropped to a low of 5.8 in 1965 as sulfur dioxide emissions peaked and averaged 8.2 in 2019 after emissions declined. Decades of efforts at a national scale created water quality improvements and are an example for addressing new and existing water quality challenges.


2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 648-680
Author(s):  
SHANE HAMILTON

A range of private and public institutions emerged in the United States in the years before and after the Great Depression to help farmers confront the inherent uncertainty of agricultural production and marketing. This included a government-owned and operated insurance enterprise offering “all-risk” coverage to American farmers beginning in 1938. Crop insurance, initially developed as a social insurance program, was beset by pervasive problems of adverse selection and moral hazard. As managers and policy makers responded to those problems from the 1940s on, they reshaped federal crop insurance in ways that increasingly made the scheme a lever of financialization, a means of disciplining individual farmers to think of farming in abstract terms of risk management. Crop insurance became intertwined with important changes in the economic context of agriculture by the 1960s, including the emergence of the “technological treadmill,” permanently embedding financialized risk management into the political economy of American agriculture.


Author(s):  
John Laundre

More and more, evidence indicates that non­lethal interactions between large mammalian ungulates and the predators that feed on them may play significant roles in ungulate population dynamics. Although predators such as wolves and mountain lions directly impact large ungulates like elk (Cervus elaphus) when they kill individuals, the fact that they scare their prey may actually have a greater long term impact on the population (Kotler and Hoyt 1989, Brown 1992, Brown and Alkon 1990 Brown et al. 1999). In response to predation risk, foraging animals are found balancing conflicting demands for food and safety. Research indicates they do this by two principal means: 1) when faced with higher predation risk, prey individuals will reduce feeding effort and/or increase vigilance compared to areas of lower risk (Sih 1980, Lima and Dill 1990), 2) they alter their use of habitat types to help reduce this predation risk. The major result is that reduced feeding efforts or selection of safer but possibly less productive habitat lead to a third prediction of a poorer quality diet as animals seek out safer areas but with likely lower quality forage. The reintroduction of wolves in Yellowstone National Parks offered a unique opportunity to test the impact of wolves on the feeding efficiency of elk and bison. After the wolves were reintroduced into Yellowstone Park in the spring of 1995, they quickly established themselves in specific locations, specifically in the Lamar Valley in the north end of the Park. This allowed us to collect data on areas with and without wolves for the first few years after their release. Additionally, as wolves have expanded their range in the Park, this has also provided an excellent opportunity to compare data on animals from the same areas before and after wolves have arrived. These comparisons then, would provide a critical test of the predictions that large predators can have a major non-lethal impact on their prey. To test these predictions, in 1996 we began a study of the foraging patterns of elk and bison in Yellowstone National Park. Here we report the results of the first four years of this study.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Jessica Saul

<p>Stroke is a medical condition causing disability worldwide (Feigin et al., 2014; Murray et al., 2012; National Heart Lung and Blood institute, 2016). It can leave people with physical and cognitive deficits. The individual’s function in everyday activities following a stroke depends on the severity of the stroke and the amount of therapy available to them. Rehabilitation for the physical impairments, such as upper limb deficits, can promote recovery and is delivered by physiotherapists and occupational therapists. Therapy takes place predominantly in the clinical environment. It is manual, task based, delivered one on one, and can be time intensive. Self-management methods for patients’ stroke rehabilitation are gaining attention from healthcare professionals (Taylor, Monsanto, Kilgour, Smith, & Hale, 2019). Rehabilitation that can be done at home has benefits for the individual, the family or caregiver, the therapist and the healthcare system. Independent rehabilitation at home reduces pressure on healthcare resources and can be beneficial for stroke patients recovery. So, medical interventions and products are shifting from clinical to community and home environments.   The use of robotics for rehabilitation has the potential to support recovery of function and assist with everyday tasks in a variety of ways. This paper explores the design of a robotic device for the hand. By involving stroke patients, clinicians and carers in the design process, this research aims to improve the user experiences of a robotic device for hand rehabilitation. Designing for the user experience has the potential to improve the engagement and acceptance of the robotic device for independent home therapy.   A combination of methods have been used to include users in the design process and gather qualitative data to inform the design. The methodologies include research through design and human-centred design. Research through design includes methods such as a literature review, using and adapting design criteria, prototyping, iteration, user-testing, and thematic analysis. Human-centred design is about involving users in the development process and include methods such as surveys, semi-structured interviews, observations, and user testing. There were four clinicians and seven stroke patients that met inclusion criteria and participated in the testing. Three patients and three clinician participants were involved in the interviews. Personas were used to understand user wants and needs, and to inform criteria for the design process.  By using these methods we gain a better understanding of the users’ needs in order to improve the design of the pre-existing robotic upper limb stroke rehabilitation device. The purpose of the design is to meet the needs of the stroke patient in his or her own home. This design study focuses on developing the user experience by addressing usability. Interactions considered during the iterative design process are putting on and taking off the device. It is found through testing and iterations that comfort, cleaning and safety were necessary for this wearable robotic upper limb stroke therapy device to be easily worn and used in the home.</p>


2019 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-81
Author(s):  
Etienne Morales

This article focuses on the transformation of the carrier Cubana de aviación before and after the 1959 Cuban revolution. By observing Cubana's management, labour force, equipment, international passenger and freight traffic, this article aims to outline an international history of this Latin American flag carrier. The touristic air relationships between the American continent and Spain that could be observed in the 1950s were substituted – in the 1960s and 1970s – by a web of political “líneas de la amistad” [Friendship Flights] with Prague, Santiago de Chile, East Berlin, Lima, Luanda, Managua, Tripoli and Bagdad. This three-decade period allows us to interrogate breaks and continuities in the Cuban airline travel sector and to challenge the traditional interpretations of Cuban history. This work is based on diplomatic and corporative archives from Cuba, United States, Canada, Mexico, Spain and France and the aeronautical international press.


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