Rent: apartment blocks and their uses

In 1974, pursuing his interest in the infra-ordinary – ‘the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the back-ground noise, the habitual’ – Georges Perec wrote about an idea for a novel:
‘I imagine a Parisian apartment building whose façade has been removed … so that all the rooms in the front, from the ground floor up to the attics, are instantly and simultaneously visible’.
In Life A User’s Manual (1978) the consummation of this precis, patterns of existence are measured within architectural space with an archaeological sensibility that sifts through narrative and décor, structure and history, services and emotion, the personal and the system, ascribing commensurate value to each.
Apartment comes from the Italian appartare meaning ‘to separate’. The space of the boundary between activities is reduced to a series of intimately thin lines: the depth of a floor, a party wall, a window, the convex peep-hole in a door, or the façade that Perec seeks to render invisible. The apartness of the apartment is accelerated when aligned with short-term tenancies. Here Perec’s interweaving of personal histories over time using the structure of the block, gives way to convivialities of detachment: inhabitants are temporary, their personalities anonymous, their activities unknown or overlooked.
Borrowing methods from Perec, to move somewhere between conjecture, analysis and other documentation and tracing relationships between form, structure, materiality, technology, organisation, tenure and narrative use, this paper interrogates the late twentieth-century speculative apartment block in Britain and Ireland arguing that its speculative and commodified purpose allows a series of lives that are often less than ordinary to inhabit its spaces.
Henri Lefebvre described the emergence of an ‘abstract space’ under capitalism in terms which can be applied to the apartment building: the division of space into freely alienable privatised parcels which can be exchanged. Vertical distributions of class and other new, contiguous social and spatial relationships are couched within a paradox: the building which allows such proximities is also a conductor of division. Apartment comes from the Italian appartare meaning ‘to separate’. The space of the boundary between activities is reduced to a series of intimately thin lines: the depth of a floor, a party wall, a window, the convex peep-hole in a door, or the façade that Perec seeks to render invisible. The apartness of the apartment is accelerated when aligned with short-term tenancies. Here Perec’s interweaving of personal histories over time using the structure of the block, gives way to convivialities of detachment: inhabitants are temporary, their personalities anonymous, their activities unknown or overlooked.

Dublin 1916: theatre of revolt

In his essay, Anti-Object, Kengo Kuma proposes that architecture cannot and should not be understood as object alone but instead always as series of networks and connections, relationships within space and through form. Some of these relationships are tangible, others are invisible. Stan Allen and James Corner have also called for an architecture that is more performative and operative – ‘less concerned with what buildings look like and more concerned with what they do’ – as means of effecting a more intimate and promiscuous relationship between infrastructure, urbanism and buildings. According to Allen this expanding filed offers a reclamation of some of the areas ceded by architecture following disciplinary specialization:

‘Territory, communication and speed are properly infrastructural problems and architecture as a discipline has developed specific technical means to deal with these variables. Mapping, projection, calculation, notation and visualization are among architecture’s traditional tools for operating at the very large scale’.

The motorway may not look like it – partly because we are no longer accustomed to think about it as such – but it is a site for and of architecture, a territory where architecture can be critical and active. If the limits of the discipline have narrowed, then one of the functions of a school of architecture must be an attempt occupy those areas of the built environment where architecture is no longer, or has yet to reach. If this is a project about reclamation of a landscape, it is also a challenge to some of the boundaries that surround architecture and often confine it, as Kuma suggests, to the appreciation of isolated objects.

M:NI 2014-15
We tend to think of the motorway as a thing or an object, something that has a singular function. Historically this is how it has been seen, with engineers designing bridges and embankments and suchlike with zeal … These objects like the M3 Urban Motorway, Belfast’s own Westway, are beautiful of course, but they have caused considerable damage to the city they were inflicted upon.

Actually, it’s the fact that we have seen the motorway as a solid object that has caused this problem. The motorway actually is a fluid and dynamic thing, and it should be seen as such: in fact it’s not an organ at all but actually tissue – something that connects rather than is. Once we start to see the motorway as tissue, it opens up new propositions about what the motorway is, is used for and does. This new dynamic and connective view unlocks the stasis of the motorway as edifice, and allows adaptation to happen: adaptation to old contexts that were ignored by the planners, and adaptation to new contexts that have arisen because of or in spite of our best efforts.

Motorways as tissue are more than just infrastructures: they are landscapes. These landscapes can be seen as surfaces on which flows take place, not only of cars, buses and lorries, but also of the globalized goods carried and the lifestyles and mobilities enabled. Here the infinite speed of urban change of thought transcends the declared speed limit [70 mph] of the motorway, in that a consignment of bananas can cause soil erosion in Equador, or the delivery of a new iphone can unlock connections and ideas the world over.

So what is this new landscape to be like? It may be a parallax-shifting, cognitive looking glass; a drone scape of energy transformation; a collective farm, or maybe part of a hospital. But what’s for sure, is that it is never fixed nor static: it pulses like a heartbeat through that most bland of landscapes, the countryside. It transmits forces like a Caribbean hurricane creating surf on an Atlantic Storm Beach: alien forces that mutate and re-form these places screaming into new, unclear and unintended futures.

And this future is clear: the future is urban. In this small rural country, motorways as tissue have made the whole of it: countryside, mountain, sea and town, into one singular, homogenous and hyper-connected, generic city.

Goodbye, place. Hello, surface!

MNI: Motorway Notation Network

In his essay, Anti-Object, Kengo Kuma proposes that architecture cannot and should not be understood as object alone but instead always as series of networks and connections, relationships within space and through form. Some of these relationships are tangible, others are invisible. Stan Allen and James Corner have also called for an architecture that is more performative and operative – ‘less concerned with what buildings look like and more concerned with what they do’ – as means of effecting a more intimate and promiscuous relationship between infrastructure, urbanism and buildings. According to Allen this expanding filed offers a reclamation of some of the areas ceded by architecture following disciplinary specialization:

‘Territory, communication and speed are properly infrastructural problems and architecture as a discipline has developed specific technical means to deal with these variables. Mapping, projection, calculation, notation and visualization are among architecture’s traditional tools for operating at the very large scale’.

The motorway may not look like it – partly because we are no longer accustomed to think about it as such – but it is a site for and of architecture, a territory where architecture can be critical and active. If the limits of the discipline have narrowed, then one of the functions of a school of architecture must be an attempt occupy those areas of the built environment where architecture is no longer, or has yet to reach. If this is a project about reclamation of a landscape, it is also a challenge to some of the boundaries that surround architecture and often confine it, as Kuma suggests, to the appreciation of isolated objects.

M:NI 2014-15
We tend to think of the motorway as a thing or an object, something that has a singular function. Historically this is how it has been seen, with engineers designing bridges and embankments and suchlike with zeal … These objects like the M3 Urban Motorway, Belfast’s own Westway, are beautiful of course, but they have caused considerable damage to the city they were inflicted upon.

Actually, it’s the fact that we have seen the motorway as a solid object that has caused this problem. The motorway actually is a fluid and dynamic thing, and it should be seen as such: in fact it’s not an organ at all but actually tissue – something that connects rather than is. Once we start to see the motorway as tissue, it opens up new propositions about what the motorway is, is used for and does. This new dynamic and connective view unlocks the stasis of the motorway as edifice, and allows adaptation to happen: adaptation to old contexts that were ignored by the planners, and adaptation to new contexts that have arisen because of or in spite of our best efforts.

Motorways as tissue are more than just infrastructures: they are landscapes. These landscapes can be seen as surfaces on which flows take place, not only of cars, buses and lorries, but also of the globalized goods carried and the lifestyles and mobilities enabled. Here the infinite speed of urban change of thought transcends the declared speed limit [70 mph] of the motorway, in that a consignment of bananas can cause soil erosion in Equador, or the delivery of a new iphone can unlock connections and ideas the world over.

So what is this new landscape to be like? It may be a parallax-shifting, cognitive looking glass; a drone scape of energy transformation; a collective farm, or maybe part of a hospital. But what’s for sure, is that it is never fixed nor static: it pulses like a heartbeat through that most bland of landscapes, the countryside. It transmits forces like a Caribbean hurricane creating surf on an Atlantic Storm Beach: alien forces that mutate and re-form these places screaming into new, unclear and unintended futures.

And this future is clear: the future is urban. In this small rural country, motorways as tissue have made the whole of it: countryside, mountain, sea and town, into one singular, homogenous and hyper-connected, generic city.

Goodbye, place. Hello, surface!

Finite element modelling of cyclic behaviour of cold-formed steel bolted moment-resisting connections

This paper investigates the accuracy of new finite element modelling approaches to predict the behaviour of bolted moment-connections between cold-formed steel members, formed by using brackets bolted to the webs of the section, under low cycle fatigue. ABAQUS software is used as a modelling platform. Such joints are used for portal frames and potentially have good seismic resisting capabilities, which is important for construction in developing countries. The modelling implications of a two-dimensional beam element model, a three-dimensional shell element model and a three-dimensional solid element model are reported. Quantitative and qualitative results indicate that the three-dimensional quadratic S8R shell element model most accurately predicts the hysteretic behaviour and energy dissipation capacity of the connection when compared to the test results.

Problems of minimal aerodynamic resistance

Nesta tese estamos preocupados com o problema da resistência mínima primeiro dirigida por I. Newton em seu Principia (1687): encontrar o corpo de resistência mínima que se desloca através de um médio. As partículas do médio não interagem entre si, bem como a interação das partículas com o corpo é perfeitamente elástica. Diferentes abordagens desse modelo foram feitas por vários matemáticos nos últimos 20 anos. Aqui damos uma visão geral sobre estes resultados que representa interesse independente, uma vez que os autores diferentes usam notações diferentes. Apresentamos uma solução do problema de minimização na classe de corpos de revolução geralmente não convexos e simplesmente conexos. Acontece que nessa classe existem corpos com resistência menor do que o mínimo da resistência na classe de corpos convexos de revolução. Encontramos o infimum da resistência nesta classe e construimos uma sequência regular de corpos que aproxima este infimum. Também apresentamos um corpo de resistência nula. Até agora ninguém sabia se tais corpos existem ou não, evidentemente o nosso corpo não pertence a nenhuma classe anteriormente analisado. Este corpo é não convexo e não simplesmente conexo; a forma topológica dele é um toro, parece um UFO extraterrestre. Apresentamos aqui várias famílias de tais corpos e estudamos as suas propriedades. Também apresentamos um corpo que é natural de chamar um corpo "invisíveis em uma direção", uma vez que a trajectória de cada partícula com a certa direcção coincide com a linha recta fora do invólucro convexo do corpo. ABSTRACT: In this thesis we are concerned with the problem of minimal resistance first addressed by I. Newton in his Principia (1687): find the body of minimal resistance moving through a medium. The medium particles do not mutually interact, and the interaction of particles with the body is perfectly elastic. Different approaches to that model have been tried by several mathematicians during the last 20 years. Here we give an overview of these results that represents interest in itself since all authors use different notations. We present a solution of the minimization problem in the class of generally non convex, simply connected bodies of revolution. It happens that in this class there are bodies with smaller resistance than the minimum in the class of convex bodies of revolution. We find the infimum of the resistance in this class, and construct a sequence of bodies which approximates this infimum. Also we present a body of zero resistance. Since earlier it was unknown if such bodies exists or not, evidently our body does not belong to any class previously examined. The zero resistance body found by us is non-convex and non-simply connected; topologically it is a torus, and it looks like an extraterrestrial UFO. We present here several families of such bodies and study their properties. We also present a body which is natural to call a body "invisible in one direction", since the trajectory of each particle with the given direction, outside the convex hull of the body, coincides with a straight line.

Time in Perspective: a visual approach to models of time

Geographical representations of topographical space come in many shapes and are a regular topic of discussion. The depiction of the invisible and maybe even illusory concept of time on the other hand, remains largely unchanged and undisputed. A uniform and arithmetic model of time fits well with the rigid structure of digital data, which might be why it has been widely adopted within HCI. In our proposal, we will present historic and contemporary approaches that offer alternative perspectives on the visual representation of time. Keywords: timeline, chronographics

A World Drawn: An Introduction to the art of Julian Opie (for a Polish Audience)

Essay in a monograph associated with the exhibition Julian Opie: Sculptures, Paintings, Films at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow, Poland, 18 October 2014 to 25 January 2015. Slyce attempts to re-examine the lineaments of Opie's practice for a new and broader audience. During which, he calls attention in the writing to the processes of its commissioning and early request to do so for a 'Polish audience'. He attempts to bring to light some of these often invisible moves in the commissioning of catalogue essays, while also re-examining Julian Opie's practice in light of its established reception in Britain.

Metagenomic systems biology: frameworks for modeling and characterizing the gut microbiome

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2014

Flipped clock

Flipped Clock is a working modified digital clock. Although it tells the current time, every digit has been rotated by 180 degrees. In doing so, the act of telling the time is once again rendered unfamiliar to us, reminding us of its artifice and almost invisible authority.

London Wall

London Wall is a physical manifestation of the invisible city all around us; a poetic snapshot of social networking traffic from within a three-mile radius of the Museum of London. Over a ten-day period, publicly available status updates from popular websites like twitter and facebook will be selected then published as a vast array of A3 posters pasted onto a wall in the museum's foyer, revealing the idle mutterings of ourselves to ourselves as a form of concrete poetry. This commission is in the foyer and is part of relaunch the museums new galleries.

Floating on the same plane: metropolis, money and the culture of abstraction

This article argues that the emergence of a trans-disciplinary discourse of ‘visual culture’ must be understood as, above all, a constitutively urban phenomenon. More specifically, it is in the historically new form of the capitalist metropolis, as described most famously by Simmel, that the ‘hyper-stimulus’ of modern visual culture has its social and spatial conditions. Paradoxically, however, it is as a result of this that visual culture studies is also intrinsically ‘haunted’ by a certain spectre of the invisible: one rooted in those forms of ‘real abstraction’ which Marx identifies with the commodity and the money form. Considering, initially, the canonical urban visual forms of the collage and the spectacle, these are each read in a certain relation to Simmel’s account of metropolitan life and of the money form, and, through this, to what the author claims are those forms of social and spatial abstraction that must be understood to animate them. Finally, the article returns to the entanglement of the visible and invisible entailed by this, and concludes by making some tentative suggestions about something like a paradoxical urban ‘aesthetic’ of abstraction on such a basis.

Unnoticed apocalypse: the science fiction politics of urban crisis

The slogan ‘capitalism is crisis’ is one that has recently circulated swiftly around the global Occupy movement. From Schumpeter to Marx himself, the notion that the economic cycles instituted by capitalism require periodic crises as a condition of renewed capital accumulation is a commonplace. However, in a number of recent texts, this conception of crisis as constituting the very form of urban capitalist development itself has taken on a more explicitly apocalyptic tone, exemplified by the Invisible Committee's influential 2007 book The Coming Insurrection, and its account of what it calls simply ‘the metropolis’. ‘It is useless to wait’, write the text's anonymous authors, ‘for a breakthrough, for the revolution, the nuclear apocalypse or a social movement.… The catastrophe is not coming, it is here.’ In considering such an apocalyptic tone, this paper thus situates and interrogates the text in terms both of its vision of the metropolis as a terrain of total urbanization and its effective spatialization of the present as itself a kind of ‘unnoticed’ apocalypse: the catastrophe which is already here. It does so by approaching this not only apropos its place within contemporary debates surrounding leftist politics and crisis theory but also via its imaginative intersection with certain post-1960s science fiction apocalyptic motifs. What, the paper asks, does it mean to think apocalypse as the ongoing condition of the urban present itself, as well as the opening up of political and cultural opportunity for some speculative exit from its supposedly endless terrain?

Comment: The Instagram Lawscape

Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos has recently published a collection of what he calls “picpoems”, which were poems inspired by pictures that he took using an iPhone. The pictures were taken and subsequently listened to through a posthuman methodology, which resulted in his composition of the poems. This comment comprises a conversation between Pravin Jeyaraj and Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, in which Jeyaraj explores how the picpoems offer a visualisation of being inside the lawscape, which is an environment created by an invisible law. He argues that the role of law is to highlight the lack of control we have over our bodies and how suicide is the only way we can have any form of control over our escape.

A Tradução reinventada em The Invention of Solitude de Paul Auster

A leitura da obra de Paul Auster, desde os primeiros poemas e ensaios até à mais recente ficção, revela uma constante reflexão metalinguística e metaficcional sobre o trabalho da escrita. Auster equaciona o problema da escrita enquanto acto, permitindo ao leitor acompanhar e participar desse processo de construção. A narrativa e a linguagem intelectualizam-se, tornam-se conscientes, o que possibilita uma aproximação privilegiada ao ensino da tradução de textos literários através da própria literatura. The Invention of Solitude é como uma arte poética inspirada na experiência efectiva do sujeito, enquanto escritor e tradutor. Podemos considerá-lo um romance-manifesto em duas partes (Portrait of an Invisible Man e The Book of Memory), com especial incidência na exploração analítica da cena da escrita, utilizando a personagem-escritor e suas vivências como cobaia neste processo de auto e heteroconhecimento. A partir da análise aplicada de The Invention of Solitude, este artigo irá remeter também para os ensaios de Ernest Gellner sobre Wittgenstein em Language and Solitude, entre outros escritores que se debruçaram igualmente sobre questões ligadas à tradução literária, como Dryden, Goethe, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Ortega y Gasset e Octávio Paz.

A Participação das mulheres na administração das empresas “O Teto de vidro”

Dissertação apresentada ao Instituto Superior de Contabilidade para a obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Auditoria Orientador: Mestre Helena Maria Santos de Oliveira