1,562 research outputs found
Provocative conservation/evocative design - contemporary design intervention in historic urban landscape
The notion of authenticity has been intensively debated in the field of heritage conservation. However, this slippery intellectual term is hardly instructive for urban conservation and design practice for historic environment in contemporary cities. The issues of authenticity leave us an unsolved gap in both conservation theory and methodology. How should we perceive the ‘authenticity’ of a place? How does a new design respect and reflect this notion? There is no single answer for these questions. Through this research, the idea of progressive authenticity has been gradually formed and explored. It argues that what is happening ‘now’ is more essential to authenticity. How should we respect ‘now’ in a landscape that the ‘past’ needed to be conserved? This is the ultimate question to the author as a designer. The research uses a series of design experiments to illustrate different ideas of authenticity, the conflict between different perspectives of understanding this notion and the view to open up various interpretations of authenticity. Meanwhile, this research explores how the meanings of a historic place could be presented and experienced differently from the conventional heritage interpretations. ‘Provocative’ and ‘Evocative’ are used as keywords for a range of designs, which encourage the users to understand, think about and interact with the historic site differently
Eulogy.
The artist discusses the search for identity which underlies her Master of Fine Arts exhibition, Eulogy, hosted by the Carroll Reece Museum on the campus of East Tennessee Sate University, Johnson City, Tennessee, from March 8 to May 6, 2011. This exhibit contains works which explore the artist\u27s relationship with the natural world, ornithology, philosophy, psychology, poetry, and related personal influences.
The artist\u27s thesis work consists of paintings, drawings, and photographs. The artist references her own investigation of poetry, philosophy, psychology, and personal history which have shaped a private sense of awareness. Also reviewed are the influences of artists such as Alexander Marshall, William Morris, Charles Burchfield, Rosamond Purcell, and Kiki Smith; the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke and writings of Loren Eiseley; the ideas of philosophers G. W. F. Hegel and Slavoj Žižek, and art historian James Elkins
Understanding Chefchaouen
The medina of Chefchaouen represents an architectural heritage of great value and its building culture constitutes a repertoire of knowledge to be safeguarded as an expression of cultural diversity in the relationship between society and nature. The volume presents the results of an in-depth research on the knowledge system that constitutes the local building culture of the medina, highlighting the characteristics of the construction systems, the risks to which the traditional heritage is subject, and its contribution to the development of a sustainable habitat. The book addresses the theme of the built heritage of the medina with an interdisciplinary approach, which includes architecture as part of a system that has to be studied along with the natural, social and cultural contexts
Kuwaiti housing legislation with emphasis on interior architecture based on space syntax, motivation and adaptation theories
From observational approaches to housing in Kuwait, it has been found that the people there are experiencing a housing crisis, specifically in interior architecture, as they are building and living in houses that do not fulfil their needs. This is evidenced by the fact that in a single year, almost every house owner in both private and governmental houses in Kuwait city has done two or three alterations, either adding a room or bathroom, enlarging a living room, or adding walls for privacy.For the above reasons, the aim of this study is to build a body of knowledge based on several theories, in order to enrich and improve the current Kuwaiti housing legislation with emphasis on interior architecture. By having access to authorized information, in theory Kuwaitis could improve their homes. This study therefore investigates theories such as Maslow's Motivation Theory that highlights the hierarchy of human needs, Adaptation theory to explore the cultural, social, and environmental adaptation processes humans experience within their houses, Space Syntax to provide a systematic approach to segregation and space integration within the house, and sustainability to provide guidelines for building houses that maintain the people's cultural values and house design traditions in a way that enriches their lives and well-being. In addition, this study focuses on planning and building legislation and the impact of neighbouring on the house design that in turn affects people's daily lives.This study begins by giving the reader a brief history of Kuwait and its urban development, along with the influence that the discovery of oil had on people's houses and their house design. This is followed by two parts: the first is the deductive part, which explores the theories outlined above, while the second is the inductive part and describes the author's empirical work in which extended interviews with open -ended questions were used to acquire data regarding people's feelings, problems and needs within their houses. The findings and conclusions from that work are presented together with recommendations for future housing design. The research findings and the deductive part of this study are then considered together to produce a framework which legislators and designers in Kuwait Municipality and the PAHC (Public Authority for Housing Care) could use to improve the current Kuwaiti housing legislation comprehensively, with emphasis on the interior architecture. In the conclusion a review of the main findings of the thesis is presented, together with a set of fundamental recommendations derived from the synthesis of the deductive and inductive parts of this research. The thesis concludes with a final message about the importance of interior architecture in the quality of people's lives
The influence of tourism on the sustaining of vernacular architechtural tradition embodied in the Bai and Naxi dwellings in Yunnan, China.
Yunnan is an economically underdeveloped region in south-western China, in which many ethnic settlements are preserved well. Within the last two decades, many ethnic communities at a grass-roots social level have been conducting a series of tourism-related developments of Bai and Naxi dwellings in Yunnan. They are altering, restoring, rebuilding, refurbishing and renewing ordinary Bai or Naxi dwellings into multi-function dwellings, which are not only the residential homes of families, but are also capable of providing an exotic cultural experience for tourists‘ consumption. Nevertheless, Bai and Naxi dwellings are representations of a living culture, embodying a complex set of vernacular architectural traditions which have been transmitted for many generations. When the Bai and Naxi dwellings are involved in tourism development, the transmission and adaptation of these vernacular architectural traditions are changed, and the manner in which such traditions aresustained in new circumstances becomes an interesting problem. This study explores the influence of tourism development on sustaining the vernacular architectural tradition embodied in Bai and Naxi dwellings in Yunnan, China. The researcher has conducted three rounds of fieldwork, choosing 30 Bai and Naxi dwellings involved in tourism development, from four ethnic minority settlements in Yunnan, for investigation. Observation, interview and questionnaire have been applied to collect data, and template analysis has been used to analyse the data. The results of the analysis show that if tourism development is conducted mainly at a community level, itcan enhance the sustaining of the vernacular architectural tradition embodied in Bai and Naxi dwellings. In summary, the sustaining of vernacular architectural tradition is not simply influenced by the nature of tourism, but is highly dependent on the social level of the developers, the construction pattern they choose, and the socio-cultural interaction they produce
Investigating the development of traditional and modern housing design in Libyan architecture
The design of housing is one of the most difficult tasks in the field of architecture. Housing meets people’s functional, social and spiritual needs. The fundamental task of this study has been to investigate the features of traditional and contemporary housing making it possible to describe them and then use this comparison to understand the differences between the
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