Lugares de montanha: proposta de reactivação de uma aldeia do Vale do rio Ceira, Serra da Lousã

O território da Serra da Lousã, quase desabitado e profundamente descaracterizado, esconde lugares em ruína e indícios de vivências passadas que a montanha teima em reclamar. Importa recuperar esses lugares reinventando-os, sob pena de se perderem com o passar do tempo e o avanço do meio natural. Este trabalho debruça-se sobre um dos lugares abandonados desta serra, a Silveira de Baixo, procurando nas suas raízes oportunidades para uma reactivação. Estuda a hipótese de tornar a aldeia e esta parte da serra, acessíveis a pessoas portadoras de deficiências, físicas ou cognitivas, tendo assim um duplo objetivo: permitir o acesso para todos a lugares de grande beleza natural e reactivar uma economia local que permita um desenvolvimento sustentado, através de actividades e produtos nativos deste território, conservando assim alguns dos seus saberes ancestrais. Desenha-se deste modo o início de uma comunidade, experimentando um equilíbrio entre o antigo e o contemporâneo, negando a musealização do lugar que o pode tornar estéril e constitui um impedimento no retorno de vida a este território. Assim, o trabalho experimenta o papel da arquitectura na reactivação de um lugar antigo e com marcas, preservando os seus elementos notáveis e com eles construindo novas espacialidades que ajudem ao estabelecimento de vivências contemporâneas; Mountain setlements: Proposal for reactivating an abandoned village in Ceira river valley, Lousã mountain range Abstract: The Lousã mountain range, almost uninhabited and profoundly decharacterized, speaks to us through its ruins about ways of living that ceased to exist. It is important to recover and reinvent them, otherwise they will slowly vanish as time goes by and nature steps in. This investigation focus on one of these abandoned settlements, Silveira de Baixo. It looks in its roots for opportunities of reactivation, investigating the hypothesis of turning this village and the mountain accessible to the physically and mentally impaired, thus assuming a double objective, of allowing these disabled people to experience a place of extreme beauty and of reinventing and reactivating native productive activities thus conserving them and allowing for the village’s economical sustainability. This work designs a new beginning for a community and experiments the balance between the old and the new, without excessive patrimonialisation that often kills the return of life to such settlements. Experimenting the role of architecture in providing life to an abandoned place through a sustainable intervention.

Percorsi urbani e percorsi narrativi: il "racconto dei racconti" di via Zamboni a Bologna

La percezione dello spazio urbano, nella sua complessità, risente inevitabilmente dello stratificarsi, nel tempo, di significati storici, ideologie, archetipi e utopie attraverso i quali la società, nei suoi diversi stadi di sviluppo, ha consolidato l'idea di centro abitato. Nel mondo contemporaneo, la città narrata si sovrappone sempre di più a quella reale, organizzando e sintetizzando i processi interpretativi dei circuiti urbani: al cityscape, il panorama fisico della città, si antepone il suo mindscape, il panorama dell'anima e delle culture urbane. In sintonia con tali prospettive, la presente ricerca si propone di analizzare i processi comunicativi e i paradigmi mediatici che attraversano e ridefiniscono le dinamiche urbane, prendendo in esame gli strumenti e i linguaggi che concorrono a disegnare e raccontare l'immagine di una città. In tale contesto, il progetto prende in considerazione come case study la singolare situazione del distretto universitario intorno a via Zamboni a Bologna: un'arteria di straordinaria bellezza e vitalità, cui tuttavia non corrisponde un'immagine pubblica altrettanto positiva. La tesi ha analizzato in particolare l’immagine pubblica e la percezione di via Zamboni e di piazza Verdi dai primi del Novecento a oggi, in relazione ai principali eventi che le hanno viste come scenari privilegiati. Prendendo in considerazione un arco di tempo di oltre un secolo, sono stati selezionati alcuni momenti topici, occasioni culturali o accadimenti con una forte connotazione simbolica: dalla Liberazione alle manifestazioni del ’77, dalle storiche ‘prime’ del Teatro Comunale agli allestimenti della Pinacoteca, dalle lezioni di professori universitari di chiara fama alle più recenti contestazioni studentesche. Il risultato è un racconto stratificato che attraversa segni e immagini per ricostruire l’iconografia del quartiere attraverso testi, fotografie, filmati, opere d’arte o prodotti multimediali.

The birth of a tragic hero(ine) On tragic excess in contemporary theatre

The idea of the tragic is unthinkable. It is precisely within the moment in which an ordinary human being, a heroine or a hero – incapable of scrutinizing fully their own position within the whole – is invited to respond, to accept or refuse it all, that the tragic unfolds, changing their life irremediably. What are the causes and the consequences of "god’s arrival", as in case of Dionysus who visits Pentheus’ home in Euripides’ "The Bacchae"? Through episodes in the stories of characters from Ancient Greek dramas – such as Oedipus, Antigone, Ajax, Io, through Dostoevsky’s or Kafka’s imagery, in Prince Myshkin’s, the Ridiculous Man’s or Gregor Samsa’s experiences, this doctoral research proposes to examine the aspects which compete in the creation of a tragic hero. Theatrical performances – such as Jan Fabre’s "Mount Olympus: To Glorify the Cult of Tragedy, a 24-Hour Performance", immersed in a cycle of life, death and re-birth; Oliver Frljić’s "Trilogija o hrvatskom fašizmu", in its careful analysis of the wounds of a heritage of war; and Cristian Ceresoli’s and Silvia Gallerano’s tragic testimony of an estranged, almost soulless body in "La Merda" – open up the dialogue on our contemporary idea of the tragic. This doctoral work chooses excess as its privileged channel through which to approach the concept of the tragic – by its nature elusive, hostile to any definition, strictly personal and, thus, visible only through one’s own lens. In an excess of pain, devotion, desire, rage, arrogance or beauty, opposites collide, time concentrates into a moment and the hero is invited to choose, to live or die, to transform.

Computational design of a new type of sandwich cross-section for a defined solution of a tree-like column produced by wire-and-arc additive manufacturing

When it comes to designing a structure, architects and engineers want to join forces in order to create and build the most beautiful and efficient building. From finding new shapes and forms to optimizing the stability and the resistance, there is a constant link to be made between both professions. In architecture, there has always been a particular interest in creating new shapes and types of a structure inspired by many different fields, one of them being nature itself. In engineering, the selection of optimum has always dictated the way of thinking and designing structures. This mindset led through studies to the current best practices in construction. However, both disciplines were limited by the traditional manufacturing constraints at a certain point. Over the last decades, much progress was made from a technological point of view, allowing to go beyond today's manufacturing constraints. With the emergence of Wire-and-Arc Additive Manufacturing (WAAM) combined with Algorithmic-Aided Design (AAD), architects and engineers are offered new opportunities to merge architectural beauty and structural efficiency. Both technologies allow for exploring and building unusual and complex structural shapes in addition to a reduction of costs and environmental impacts. Through this study, the author wants to make use of previously mentioned technologies and assess their potential, first to design an aesthetically appreciated tree-like column with the idea of secondly proposing a new type of standardized and optimized sandwich cross-section to the construction industry. Parametric algorithms to model the dendriform column and the new sandwich cross-section are developed and presented in detail. A catalog draft of the latter and methods to establish it are then proposed and discussed. Finally, the buckling behavior of this latter is assessed considering standard steel and WAAM material properties.