Palladio’s Villa Emo:The Golden Proportion Hypothesis Defended

At Nexus 2000, Rachel Fletcher argued that Palladio may well have made use of the ‘golden section’, or extreme and mean ratio, in the design of the Villa Emo at Fanzolo. In this issue of Nexus Network Journal, Lionel March argued that the Golden Section is nowhere to be found in the Villa Emo as described in I quattro libri dell’archittetura. In the present paper, Rachel Fletcher defends her original thesis, comparing the Villa Emo as actually built to the project for it that Palladio published in his book.     

Andrea Palladio’s Villa Cornaro in Piombino Dese

As for many of Palladio’s buildings, modern surveys of the Villa Cornaro in Piombino Dese do not exist, are incomplete, omit information about important aspects such as the use of the classical orders, or have been published without dimensions indicated in the plans. The analysis presented here is based on a June 2003 survey of the villa made by Steve Wassell, Tim Ross, Melanie Burke, and author Branko Mitrović. In his treatise, Palladio listed his preferred room types: circular, square or rectangular with length-to-width ratios 2/1, 3/2, 4/3, 5/3 or . Half a century ago, this kind of speculative search for the comprehensive interpretation of Palladio’s proportional system received great impetus from Rudolf Wittkower’s Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism. It is, however, important to differentiate between the derivation of certain proportional rules and their explanation. Wittkower asserted that the use of ornamentation—and especially the orders—did not matter in Palladio’s design process. Refuting this theory, Mitrović argues that Palladio, in the early 1550, formulated a very different approach to the use of the orders, combining the principle of preferred room proportions and the use of a columnar system to determine the placement of walls. The proportions of the main sala and porticos are derived on the basis of the proportional rules for the order used; the proportions of the side rooms on the basis of preferred ratios. Ultimately, the result is that the mathematics of the orders became decisive for Palladio’s design principles and the use of proportions from the early 1550s.     

The Mathematics of Palladio’s Villas: Workshop ’98

Stephen Wassell describes the the itinerary and goals of the 1998 workshop tours of the Villas of Andrea Palladio, and discusses the mathematical aspects of the Renaissance master’s designs.     

A Perspective Analysis of the Proportions of Palladio’s Villa Rotonda: Making the Invisible Visible

Because of differences between Palladio’s architecture as built and the ideal architecture represented in the Quattro libri, many analyses have been performed in order to bring to light the proportions that underlie the beauty of the architecture. This present paper proposes a method of analysis based on perspective grids laid out on photographs to reveal how perspective is used to heighten the spectator’s perception of the forms.     

The Hidden Order of Hadrian’s Villa, and the Order of Modern Architecture

The casual violence with which the various parts of the second-century Villa of Hadrian crash into each other seems to belie any possibility of a rational plan, although an overall master plan seems a necessity. Amazingly, in the twentieth century, Le Corbusier extolled Hadrian’s Villa as the archetype of great planning. This paper will describe the clear, mathematically ordered process by which the Villa was planned, and the compositional principles of its design will be shown to be exactly those which underlie the theories of Corbusier, 1800 years later.     

Architecture and Archaeoastronomy in Hadrian’s Villa near Tivoli, Rome

Built by the emperor Hadrian starting in 117 A.D., the villa is a masterpiece of ancient Roman architecture. Our Accademia Pilot project studied and surveyed the Accademia Esplanade, the highest artificial terrace of the villa, discovering that it was astronomically oriented along the solstitial axis, as were its main buildings, Accademia and Roccabruna. From 2009 to 2011 we photographed a series of light phenomena. In the Accademia at dawn of the winter solstice or at sunset of the summer solstice (opposed by 180°) the sun shines through the main axis of the building, creating spots of light in the Temple of Apollo. In Roccabruna at the summer solstice the sun creates a blade of light inside the dome. Archaeoastronomy provided a new key for understanding the meaning and function of those buildings, which were probably dedicated to the cult of the Egyptian goddess Isis, linked to the seasons.     

Portfolio Risk Measures: The Time’s Arrow Matters

The traditional ex post risk measure associated to a portfolio, a fund or a market performance, is the standard deviation of a series of past returns, called volatility. We propose an alternative risk measure, that turns out to better quantify the risk actually supported by an investor or asset manager with respect to a portfolio or a fund. This alternative measure is computed from the actual dispersion of successive cumulated returns relative to the corresponding successive cumulated returns produced by an accrued performance of null volatility, which better reflects the dynamics of the risk-return relationship over time. Hence, the proposed name of “accrued returns variability”, for such a risk measure that incorporates the passage of time. Applications are presented, to enlighten the advantage of this risk measure.     

The Translator’s Extended Mind

The rapid development of natural language processing in the last three decades has drastically changed the way professional translators do their work. Nowadays most of them use computer-assisted translation (CAT) or translation memory (TM) tools whose evolution has been overshadowed by the much more sensational development of machine translation (MT) systems, with which TM tools are sometimes confused. These two language technologies now interact in mutually enhancing ways, and their increasing role in human translation has become a subject of behavioral studies. Philosophers and linguists, however, have been slow in coming to grips with these important developments. The present paper seeks to fill in this lacuna. I focus on the semantic aspects of the highly distributed human–computer interaction in the CAT process which presents an interesting case of an extended cognitive system involving a human translator, a TM tool, an MT engine, and sometimes other human translators or editors. Considered as a whole, such a system is engaged in representing the linguistic meaning of the source document in the target language. But the roles played by its various components, natural as well as artificial, are far from trivial, and the division of linguistic labor between them throws new light on the familiar notions that were initially inspired by rather different phenomena in the philosophy of language, mind, and cognitive science.

     

The problem of electronic argument: a humanist’s perspective

This article attempts to explain the absence of a new rhetoric, as repurposed for electronic media. Such a rhetoric would provide, among other things, a blueprint for electronic arguments conducted in hypermedia form. Without an electronic rhetoric, the artifacts generated in new media inevitably fall into a narrow range: e-commerce and edutainment. One role of the humanist in this technological age, whose mother tongue is the conceptual language of the technologist, is to speak in an alternative language out of which an electronic rhetoric could emerge. The hallmark of the humanist’s alternative language or vocabulary is that it does not find technological innovation synonymous with rhetorical invention.     

The Octagon in Leonardo’s Drawings

Mark Reynolds presents a study on Leonardo’s abundant use of the octagon in his drawings and architectural renderings. Specifically, he focuses on Leonardo’s applications of the octagon: in his studies and sketches of the centralized church, and for which we can find influences specifically from Brunelleschi, as well as from other fifteenth-century architects working with this type of religious structure; in his almost obsessive and frequently repetitious drawing of octagonal shapes and forms in his notebooks throughout his career; in his project for a pavilion while with the Sforzas in the last part of his period in Milan. Also examined are ways to develop the modules to accommodate and the θ rectangles. The application of the modular units, so far, have been within the square and its gridwork, but as the octagon has traditionally been used in the development of both the circle and the square, this shape is an interesting challenge in terms of linking the two-dimensional surface to the three-dimensional forms we are planning to generate. The object is to provide us with more insight as to why the octagon held so much fascination for Leonardo as one of the ultimate geometric expressions of grandeur and practicality in spatial organization, design, and development. Often in Leonardo’s drawings of octagons, precise geometric constructions were lacking; the master’s approach was freehand. The author seeks to learn if Leonardo’s sketches can be put to the rigors of strict geometric construction, and still be viable as accurate renderings of octagonal geometric spaces with his own geometric constructions of those same spaces.     

The Resolution of Keller’s Conjecture

Journal of Automated Reasoning - We consider three graphs, $$G_{7,3}$$ , $$G_{7,4}$$ , and $$G_{7,6}$$ , related to Keller’s conjecture in dimension 7. The conjecture is false for this...     

The Interplay Between the Speaker’s and the Hearer’s Perspective

The neutralization of contrasts in form or meaning that is sometimes observed in language production and comprehension is at odds with the classical view that language is a systematic one-to-one pairing of forms and meanings. This special issue is concerned with patterns of forms and meanings in language. The papers in this special issue arose from a series of workshops that were organized to explore variants of bidirectional Optimality Theory and Game Theory as models of the interplay between the speaker’s and the hearer’s perspective.     

The Pötzl Effect: Corroboration of a Cybernetic Hypothesis

The deferred-updating cybernetic theory of the mind/brain information-processing system was devised to explain the purpose of sleep [2]. This theory predicts the existence of an intermediate memory, the circadian memory [14]. This is different from, and auxiliary to, both short-term and long-term mem⊙ry. One of the prime functions of circadian memory, according to the theory, is to store incoming information until it can be integrated into long-term memory. This takes place during sleep, the purpose of which, from an information-processing point of view, is to allow the system to go off-line to accomplish the integration.     

The machine’s role in human’s service automation and knowledge sharing

The possibility of interacting with remote services in natural language opens up new opportunities for sharing knowledge and for automating services. Easy-to-use, text-based interfaces might provide more democratic access to legal information, government services, and everyday knowledge as well. However, the methodology of engineering robust natural language interfaces is very diverse, and widely deployed solutions are still yet to come. The main contribution is a detailed problem analysis on the theoretical level, which reveals that a text-based interface is best understood as an artificial agent that represents the interests of the remote party who is separated in time and space from the client. A possible ethical issue about the development of such an agent is also discussed.     

The added value of Planning Support Systems: A practitioner’s perspective

Planning Support Systems (PSS) are geo-information based tools to support planning. Since the term PSS appeared for the first time in the late 1980s it has evolved into a serious academic subfield. In this debate, little systematic attention has been paid to the added value of PSS for planning practice. In particular the perspective of users requires more empirical attention. This paper attempts to fill this gap by answering the question: What is the practitioner’s perception of the added value of PSS? In doing so we first develop a conceptual framework including the most important added values of PSS observed in the literature. Next, we describe an empirical study of the MapTable PSS, a support tool that is relatively frequently used in the Netherlands. Fifteen interviews were conducted and a Group Decision Room workshop was organized in order to systematically gather perceptions of users about the added value of this PSS. Added values that particularly emphasized are improved collaboration and communication among stakeholders, something which resonates with recent trends in planning. The added value of a better informed outcome is, somewhat surprisingly, considered less important. In order to deepen our understanding, we recommend more research in different contexts and with different tools.