Architecture

"on Julio Vilamajo see also in my academia's webpage books: (Book Chapter) Disegni d'interni: Julio Vilamajó, Montevideo (Uruguay), in A. Bossi, ed., Julio Vilamajo: Disegni per l'arredamento. 30-37. Napoli: Oxiana 2005. (interiores de Julio Vilamajo)
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"Issues of public space use have become a paramount
subject of research in the recent past. While research of an
overtly operative outlook has convincingly put forward design
and management recommendations for improving the use of
public spaces, it has struggled in approaching the issue as the
scope of urban policy and planning.
This research project aims at contributing to re-placing the
problem at an urban scope. It will do so by comparing three very
different policy and planning processes which, at an urban scale,
explicitly put forward use as a main objective of public space
production, namely Lyon, Louvain-la-Neuve and Lisbon.
This research adopts an inductive approach to the subject,
framed by readings in the intersection of pragmatic sociology,
policy and economics/management studies which suggest the
explanation of policy outcomes by in-depth analyses of the
processes leading to them. However, it maintains a geographical
standpoint as it is concerned, as well, with the “spatialization of
public policies”, i.e. the spaces that are actually produced by said
processes and the dynamics of use taking place therein."

Cemeteries, Michel Ragon once noted, can turn from spaces of internment into a museum. In that capacity, their organization, their memorializing structures, their selection of who could and could not be laid to rest there (among their myriad other features), all serve a didactic purpose to the living wandering the grounds. The landscape of the cemetery and the symbolic visual languages that give meaning to its various elements—grave markers, mausolea, the disposition of burial sites relative to one another, the articulation of boundaries between the cemetery and the surrounding areas—can generally be understood as efforts to communicate and materialize particular religious, cultural, social, and even political values. My interest here is to explore the landscape of the Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta in order to understand how race shaped its internal organization and, in turn, how the racial politics of the cemetery space materialize the turbulent history of race relations in Atlanta.

Recent national press coverage has generated considerable attention to the solar geometry of the Spanish colonial missions of California. Speculations as to the purpose of the attendant illuminations have ranged widely from outright attacks to praise of recent scholarship that has sought to understand said phenomena within the context of Franciscan mission belief and history. Current research to identify potential parallel illumination sites in the Spanish colonial churches of the Philippines has revealed a pattern of congruent Counter-Reformation architectural design standards and edicts that served to mandate equinoctial church alignments. Those edicts penned by Saint Charles of Borromeo provide conclusive documentation for the church mandated integration of solar geometry, and equinoctial illuminations, into the building of New World church and California mission architecture. I thereby contend that these new revelations support the role of the Catholic Church, and in particular the Council of Trent in the mandated solar geometry so noted, and this in turn serves to verify and bolster those findings from previous research arguing for the liturgical basis of the phenomenon in question.

This paper discusses the value and usefulness of the urban village concept within the context of neighbourhood renewal, and in particular considers the factors that have encouraged or limited its implementation. The findings discussed here are based on case study research into the Garston-under-the-Bridge urban village in Merseyside. The research finds that the urban village concept might not always be valuable or useful if applied in a renewal context. This is because typical place-specific attributes common to a renewal context might contradict the preconditions for delivering the urban village vision, and because spatial practices and meanings attached to both the form of development or the desirable pattern of community life by development professionals might not match the aspirations of the existing or future residents. Additionally, it was found that the concept has been used by professionals as a means to an end, or a language through which professionals organise and mediate their own context-specific interests. Essentially, the concept has been attractive as resources have been associated with it and as a result its language has been appropriated, interpreted and exchanged. Concern about the substance of the concept, its relevance and its legitimacy as a vision for guiding the form of cities would seem to have been less of an interest.URBAN DESIGN International (2003) 8, 5–19. doi:10.1057/palgrave.udi.9000090