Recording, Documentation, and Information Management for the Conservation of Heritage Places: Guiding Principles

Provides guidance on integrating recording, documentation, and information management of territories, sites, groups of buildings, or monuments into the conservation process; evaluating proposals; consulting specialists; and controlling implementation

Between a White Cube, Black Box, and Warehouse: Constructing Spaces for Contemporary Art throughout the Recent Museum Building Boom

Since the 1990s, museum buildings and the art housed inside them have undergone dramatic changes. Once canonical structures, they have evolved to more suitably contain new art forms and reflect the expanding and dynamic purposes of the museum. Museum architecture constructs the meanings and values of institutions as its primary and most tangible symbol. It commands a specific approach for display rhetoric and dictates the ways users and curators make use of space. What is the relationship between the latest museum building boom and contemporary art? What specific architectural strategies are employed by museums and architects to suit contemporary art? This paper examines the recent trends in museum construction in order to explore the ways in which new museums have reshaped the museum experience and dialogue between users and contemporary art.Desde la década de 1990 los edificios de los museos y el arte alojado en ellos han sufrido cambios dramáticos. Las estructuras canónicas han evolucionado para contener de manera más adecuada nuevas formas de arte y reflejar los propósitos dinámicos y en expansión del museo. La arquitectura del museo manifiesta los significados y valores de la propia institución como su símbolo principal y más tangible, presenta un enfoque específico para mostrar la retórica y dicta las formas en que los usuarios y los curadores hacen uso del espacio. ¿Cuál es la relación entre el último auge de la construcción de museos y el arte contemporáneo? ¿Qué estrategias arquitectónicas específicas emplean los museos y arquitectos para adaptarse al arte contemporáneo? Este artículo examina las tendencias recientes en la construcción de museos para explorar las formas en que los nuevos espacios han reformulado la experiencia y el diálogo entre los usuarios y el arte contemporáneo

A taxonomy of asymmetric requirements aspects

The early aspects community has received increasing attention among researchers and practitioners, and has grown a set of meaningful terminology and concepts in recent years, including the notion of requirements aspects. Aspects at the requirements level present stakeholder concerns that crosscut the problem domain, with the potential for a broad impact on questions of scoping, prioritization, and architectural design. Although many existing requirements engineering approaches advocate and advertise an integral support of early aspects analysis, one challenge is that the notion of a requirements aspect is not yet well established to efficaciously serve the community. Instead of defining the term once and for all in a normally arduous and unproductive conceptual unification stage, we present a preliminary taxonomy based on the literature survey to show the different features of an asymmetric requirements aspect. Existing approaches that handle requirements aspects are compared and classified according to the proposed taxonomy. In addition,we study crosscutting security requirements to exemplify the taxonomy's use, substantiate its value, and explore its future directions

The Descriptive Challenges of Fiber Art

published or submitted for publicatio

An interdisciplinary study of information systems: Christopher Alexander and IS failure.

This paper describes work carried out at the University of York; its contents do not represent the views or opinions of BT. It provides an example of how insights into the field of IS can be gained by looking at it from the perspective of other academic disciplines. Based on the idea that physical and virtual office spaces exist to serve parallel organisational requirements, it is argued that designers of information systems (IS) should be able to learn from the experience of architects in order to improve their methods and redefine their objectives. Firstly, the work of Christopher Alexander is reviewed to show how his work on architectural patterns has been of value to the designers object-oriented systems. Secondly, similarities in the literature between notions of failure in architecture and IS design are identified. These are then examined through interviews with practitioners to establish the relevance of the approach. Finally, the area that Alexander described as ‘the quality without a name’ is highlighted as a topic for further research.Information Systems, Patterns, Virtual Office, Christopher Alexander

Planning the safeguard of hidden heritage: Standards and compromises for the physical preservation of “minor” archives of Contemporary Architecture

Contemporary architectural archives are a peculiar kind of “borderline” heritage, oscillating between the collection and the deposit status. This ambivalence raises questions about their protection and enhancement: the architectural drawings exposure and consultation are designed and managed according to Standards relating to the archival sector, in the strict sense; however, such a specific approach will not be sufficient if the documents include design drawings, characterized by different formats, techniques and supports. The balance between external environment, conservation spaces and drawings is maintainable if preventive conservation methodologies are applied to limit the chemical, physical and biological degradation through active and passive systems of environmental control. The protection strategies are explained in Standards and Guidelines, often made accessible by national and international bodies and often taken on, at the institutional level, with different results, since every archive proves to be an organism on its own. This paper proposes the analysis and comparison of the regulations, produced in Italy and abroad, on the preventive conservation and the methodologies of the architectural documents exhibition, highlighting how much the values of environmental parameters are not as important, if they are considered in end of themselves, as the investigation of other factors, ranging from the materials chemistry and physics at the past history of each archive, up to its fruition

A Safe House for Orphan Parts an Architectural Proposal for a US Center for Illicit Antiquities

Though very different institutions, the Met, the Getty, and US Immigration and Customs have a striking similarity in one regard. Each holds unmatched collections of antiquities. They focus efforts on study, acquisition, and object transfer. However, the Met and the Getty are renowned museums and ICE recovers and repatriates black market goods, keeping their collection in several top-secret warehouses. One such warehouse in Queens houses over 2,500 seized artifacts including “a huge stone Buddha from India, terra-cotta horsemen from China, reliefs from Iraq, Syria, and Yemen” Unlike the carefully curated collections at institutions like the Met, these pieces are a wildly varying group of rescues. These looted “parts” become displaced from their site or museum context and either disappear into private collections or spend years in government facilities awaiting repatriation. In parallel globally and in the United States, the means and methods of war have greatly evolved leaving a vast aging building stock of military orphans. Traditional building typologies including munitions storage, forts, and bunkers have been superseded but are expensive or difficult to demolish. In addition, these spaces are crafted around defensive, introverted narratives. A Safe House for Orphan Parts posits the role of architecture in repatriation and speculates on the proposed relationship between the orphan part and the orphaned building. The project seeks to explore the architectural opportunities to tell the story of looting in relation to terrorism