Postmodernism and socialist mass housing in Poland

ABSTRACT

In the 1970s and 1980 architects and planners in socialist Poland increasingly attempted to defy the inflexible structure of the state-operated construction industry and modify the by-now ubiquitous system-built mass housing blocks. These efforts generated housing complexes that took up postmodern principles—visually harmonic, legible, and at the same time meaningful urban spaces modelled after historical typologies. On the basis of archival documents, contemporaneous publications, and interviews with the protagonists this article analyses three examples: Radogoszcz-East in ?ód? (1979–1989, designed by Jakub Wujek, Zdzis?aw Lipski, and Andrzej Owczarek), Ró?any Potok in Poznań (1978–2010s, designed by Marian Fikus and Jerzy Gurawski) and the Na Skarpie Scheme in Kraków-Nowa Huta (1987–95, designed by Romuald Loegler, Wojciech Dobrzański, Ewa Fitzke, and Micha? Szymanowski). The article argues that these housing complexes first evolved from late modernist ideas, in particular structuralist currents, and only at a later stage absorbed postmodern theory from both domestic and international sources. It also points to individual architects and planners as the driving forces in the struggle between artistic innovation and systemic inertia, who were able to take advantage of unexpected latitude within the declining socialist regime to carry out their proposals.     

Hysteretic upscaled constitutive relationships for vertically integrated porous media flow

Subsurface two-phase flow in porous media often takes place in reservoirs with a high ratio between the associated lateral and vertical extent and the lateral and vertical flow time scales. This allows for a two-scale approach with effective quantities for two-dimensional horizontal flow equations obtained from reconstructed hydrostatic vertical pressure and saturation distributions. Here, we derive explicit expressions for the two dimensional constitutive relationships for a play-type hysteretic Brooks–Corey capillary pressure function with a pore-size distribution index of 2 and quadratic relative permeabilities. We obtain an explicit hysteretic parametrization for the upscaled capillary pressure function and the upscaled relative permeabilities. The size of the hysteresis loop depends on the ratio between buoyancy and the entry pressure, i.e. it scales with the reservoir height and the ratio between drainage and imbibition capillary pressure. We find that the scaling for the relative permeability is non-monotonic and hysteresis vanishes for both small and large reservoirs.     

Aesthetic strategies in sonification

Sound can be listened to in various ways and with different intentions. Multiple factors influence how and what we perceive when listening to sound. Sonification, the acoustic representation of data, is in essence just sound. It functions as sonification only if we make sure to listen attentively in order to access the abstract information it contains. This is difficult to accomplish since sound always calls the listener’s attention to concrete—whether natural or musical—points of references. Important aspects determining how we listen to sonification are discussed in this paper: elicited sounds, repeated sounds, conceptual sounds, technologically mediated sounds, melodic sounds, familiar sounds, multimodal sounds and vocal sounds. We discuss how these aspects help the listener engage with the sound, but also how they can become points of reference in and of themselves. The various sonic qualities employed in sonification can potentially open but also risk closing doors to the accessibility and perceptibility of the sonified data.     

Solution processable,precursor based zinc oxide buffer layers for 4.5% efficient organic tandem solar cells

In this work we present regular and inverted organic tandem solar cells from poly[N-9′-hepta-decanyl-2,7-carbazole-alt-5,5-(4′,7′-di-2-thienyl-2′,1′,3′-benzothiadiazole): [6,6]-phenyl C₇₀-butyric acid methyl ester (PCDTBT:PC₇₁BM) with power conversion efficiencies of up to 4.5%. The recombination zone comprises an electron conducting, precursor based zinc oxide buffer layer that was applied from solution under ambient conditions and at moderate processing temperatures. Optimized active layer thicknesses in both subcells were derived from optical Transfer Matrix simulations. The short circuit current density of the tandem cell exceeds half the short circuit current density of the single absorber cells indicating a real gain in quantum yield when utilizing the tandem architecture.     

Gamer als Designer Nutzergenerierte Inhalte in Computerspielen

Im Bereich der Computerspiele und virtuellen Welten wurden in den vergangenen Jahren komplexe Strategien und Werkzeuge entwickelt, welche in beispiellosem Umfang die Integration der Nutzer in den Kreativprozess und die Wertsch?pfungskette erm?glichen. Durch Zusammenarbeit mit der Gemeinschaft der ambitionierten Amateure lassen sich die Kosten und Risiken innovativer Produktentwicklung reduzieren und zudem eine besonders starke Identifikation der Nutzer mit dem gemeinsam gestalteten, sich stets dynamisch ver?ndernden Produkt erzeugen. Ausschlaggebend für die Aussch?pfung des innovativen Potenzials ist der Grad der Freiheit, den die Game-Editoren gew?hren. Dieser variiert von Spiel zu Spiel erheblich und reicht von der rein oberfl?chlichen Dekoration der Spielwelt bis hin zur weitreichenden Umgestaltung der Spiele. Proportional zur gestalterischen Freiheit w?chst allerdings die Gefahr von Zielkonflikten zwischen den verschiedenen Parteien. Die Art und Weise, wie die Entwickler diesen Zielkonflikten begegnen und die Produktion von User-generated Content koordinieren, ist für Bereiche der Produktentwicklung von Interesse, die weit über die Sph?re des Computerspiels hinausweisen.     

On the efficiency of routing in sensor networks

In sensor networks, a key efficiency measure for routing protocols is the stretch of the computed paths, where the stretch is the ratio of the path length and the Euclidean distance covered. In the literature, many protocols have been evaluated via extensive simulations, and often come without any theoretical guarantees. For those whose performances are theoretically guaranteed there is an important gap between the theoretical predictions and the experimental results. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we give theoretical results that explain the observed efficiency of many of the algorithms proposed in the literature. Second, we propose ROAM2, a deterministic routing protocol, that requires a single bit of memory at each node and that ensures, with high probability (depending on the node distribution), that the paths have a constant stretch.     

A symmetric method for weakly imposing Dirichlet boundary conditions in embedded finite element meshes

In this paper, we propose a way to weakly prescribe Dirichlet boundary conditions in embedded finite element meshes. The key feature of the method is that the algorithmic parameter of the formulation which allows to ensure stability is independent of the numerical approximation, relatively small, and can be fixed a priori. Moreover, the formulation is symmetric for symmetric problems. An additional element-discontinuous stress field is used to enforce the boundary conditions in the Poisson problem. Additional terms are required in order to guarantee stability in the convection–diffusion equation and the Stokes problem. The proposed method is then easily extended to the transient Navier–Stokes equations. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.