Making Home(s) in Displacement

Making Home(s) in Displacement critically rethinks the relationship between home and displacement from a spatial, material, and architectural perspective. Recent scholarship in the social sciences has investigated how migrants and refugees create and reproduce home under new conditions, thereby unpacking the seemingly contradictory positions of making a home and overcoming its loss. Yet, making home(s) in displacement is also a spatial practice, one which intrinsically relates to the fabrication of the built environment worldwide. Conceptually the book is divided along four spatial sites, referred to as camp, shelter, city, and house, which are approached with a multitude of perspectives ranging from urban planning and architecture to anthropology, geography, philosophy, gender studies, and urban history, all with a common focus on space and spatiality. By articulating everyday homemaking experiences of migrants and refugees as spatial practices in a variety of geopolitical and historical contexts, this edited volume adds a novel perspective to the existing interdisciplinary scholarship at the intersection of home and displacement. It equally intends to broaden the canon of architectural histories and theories by including migrants' and refugees' spatial agencies and place-making practices to its annals. By highlighting the political in the spatial, and vice versa, this volume sets out to decentralise and decolonise current definitions of home and displacement, striving for a more pluralistic outlook on the idea of home.

Satellite Image Processing Systems: An Architectural Perspective

Satellite image processing systems include satellite image classification, long ranged data processing, yield prediction systems, etc. All of these systems require a large quantity of images for effective processing, and thus they are directed towards big-data applications. All these applications require a series of highly complex image processing and signal processing steps, which include but are not limited to image acquisition, image pre-processing, segmentation, feature extraction & selection, classification and post processing. Numerous researchers globally have proposed a large variety of algorithms, protocols and techniques in order to effectively process satellite images. This makes it very difficult for any satellite image system designer to develop a highly effective and application-oriented processing system. In this paper, we aim to categorize these large number of researches w.r.t. their effectiveness and further perform statistical analysis on the same. This study will assist researchers in selecting the best and most optimally performing algorithmic combinations in order to design a highly accurate satellite image processing system.

Affordable Housing Reimagined

This paper explores contemporary affordable housing in Denmark. The aim is to unfold central ideas in some of the most progressive projects that have recently been designed and built. The paper goes into three areas of architecture, namely the social, the formal and the technological. In each area one aspect is analysed and discussed with a point of departure in a specific project: The social in relation to the neighbourly and The Orient by Dorte Mandrup, the formal in relation to the spacious and Dortheavej housing by BIG, and the technological in relation to the rebuildable and Circle House by Fællestegnestuen. The aim is to contribute to the current discourse on affordable housing from a Danish standpoint and in an architectural perspective.

The Cultural Heritage of Architectural Linear Perspective: The Mural Paintings in Nantang Church

This paper presents a contextual use of the innovative drawing techniques that involved architecture and painting in the Qing court during the first half of the eighteenth century. At this point architectural linear perspective in painting (quadratura) and stage design had become common fields of experimentation for the Chinese and Jesuit artists missionaries. In this conceptual context, Western quadratura was developed in China by Giovanni Gherardini. (1655–1729), and especially by Giuseppe Castiglione (1688–1766), who is remembered as an extraordinarily versatile architect–painter. The focus of this paper is on the “illusory mural paintings of architectural perspective in Nantang Church” (Beijing), which has now disappeared, and which spread the influence of the Western Renaissance. The imported Western linear perspective and the fundamentals of architectural drawing facilitated the systematization and dissemination of the quadratura as an unknown technique in China. Based on the text described by the contemporary scholar Yao Yuan Zhi, an original interpretation of the architectural perspective mural paintings in Nantang Church is proposed. These paintings provide an important case study of Sino-European collaboration in the eighteenth century from different points of view: the representation of the light in drawings and the fact that the concept of shadow in some respects was unknown to the Chinese artist.

Perceived Lighting Uniformity on Pedestrian Roads: From an Architectural Perspective

Lighting uniformity is a key factor in traffic safety, and it could even result in energy savings for light installations. However, highly uniform horizontal road lighting for motorized vehicles may not be optimal for pedestrian roads. Therefore, it is important to evaluate the way in which pedestrians experience road lighting uniformity. Accordingly, we employed a qualitative approach to examine pedestrian road lighting uniformity. Visual analyses were used to exemplify and discuss the perceived uniformity. The case studies were performed on three pedestrian roads with similar light installations. The results show that the experience of road lighting uniformity differs substantially between the three roads. Based on the case studies, there are many aspects that need to be considered beyond the light falling on the horizontal surfaces. This study suggests that the visual experience of road lighting uniformity for pedestrians is difficult to estimate with photometric values because the visual impact of uniformity is highly influenced by the spatial context and landscape.

School space selection preferences: Architectural perspective toward formal school

<span lang="EN-US">School space plays an essential role in creating a pleasurable learning atmosphere. The tendency of everyone to choose a school space also varies. By knowing this trend pattern, schools can be designed to improve student learning effectiveness. The purpose of this study was to find out which school spaces students choose to study, what kind of room criteria are needed, and distribution patterns of students' preference choices. This research used both the qualitative exploratory and quantitative methods using an open-ended question questionnaire for data collection. Data analysis techniques used qualitative analysis methods consisting of open coding, axial coding, and selective coding. The results showed that the library, mosque, and multimedia laboratory were the most preferred space for students to study at school. Some factors that influence the selection include thermal comfort, completeness of supporting facilities, and acoustic comfort.</span>

Manifesting Civic-ness

Urban centres have seen decreasing public notions of civic-ness, as citizens’ understanding and implementation of civic engagement have shifted into the individualistic and private physical realm. The characteristics of a citizen in the contemporary age are scattered and ill-defined, leading to a dilemma of citizenship, and where and how civic engagement takes place. Analyzing this quandary from an architectural perspective begins to question how a space can become civic, and addresses the necessity of physical space for increased civic engagement. This thesis aims to define and suggest a bridge for the current gap in civic architecture that is citizen-oriented, combining programmatic and spatial functions as an architectural alternative to highly institutional governmental spaces. The alternative provides a platform of tangible, non-privatized spaces that have the potential to make room for a more balanced approach to participation that encourages the engagement of a substantive citizenry

Manifesting Civic-ness

Urban centres have seen decreasing public notions of civic-ness, as citizens’ understanding and implementation of civic engagement have shifted into the individualistic and private physical realm. The characteristics of a citizen in the contemporary age are scattered and ill-defined, leading to a dilemma of citizenship, and where and how civic engagement takes place. Analyzing this quandary from an architectural perspective begins to question how a space can become civic, and addresses the necessity of physical space for increased civic engagement. This thesis aims to define and suggest a bridge for the current gap in civic architecture that is citizen-oriented, combining programmatic and spatial functions as an architectural alternative to highly institutional governmental spaces. The alternative provides a platform of tangible, non-privatized spaces that have the potential to make room for a more balanced approach to participation that encourages the engagement of a substantive citizenry

Characterizing Smart Environments as Interactive and Collective Platforms: A Review of the Key Behaviors of Responsive Architecture

Since architect Nicholas Negroponte first proposed a vision of responsive architecture smart environments have been widely investigated, especially in the fields of computer science and engineering. Despite growing interest in the topic, a comprehensive review of research about smart environments from the architectural perspective is largely missing. In order to provide a formal understanding of smart environments in architecture, this paper conducts a systematic literature review of scholarly sources over the last decade, focusing on four related subjects: (1) responsive architecture, (2) kinetic architecture, (3) adaptive architecture and (4) intelligent buildings. Through this review, the paper identifies and examines interactive and collective behaviors in smart environments, thereby contributing to defining the properties of creative, smart spaces in the contemporary digital ecosystem. In addition, this research offers a means of systematically characterizing and constructing smart environments as interactive and collective platforms, enabling occupants to sense, experience and understand smart spaces.

Resilience in Postdisaster Reconstruction of Human Settlement

Disaster resilience is an ongoing learning process for individuals, families, communities, and society in general to prepare for, respond to, adapt to, and recover from disaster events. This capacity requires a synthesis of multiple elements, including natural, built, social, cultural, economic, and political environments. Architects are on the front line to facilitate postdisaster reconstruction of human settlement, overseeing the quality of structural and infrastructural systems to better support the various social and humanitarian recovery efforts. From the architectural perspective of disaster research and practice, this chapter examines various aspects of building resilience in human settlement. Using the post-Wenchuan earthquake reconstruction initiative in China as an example, this chapter illustrates how the lack of balance among different societal factors (such as social, economic, and cultural) in built environment reconstruction directly damages other aspects of recovery, which significantly delays the capacity-building process of resilience.