Lost in Translation, book review of Urban Landscape Perspectives

In Sofia Coppola's 2003 film Lost in Translation, Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson's characters find themselves culturally stranded and oddly mismatched as an improvised tourist couple in contemporary Tokyo. This is an urban landscape that they cannot comprehend but only temporarily experience, in a fragmented and surreptitious way that allows no possible understanding and categorizations, but offers physical inclusion, emotional participation and momentary embeddedness.

Piranesi in Ghent

Piranesi in Ghent is an exhibition, a catalogue and a symposium. It is also a telling story in the recent scholarship and recurring ‘fashionable’ re-discoveries of Piranesi’s work. It is a funny story, a serious cultural enterprise that begins, like all good love stories, by chance. But there’s more here: scholarly passion, intellectual curiosity, design and experimentations: as well as reproductions, plates and debates, and a lot of challenging hypotheses and development possibilities. This is indeed a very Piranesian story and, as in Piranesi’s work, here the less visibly obvious is worthy of the greatest attention, because it reveals more, much more indeed, than what appears at first.

The vague, the viral, the parasitic: Piranesi's metropolis

In mid-18th century Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s etchings systematically document the old and new monuments, decrepit buildings and broken down infrastructures of a Rome that continues to inhabit and reinvent its past. His views of Rome offer a devastating account of the blurring of distinctions and articulations that time, use and neglect have imposed on the old differentiations of the urban and the rural, the public and the private, the monumental and the domestic in the 18th century city. Rome becomes for Piranesi the laboratory for a questioning of architecture that places his work well beyond the debate on style and on the origin that dominated the architectural discourse of his time. This paper suggests that Piranesi’s images anticipate the dispersion and sprawl of the city of today, in which the ‘vague’, the ‘viral’ and the ‘parasitic’ become modes of inhabitation and of transient negotiated definition. In the Antichità di Roma, ancient buildings are represented not only in their large scale and magnificence, but also in their decay and reversal to a state of naturalness. These works, together with the acute observations of the Vedute di Roma, provide the materials that are then dislocated, manipulated, cloned and endlessly mutated by Piranesi in the synthesis of the Campo Marzio dell’Antica Roma, in which the historical city is almost entirely dissolved and replaced by an extraordinary congestion of fragments. When they are re-examined on the grounds of contemporary architectural and urban theory, the sites of Piranesi's views reveal anticipations of phenomena that affect the metropolis of today. Political, social and economic conditions have changed dramatically, but the questions asked of architecture in and by these sites challenge the definition of an architecture of style, forms and boundaries - in the 18th century as well as in the 21st -in favour of an architecture of change.

Can density functional theory (DFT) be used as an aid to a deeper understanding of tandem mass spectrometric fragmentation pathways?

Prediction of tandem mass spectrometric (MS/MS) fragmentation for non-peptidic molecules based on structure is of immense interest to the mass spectrometrist. If a reliable approach to MS/MS prediction could be achieved its impact within the pharmaceutical industry could be immense. Many publications have stressed that the fragmentation of a molecular ion or protonated molecule is a complex process that depends on many parameters, making prediction difficult. Commercial prediction software relies on a collection of general heuristic rules of fragmentation, which involve cleaving every bond in the structure to produce a list of 'expected' masses which can be compared with the experimental data. These approaches do not take into account the thermodynamic or molecular orbital effects that impact on the molecule at the point of protonation which could influence the potential sites of bond cleavage based on the structural motif. A series of compounds have been studied by examining the experimentally derived high-resolution MS/MS data and comparing it with the in silico modelling of the neutral and protonated structures. The effect that protonation at specific sites can have on the bond lengths has also been determined. We have calculated the thermodynamically most stable protonated species and have observed how that information can help predict the cleavage site for that ion. The data have shown that this use of in silico techniques could be a possible way to predict MS/MS spectra. Copyright (C) 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Grid effects

Zaha Hadid's Kartal Pendik Masterplan (2006) for a new city centre on the east bank of Istanbul proposes the redevelopment of an abandoned industrial site located in a crucial infrastructural node between Europe and Asia as a connecting system between the neighbouring areas of Kartal in the west and Pendik in the east. The project is organised on what its architects call a soft grid, a flexible and adaptable grid that allows it to articulate connections and differences of form, density and use within the same spatial structure [1]. Its final overall design constitutes only one of the many possible configurations that the project may take in response to the demands of the different areas included in the masterplan, and is produced from a script that is able to generate both built volumes and open spaces, skyscrapers as well as parks. The soft grid in fact produces a ‘becoming’ rather than a finite and definitive form: its surface space does not look like a grid, but is derived from a grid operation which is best explained by the project presentation in video animation. The grid here is a process of ‘gridding’, enacted according to ancient choreographed linear movements of measuring, defining, adjusting, reconnecting spaces through an articulated surface rather than superimposed on an ignored given like an indifferent colonising carpet.

Venetian time and the meander

Argues that the past is necessary to architectural modernity for its self-definition. Goes on to look at Le Corbusier and the past in relation to his revolutionary architectural manifesto, 'Vers une architecture' (1923), and his and Tafuri's views on Venice. Also considers Le Corbusier's 'law of meander' as a strategy for urbanism and his Venice Hospital project

Los géneros Melanelia EssI. y Neofuscelia Essl. (Ascomycotina, Parmeliaceae) en el Centro de España: datos corológicos y clave de especies

Se aportan datos del hábitat y distribución de diez especies del género Melanelia y cinco del género Neofuscelia en el Centro de España (provincias de Avila, Madrid y Segovia). Consideramos que son nuevas citas: Melanelia disjunta, M. elegantula y Neofuscelia delisei, para la provincia de Avila; y M. subargentifera, M. tominii, N. delisei, N. glabrans y N. verruculifera, para la provincia de Madrid. Además. se ha elaborado una clave para la identificación de estas especies.

Contribución al estudio anatómico de los géneros Elaeoselinum Koch ex DC., Margotia Boiss. y Distichoselinum García Martín & Silvestre (Umbelliferae), en la Península Ibérica

Se realiza el estudio anatómico de los tallos, hojas y frutos de los taxones ibéricos del género Elaeoselinum s.l. y se discute el valor de los caracteres anatómicos, en orden a considerar como géneros independientes Elaeoselinum Koch ex DC., Margotia Boiss. y Distichoselinum García Martín & Silvestre.

Algunas crucíferas interesantes para la flora de Granada

Se estudian 24 taxones de la familia Brassicaceae pertenecientes a la flora de Granada, interesantes bajo distintos aspectos. De ellos se aportan datos ecológicos, biogeográficos y cromosómicos; dos constituyen primeras citas para la provincia y se propone elevar el rango a la categoría de subespecie para Alyssum diffusum Ten. var. corymbosum Pau. 

Nota sobre los brezales de la provincia de Burgos

larazona, 1. & Zaldívar, P.: Notes un beathland nf provínce of Burgos. Wc have studied o this paper <he heathlands in the Cántahro-Euska[dún. CastellanoCantábrico and Ibérico-Soriano ehorological sectors of Burgos. Twu new subasociations are described Dai,eeria- lil/retum ga/// erir-etesuro letra/iris- and Dabaecie- <Iliecturo gal// ardes-íapby-leíun~ rras.sífo//ae. A new provisional cominunitie of Gen/ide//a jr/dentata and Arrtt:,stapiules -rass/Ji1/ce is alse described.

Los enebrales rastreros oromediterráneos del sector Ibérico-Soriano

Se ha realizado un estudio fitosociológico de los enebrales rastreros oromediterráneos del Sistema Ibérico septentrional (Demanda, Neila, Urbión y Cebollera), en el que se comentan también aspectos relacionados con su ecologia y conservación. Se describen dos nuevas subasociaciones: Vaccinio-myrtilli-Juniperetum nanae minuartietosum recurvae y Vaccinio myrtilli-Juniperetum nanae vaccinietosum uliginosi.

Nueva aportación al estudio biosistemático del género Eryngium L.

En este trabajo se estudian seis diferentes táxones pertenecientes al g. Eryngium L.(Umbelliferae). Desde el punto de vista cromosómico, los resultados obtenidos son: E. campestre L. f. duriberum (Sennen et Pau) comb. nova 2n= 14; E. x chevalieri Sennen 2n= 15; E. ilicifolium Lam. 2n=18: E. triquetrum Vahl 2n= 16; E. corniculatum Lam. 2n=16 y E. galioides Lam. var. galioides 2n= 16. Se realiza asimismo un estudio morfológico y nomenclatural de las especies mas críticas y se dan dos lectotypus.

Notas florísticas y corológicas de Andalucía oriental

Se comenta el comportamiento ecológico y corologia de veinte táxones de Andalucia oriental poco o nada conocidos, de los que destacamos: Geum rivale L., Convolvulus cantabricus L., Scrophularia frutescens L., Plantago loeflingii L., Koeleria caudata (Link) Steudel y K. dasyphylla Willk.