美国西雅图先锋广场历史保护区的形成

考察美国西雅图先锋广场历史保护区形成的过程,可以看出城市历史文化遗存的保护是经济与历史文化合力作用的结果,公众参与在城市历史文化保护工作中发挥着重要的作用。我国城市经济高速发展,保护与发展的矛盾冲突还没得到很好解决,先锋广场的例子对我们具有一定的参考价值。     

西雅图社区花园的用地获取、功能分区和元素组成

社区花园在欧美具有悠久历史,在健康城市建设和促进社区发展方面的功效已经得到证实。目前,已针对社区花园的功能、类型、经营和科普等开展研究,但对土地获取和设计相关的研究较少。西雅图的社区花园历史悠久,并获得政府支持,是美国发展社区花园的城市典范。通过对西雅图23个典型案例进行调研,对用地获取方式、功能类型、分区和元素组成进行分类总结,为设计建造具有中国特色的社区花园提供启示。     

The Rise of the ‘Invisible Detail’: Ubiquitous Computing and the ‘Minimum Meaningful’

The architectural detail has provided the essential material building block for conveying an idea. Carlo Ratti and Matthew Claudel of the SENSEable City Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) ask how this, though, is all set to change in a digital context. As technologies shrink and vanish from sight, what might become the new minimum meaningful unit for architecture? How might a new relational scale establish itself, at the level of the ‘invisible detail’ or the microchip? How might this, in turn, change the very nature of buildings as they become highly responsive, human-occupied transmitters?     

Recombinant Landscapes in the American City

How are urban actors, such as landscape designers, community groups, developers and local politicians, actively restructuring their environments to meet the challenges of the American city in the new global context? Grahame Shane outlines the approaches to landscape that have been emerging since the mid-20th century and are set to recombine urban assemblages whether they are located in historic city centres, postindustrial waterfronts or suburban sprawl. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Late Modernity to Postmodern? The Rise of Global Resilience and its Progressive Potentials for Local Disaster Planning (Seattle and Paris)

ABSTRACT

This paper studies how approaches to disaster planning have been changing with the rise of ‘resilience,’ a concept that has been widely recommended by various international institutions. The critical studies on resilience argue that resilience only serves to legitimise a neoliberal policy agenda that is compatible with a global economic system of capitalism. Contesting that position, this paper argues that the rise of resilience can imply a shift in the mode of governance, and an opportunity for planners to engage with more progressive practices. To make this argument, we propose a ‘postmodern lens’ through which resilience can be seen as an attitude and a style of governance that goes beyond neoliberal assumptions by embracing uncertainty and complexity of governance challenges. Postmodern framing of resilience notes (1) how the concept can initiate a shift in the planner’s view of and practices on knowledges (going beyond ‘expert knowledge’), (2) how the flexibility of the concept can be used for developing political narratives that are progressive (3) how the concept can open up potential venues for nonconventional powers to intervene in policy making processes. To demonstrate how this lens works, we compare the cases of Seattle and Paris, which have drastically different risk governance political structures.     

The GANDALF project

The GANDALF project is concerned with the automated generation of software development environments. In particular, the project has considered project management environments, system version control environments, and incremental programming environments. The artifacts surrounding these environments are described. Later versions of these environments have been constructed as structure editors. The processes and tools involved in generating structure editors for software development environments are also discussed. Future plans of the project are briefly mentioned.     

Architecture + Textiles = Architextiles

A hybrid term, ‘architextiles’ encompasses a wide range of projects and ways of thinking that unite architecture and textiles. By way of introduction to this issue, guest-editor Mark Garcia highlights the significant rise of interest in this confluence by theorists, architects, engineers, textile designers, materials scientists and artists. He also explains how, as a hybrid mode of design and practice, architextiles is better able to respond to society's fast-changing cultural and consumer demands, enabling the production of more dynamic, flexible, interactive, event and process-based spaces. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Metronatural™: Inventing and reworking urban nature in Seattle

Seattle has long been considered a city in harmony with nature, a metropolis inseparable from and infused with the dramatic and picturesque Pacific Northwest landscape. Today, the city is frequently cited as a leader in sustainable urban development and this is due in large part to its unique relationship with its natural surroundings. However, the historical record of Seattle reveals this harmonious relationship between humans and nature to be a social construction. The founders of Seattle adopted an urban development approach similar to other North American cities and implemented large-scale engineering projects to rationalise the landscape while solidifying the municipal government as the ultimate arbiter of human/nature relations. The unintended economic, environmental, and social consequences of this so-called ‘Promethean’ approach to urban nature would be debunked in the 1950s, catalyzing a wide array of approaches by the municipality and residents to restore, protect, and live with nature in more benign ways. In this article, I examine the politics of nature in Seattle to understand how changing perceptions of the urban landscape are related to different forms of expertise, governance, and citizenship. I focus specifically on activities to reorient urban water flows because they reveal the multiple tensions between humans and nature. The article adds to contemporary scholarship in landscape architecture, human geography, and environmental history on the dilemma of urban nature while highlighting the central role of technical experts, practices, and networks as well as issues of governance, citizenship, and management. Seattle's reputation as a green metropolis serves as an entry point to interpret the various relationships between humans, technology, and nature while also suggesting potential routes to realise more sustainable urban futures.     

Elevator shaft pressurization for smoke control in tall buildings: The Seattle approach

CONTAM simulations of both commercial and residential tall building models are conducted in order to study recently adopted Seattle code requirements for elevator shaft pressurization systems. In contrast to the International Building Code (IBC) requirements, the Seattle approach specifies across elevator door pressure minimums and maximums on only four “fire floors” (including one above, and two below, the fire floor). This is accomplished using a minimal pressurization of the entire elevator shaft in conjunction with venting of the four fire floors. The present study adresses the feasibility of calibrating such a system to meet the design objectives in tall buildings (system performance during an actual fire event is not considered). The two building models correspond to 37 story buildings with dual elevator and dual stairwell shafts extending the entire height of the building. Each model is calibrated to experimental data. Simulations are conducted for a variety of ambient temperatures and exterior building door positions. Coupled pressurization of the stairwells is also considered. The system requirements are found to be achievable for both elevator only and coupled elevator and stairwell pressurization systems. However, the observed pressure differences do change with changes in the ambient temperature as well as changes in the ground floor exterior door position. It is therefore recommended that such systems should be calibrated for pressure differences intermediate to the prescribed minimum and maximum values to compensate for changes to the system performance. Providing a relief vent to ambient on any recall floor may also be advisable.     

Information,Complexity and the Detail

The proliferation of affordable computing has transformed the capability of architecture to deal with complex forms and details. As Dennis R Shelden , Chief Technology Officer of Gehry Technologies, explains, this has resulted in the production of an abundance of digital information or data. The intersection of two curved surfaces, for instance, is now much more complex than the surfaces themselves. Complexity requires more information and thus more processing, making details like this ultimately more expensive to produce. The jury is still out on what the future might hold, as architecture undergoes a period of fundamental transition in which, for the time being at least, there remains an essential mismatch between the surfeit of digital information and the tight economic limits on physical production.