Rethinking Facadism: The Contemporary New Zealand Villa

<p><b>The New Zealand Villa is a significant cultural icon of New Zealand. Its architecture encapsulates a rich story of New Zealand's colonial heritage, but preserving this legacy requires respect and understanding in the face of societal change. Presently, villa's are being 'modernised' by owners pressured to maintain the aesthetic 'respectability' of the traditional villa, while simultaneously demanding that their private realms reflect contemporary concerns. Differing expectations and conflict in architectural values results in an irretrievable loss of the villa's cultural integrity.</b></p> <p>As the villa becomes permanently entrenched in New Zealand's cultural heritage, an 'authentic' depiction of the architecture becomes subjected to facadism. District plans and heritage rules indirectly promote the 'authenticity' of facadism; however the term authentic is presented to the populace under false pretences resulting in spurious imitation forced upon villa's. Facadism results in a Potemkin City; replicated façades, insufficient in and lacking appreciation for, New Zealand's architectural history. This paper questions facadism in comparison to historical and contemporary methods of architectural change. It aims to rethink the notion of facadism and communicate alternative ways of approaching change that is honest and suitable to the aging dwelling and to the occupational demands of contemporary life.</p> <p>A methodology for assessing the New Zealand villa will analyse the social aspects of the traditional design through a contemporary lens. An analytical study will be conducted that will review the social and architectural attributes associated with the traditional villa and how it catered for demands and rituals of the Victorian society. It will evaluate the villa's position in contemporary society and focus attention to the roof as a horizontal facade. Principles will explore how the villa's traditional roof and planning attributes can be applied to contemporary lifestyle and cater for a changing occupancy.</p> <p>A design phase tests the principles through various sites and scales. The desired outcome will present a developed prototype of a 'non frontal' villa designed for the contemporary family unit. It sets out to achieve this through a series of tests exploring how the designed principles can develop a conceptual depiction of a villa. The design outcome of this thesis presents two conclusions. First a contemporary typology of the spatial language of the New Zealand villa and, second, that the villa's facade in contemporary environments has become a three dimensional object with a horizontal nature that needs to be catered for in contemporary architecture.</p>

Rethinking Facadism: The Contemporary New Zealand Villa

<p><b>The New Zealand Villa is a significant cultural icon of New Zealand. Its architecture encapsulates a rich story of New Zealand's colonial heritage, but preserving this legacy requires respect and understanding in the face of societal change. Presently, villa's are being 'modernised' by owners pressured to maintain the aesthetic 'respectability' of the traditional villa, while simultaneously demanding that their private realms reflect contemporary concerns. Differing expectations and conflict in architectural values results in an irretrievable loss of the villa's cultural integrity.</b></p> <p>As the villa becomes permanently entrenched in New Zealand's cultural heritage, an 'authentic' depiction of the architecture becomes subjected to facadism. District plans and heritage rules indirectly promote the 'authenticity' of facadism; however the term authentic is presented to the populace under false pretences resulting in spurious imitation forced upon villa's. Facadism results in a Potemkin City; replicated façades, insufficient in and lacking appreciation for, New Zealand's architectural history. This paper questions facadism in comparison to historical and contemporary methods of architectural change. It aims to rethink the notion of facadism and communicate alternative ways of approaching change that is honest and suitable to the aging dwelling and to the occupational demands of contemporary life.</p> <p>A methodology for assessing the New Zealand villa will analyse the social aspects of the traditional design through a contemporary lens. An analytical study will be conducted that will review the social and architectural attributes associated with the traditional villa and how it catered for demands and rituals of the Victorian society. It will evaluate the villa's position in contemporary society and focus attention to the roof as a horizontal facade. Principles will explore how the villa's traditional roof and planning attributes can be applied to contemporary lifestyle and cater for a changing occupancy.</p> <p>A design phase tests the principles through various sites and scales. The desired outcome will present a developed prototype of a 'non frontal' villa designed for the contemporary family unit. It sets out to achieve this through a series of tests exploring how the designed principles can develop a conceptual depiction of a villa. The design outcome of this thesis presents two conclusions. First a contemporary typology of the spatial language of the New Zealand villa and, second, that the villa's facade in contemporary environments has become a three dimensional object with a horizontal nature that needs to be catered for in contemporary architecture.</p>

Is there tree senescence? The fecundity evidence

Despite its importance for forest regeneration, food webs, and human economies, changes in tree fecundity with tree size and age remain largely unknown. The allometric increase with tree diameter assumed in ecological models would substantially overestimate seed contributions from large trees if fecundity eventually declines with size. Current estimates are dominated by overrepresentation of small trees in regression models. We combined global fecundity data, including a substantial representation of large trees. We compared size–fecundity relationships against traditional allometric scaling with diameter and two models based on crown architecture. All allometric models fail to describe the declining rate of increase in fecundity with diameter found for 80% of 597 species in our analysis. The strong evidence of declining fecundity, beyond what can be explained by crown architectural change, is consistent with physiological decline. A downward revision of projected fecundity of large trees can improve the next generation of forest dynamic models.

HOW TO PERFORM ORACLE DATABASE 11G VERSION UPDATE TO ORACLE DATABASE 19C

Due to the discontinuity of support for one of the database versions most used by organizations, Oracle Database 11g, it is important that companies that still use this version, pay attention to the next upgrade from Oracle. This work was elaborated by means of exploratory research, using as methods and research techniques the documentary and bibliographic analysis, with the purpose of providing steps with techniques and methods of how to proceed with two oracle projects, one of migration from the Linux operating system Red Hat 4.4.7-3 for Oracle Linux 7.7, and a version upgrade from Oracle Database 11g to Oracle Database 19c, presenting strategies using tools and following Oracle's recommendations. This study was built based on real demands that companies have been facing with this great dilemma, the discontinuity of support for the Oracle database 11g version. The observed results were, official support from Oracle, architectural change in order to be prepared for a supposed intervention with updating and migration of services to the cloud.

Synthetic futurism: exploring the possibilities of limitless architectural change and growth

Buildings do not have to burst out of the ground with a predetermined identity. They have an inherent need to grow, change and reinvent themselves to reflect the changes among the people and context. In the ever-changing condition of the context, the design of a building must be conscious of and attuned to the growing needs of society. It cannot assume it is destined for a singular purpose, as instead it is defined by a continuity of growth and reinvention. With the onset of contextual changes, the fleeting moment of a design’s conception becomes less significant. In turn, what rises in import is the integration of contingency to allow a design to metabolize the effects of the contextual change and synthesize new solutions within a flexible, absorptive system. Each added component through its relationship with subcomponents and previously existing elements can serve to create diversity, continuity and flexible internal hierarchies between continuous servant and served space. The summation of the Group Form that results from the melding of many parts can allow the buildings identity to shift as the individual parts reform and change to form new cohesive identities. By manufacturing the base and set of core components, a radically diverse system can grow beyond the limits of the originating elements, adding malleability to the many comprising identities.

Synthetic futurism: exploring the possibilities of limitless architectural change and growth

Buildings do not have to burst out of the ground with a predetermined identity. They have an inherent need to grow, change and reinvent themselves to reflect the changes among the people and context. In the ever-changing condition of the context, the design of a building must be conscious of and attuned to the growing needs of society. It cannot assume it is destined for a singular purpose, as instead it is defined by a continuity of growth and reinvention. With the onset of contextual changes, the fleeting moment of a design’s conception becomes less significant. In turn, what rises in import is the integration of contingency to allow a design to metabolize the effects of the contextual change and synthesize new solutions within a flexible, absorptive system. Each added component through its relationship with subcomponents and previously existing elements can serve to create diversity, continuity and flexible internal hierarchies between continuous servant and served space. The summation of the Group Form that results from the melding of many parts can allow the buildings identity to shift as the individual parts reform and change to form new cohesive identities. By manufacturing the base and set of core components, a radically diverse system can grow beyond the limits of the originating elements, adding malleability to the many comprising identities.

Architectural Search and Innovation

Product innovation can result from the novel design and combination of product components as well as from changing the underlying architecture: that is, the way components interact with each other. Even though previous studies have shown that architectural change can constitute a powerful source of innovation, little insight exists on how organizations should engage in architectural search itself. In this paper, using computer simulation, we explore underlying mechanisms of architectural search. We find that contrary to search for component combinations, architectural search provides greater performance improvements the narrower the search scope, regardless of product complexity. Moreover, our theory and findings suggest a more differentiated typology of architectural innovation. Although narrow architectural search often leads to pure architectural innovations that do not require substantial component changes, broader architectural search often leads to composite architectural innovation (i.e., architectural innovations that typically render existing component designs suboptimal but allow for new high-performing component combinations to arise). Lastly, although narrow architectural search outperforms broad architectural search in the long run, in the short run broad architectural search can have performance advantages.