Out of the Shadows: A one day investigation of the politics of architecture explored through the lens of post-conflict, Belfast

This booklet covers the itinerary and some of the findings of a day-long visit to Belfast on the 7th November 2014 by Peter Oborn; Vice President International of the Royal Institute of British Architects. His visit was in response to a motion submitted to the RIBA council (19.05.2014) calling for the suspension of the Israeli Association of United Architects from the International Union of Architects. Despite members of council speaking against the motion it was carried; 23 members voting for, 16 against, and 10 abstentions. Subsequently the RIBA came under considerable pressure to consider its position in such critical contexts. This visit to Belfast was part of a wider fact-finding mission and evidence taking. At its heart was the question: 'Is it appropriate for the institute (RIBA) to engage with communities facing civil conflict and/or natural disaster and, if so, how it can do so most effectively.' The visit was facilitated by Ruth Morrow, Professor of Architecture, School of Planning, Architecture & Civil Engineering, Queen's University Belfast, and Martin Hare, Royal Society of Ulster Architects (RSUA) president.

Defining the role of common variation in the genomic and biological architecture of adult human height

Using genome-wide data from 253,288 individuals, we identified 697 variants at genome-wide significance that together explained one-fifth of the heritability for adult height. By testing different numbers of variants in independent studies, we show that the most strongly associated 1/42,000, 1/43,700 and 1/49,500 SNPs explained 1/421%, 1/424% and 1/429% of phenotypic variance. Furthermore, all common variants together captured 60% of heritability. The 697 variants clustered in 423 loci were enriched for genes, pathways and tissue types known to be involved in growth and together implicated genes and pathways not highlighted in earlier efforts, such as signaling by fibroblast growth factors, WNT/I 2-catenin and chondroitin sulfate-related genes. We identified several genes and pathways not previously connected with human skeletal growth, including mTOR, osteoglycin and binding of hyaluronic acid. Our results indicate a genetic architecture for human height that is characterized by a very large but finite number (thousands) of causal variants.

Book Review - An Architecture of Parts: Architects, Building Workers and Industrialisation in Britain 1940–1970 by Christine Wall and Architecture and the Welfare State, edited by Mark Swenarton, Tom Avermaete and Dirk van den Heuvel.

Session organiser/chair: Architecture, Infrastructure and the Making of Modern Ireland

‘A free Ireland would drain the bogs, would harness the rivers, would plant the wastes, would nationalise the railways and the waterways, would improve agriculture, would protect fisheries, would foster industries, would promote commerce, and beautify the cities …’ (Padraig Pearse, ‘From a Hermitage’, 1913)

Somewhat unusually in his often romantic writings Padraig Pearse – poet, pedagogue and revolutionary – chose to describe the future of an independent Ireland in terms of infrastructure and technological processes. Terence Brown’s locating of this excerpt at the beginning his seminal work Ireland: A Social and Cultural History 1922-2002 highlights the simultaneous and interlinking construction of both a new physical and cultural landscape for an independent modern nation. Lacking any significant industrial complex, the construction of new infrastructures in Ireland was seen throughout the 20th century as a key element in the building of the new State, just as the adoption of an international style modernism in architecture was perceived as a way to escape the colonial past. For Paul N. Edwards modernity and infrastructure are intimately connected.

‘infrastructures simultaneously shape and are shaped – in other words, co-construct – the condition of modernity. By linking macro, meso, and micro scales of time, space and social organisation, they form the stable foundation of modern social worlds’ (2003: 186).
Simultaneously omnipresent and invisible – infra means beneath – Edwards also points out that infrastructure tends only to become apparent when it is either new or broken. Interpreting the meso scale as being that of the building, this session calls for papers that critically and analytically investigate aspects of the architectures of infrastructure in 20th-century Ireland. Like the territory they explore these papers may range across scales to oscillate between a concern for the artefact and its physical landscape, and the larger, often hidden systems and networks that co-define this architecture.

Folly: Art after Architecture

FOLLY brings together Irish and international contemporary artists whose work has been inspired by iconic buildings of architectural modernism. From Eileen Gray’s seminal E1027 to Mies Van der Rohe’s restored Farnsworth House, Paul Rudolph’s demolished residences to Walter Gropius’s imagined Chicago Tribune Tower, the buildings referenced in FOLLY have had a mixed collection of fates.

Their presence in this exhibition affords them another afterlife. The qualities that make the architecture significant are played-with, exposed, re-canonised, made ambiguous, and eulogised. By creating fictional moments, questioning conventional documentation or excavating troubled histories of production, each artist invites you to think about how we experience and understand architecture today.

Incorporating PGMs into a BDI Architecture

In this paper, we present a hybrid BDI-PGM framework, in which PGMs (Probabilistic Graphical Models) are incorporated into a BDI (belief-desire-intention) architecture. This work is motivated by the need to address the scalability and noisy sensing issues in SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition) systems. Our approach uses the incorporated PGMs to model the uncertainty reasoning and decision making processes of agents situated in a stochastic environment. In particular, we use Bayesian networks to reason about an agent’s beliefs about the environment based on its sensory observations, and select optimal plans according to the utilities of actions defined in influence diagrams. This approach takes the advantage of the scalability of the BDI architecture and the uncertainty reasoning capability of PGMs. We present a prototype of the proposed approach using a transit scenario to validate its effectiveness.

An Architecture of a Multi-Agent System for SCADA - Dealing With Uncertainty, Plans and Actions

This paper presents a multi-agent system approach to address the difficulties encountered in traditional SCADA systems deployed in critical environments such as electrical power generation, transmission and distribution. The approach models uncertainty and combines multiple sources of uncertain information to deliver robust plan selection. We examine the approach in the context of a simplified power supply/demand scenario using a residential grid connected solar system and consider the challenges of modelling and reasoning with
uncertain sensor information in this environment. We discuss examples of plans and actions required for sensing, establish and discuss the effect of uncertainty on such systems and investigate different uncertainty theories and how they can fuse uncertain information from multiple sources for effective decision making in
such a complex system.

Between Tradition and Modernity: Determining Spatial Systems of Privacy in the Domestic Architecture of Contemporary Iraq

The notion of privacy represents a central criterion for both indoor and outdoor social spaces in most traditional Arab settlements. This paper investigates privacy and everyday life as determinants of the physical properties of the built and urban fabric and will study their impact on traditional settlements and architecture of the home in the contemporary Iraqi city. It illustrates the relationship between socio-cultural aspects of public/private realms using the notion of the social sphere as an investigative tool of the concept of social space in Iraqi houses and local communities (Mahalla). This paper reports that in spite of the impact of other factors in articulating built forms, privacy embodies the primary role under the effects of Islamic rules, principles and culture. The crucial problem is the underestimation of traditional inherited values through opening social spaces to the outside that giving unlimited accesses to the indoor social environment creating many problems with regard to privacy and communal social integration.

Studio Craft and Technique: The Architecture Student's Handbook

This is a second edition of the very successful book originally published in 2010. This second edition is published by new publisher Laurence King Publishers which will include an increased international distribution.

Sound Art in Urban Architecture and Planning: An Introduction

This article will introduce a specially-commissioned edition of the JSS centering on articles developed from the International Symposium May 2014 by the Recomposing the City project.

Can(Plan)+: Extending the Operational Semantics of the BDI Architecture to deal with Uncertain Information

The BDI architecture, where agents are modelled based on their beliefs, desires and intentions, provides a practical approach to develop large scale systems. However, it is not well suited to model complex Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems pervaded by uncertainty. In this paper we address this issue by extending the operational semantics of Can(Plan) into Can(Plan)+. We start by modelling the beliefs of an agent as a set of epistemic states where each state, possibly using a different representation, models part of the agent's beliefs. These epistemic states are stratified to make them commensurable and to reason about the uncertain beliefs of the agent. The syntax and semantics of a BDI agent are extended accordingly and we identify fragments with computationally efficient semantics. Finally, we examine how primitive actions are affected by uncertainty and we define an appropriate form of lookahead planning.