STRIKING THE BALANCE: FINDING A PLACE FOR NEW URBANISM ON MAIN STREET

Preservation is a constantly evolving dialogue between past and future, new and old. Yet as the formal and aesthetic precedents of traditional urbanism are adopted by New Urbanist practitioners to cloak new construction with the guise of historic continuity, the draw of Main Street communities is quickly fading. Where once downtown had the advantage of distinctive architecture and walkability as a competitive edge over sprawling suburban retail centers, large cities and small towns alike now face the challenge of competing with savvy Main Street imitators sprouting up on the urban fringe. This trend towards New Urbanist style retail is hurting businesses on Main Street, but the increasing marketability of these formats provides an opportunity for historic commercial corridors to take advantage of evolving consumer preferences. Several communities are already adapting to this new set of challenges by utilizing New Urbanist planning and design approaches to reposition their historic commercial corridors through infill development and urban restructuring. These interventions do not always make the headlines, yet they continue to gain strength. Some preservationists argue that there is little need for “new” urbanism when a wealth of old urbanism already exists. Yet what is desperately needed is a new way of thinking about urban places. Reasserting the historic role of Main Street communities as bastions of progress and innovation will enable a future in which strong communities, sustainable growth patterns and quality of life are rooted in the legacy of previous generations while providing for the demands of the next

Theorem and Practicum:: Order, Value, Result, Interaction

The Thesis is the last major step toward graduation with a first professional degree, or Bachelor of Architecture (B.Arch.), which traditionally prepares students for practice. As a threshold between directed studios and independent thought, the Thesis provides an opportunity for the student to systematically explore a coherent line of investigation of issues relevant to the field of architecture. The Thesis is an intellectual position laid down or to be advanced. It is the first stage of the dialectic-discussion, that is, discussion and reasoning by dialogue as a method of intellectual investigation. An architectural thesis demands that a student take a position and have something to say that is relevant to the discursive field that it inhabits and/or its wider cultural context. In the field of architecture such intellectual positions have implications that result from a critique and re-examination of the role of architecture as a critical participant in the conditioning of public and private space. Thus, while an undergraduate architectural thesis originates in a determinate intellectual position, it culminates in a designed artifact, but rarely the artifact itself. This paper takes a step in characterizing architectural research, where the interaction of Theorem and Practicum is used not only as a guiding principle in the critical thinking process, but also as a springboard for constructive practices in the built realm. This particular reading is an inquiry into the importance and influence of interaction between Theorem and Practicum, as well as, the importance of which is observed through different modes of cross-pollination occurring in various aspects of architectural discourse and practice. This investigation is explored in four perspectives, labeled ‘order', ‘values', ‘results' and ‘interaction' are categorized according to their relationship to the investigation of Theorem and Practicum. Furthermore, these four attributes permeate and connect the diverse areas of research explored, which in combination provides an argument that rather than questioning: "is doing architecture doing research” as articulated by Jeremy Till, instead asks: "is doing research doing architecture”. Our aim is to expand the pedagogical field where the interaction of Theorem and Practicum is not an isolated act, but one of making

Urban Palimpsests: Studying Enlightenment Influences in the Post-Earthquake Rebuilding of Lima and Lisbon, 1746–1765

Urban renewal has long existed as a vessel for the assertion of authority, embodying hierarchy, policy, and culture in the most tangible way with architecture and civic landscaping shaped to accommodate the upper strata of society. Particularly interesting to study through this lens is the latter half of the eighteenth century which marks the turning point between royal absolutism and the emergence of competing forms of power in the European Empire, through the growth of the Enlightenment movement. This paper offers a comparison of two imperial cities, Lima and Lisbon, which due to similarly tragic earthquakes, were provided the opportunity to implement reforms at an urban scale, bringing opposing thought to the forefront of cultural debate and identity and redefining the roles of Church and State. Through an analysis of primary and secondary texts as well as original architectural documents, this study focuses on highlighting how urbanism can be used as a mechanism of power. With these sources, the paper compares the two events to synthesize a greater understanding of the roles of Lisbon and Lima as parts of the greater Iberian empires. Ultimately, this juxtaposition of the two cities provides a unique study of how architecture and urban morphology manifested the Spanish and Portuguese empires’ respective Bourbon and Pombaline reforms, and the reasons for the differences in their impacts

Theorem and Practicum:: Order, Value, Result, Interaction

The Thesis is the last major step toward graduation with a first professional degree, or Bachelor of Architecture (B.Arch.), which traditionally prepares students for practice. As a threshold between directed studios and independent thought, the Thesis provides an opportunity for the student to systematically explore a coherent line of investigation of issues relevant to the field of architecture. The Thesis is an intellectual position laid down or to be advanced. It is the first stage of the dialectic-discussion, that is, discussion and reasoning by dialogue as a method of intellectual investigation. An architectural thesis demands that a student take a position and have something to say that is relevant to the discursive field that it inhabits and/or its wider cultural context. In the field of architecture such intellectual positions have implications that result from a critique and re-examination of the role of architecture as a critical participant in the conditioning of public and private space. Thus, while an undergraduate architectural thesis originates in a determinate intellectual position, it culminates in a designed artifact, but rarely the artifact itself. This paper takes a step in characterizing architectural research, where the interaction of Theorem and Practicum is used not only as a guiding principle in the critical thinking process, but also as a springboard for constructive practices in the built realm. This particular reading is an inquiry into the importance and influence of interaction between Theorem and Practicum, as well as, the importance of which is observed through different modes of cross-pollination occurring in various aspects of architectural discourse and practice. This investigation is explored in four perspectives, labeled ‘order', ‘values', ‘results' and ‘interaction' are categorized according to their relationship to the investigation of Theorem and Practicum. Furthermore, these four attributes permeate and connect the diverse areas of research explored, which in combination provides an argument that rather than questioning: "is doing architecture doing research” as articulated by Jeremy Till, instead asks: "is doing research doing architecture”. Our aim is to expand the pedagogical field where the interaction of Theorem and Practicum is not an isolated act, but one of making

THE FEASIBILITY AND SIGNIFICANCE OF APPLYING THE MAIN STREET APPROACH TO PRESERVATION BASED ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IN CONTEMPORARY CHINA

On the basis of an analysis of some important factors which caused the grim situation of China\u27s historic preservation, this thesis points out the necessity to rethink the relationship between economic development and historic preservation in contemporary China and learn successful experience from US preservation based commercial revitalization approach. In the second part, it makes a brief introduction and analysis of current situation of US historic preservation and the history, missions, and achievements of the National Trust Main Street approach in order to make a further explanation of the necessity of learning something in historic preservation field from the United States. The third part answers the question whether it is possible to apply the de-centered and locally based Main Street programs to China\u27s contemporary context, and then it discusses some possible methods to apply the National Trust Main Street four-point approach to China in order to realize China’s preservation based economic development. The last part summarizes the significance of applying this approach to China. This thesis aims to introduce this model to Chinese government officials and common people in order to make them better understand that preservation can be a catalyst for local economic development if appropriate strategies are adopted

A formal evaluation of the performance of different corporate styles in stable and turbulent environments

The notion of "parenting styles", introduced by Goold, Campbell and Alexander, has been widely acknowledged by the Corporate Strategy literature as a good broad description of the different ways in which corporate managers choose to manage and organize multibusiness firms. The purpose of this paper is to present a formal test of the relationship between parenting style and performance. For this test, we developed a set of agent-based simulations using the Performance Landscapes framework, which captures and describes the evolution of firms led by different parenting styles in business environments with different levels of complexity and dynamism. We found that the relative performance of each style is contingent upon the characteristics of the environment in which the firm operates. In less complex business environments, the Strategic Planning style outperforms the Strategic Control and Financial Control styles. In highly complex and highly dynamic environments, by contrast, the Strategic Control style performs best. Our results also demonstrate the importance of planning and flexibility at the corporate level and so contribute to the wider debate on Strategic Planning vs. Emergent Strategies.Corporate strategy; Parenting styles; Agent-based models;

Paradigm Shifts in Social Housing After Welfare‐State Transformation : Learning from the German Experience

Welfare‐state transformation and entrepreneurial urban politics in Western welfare states since the late 1970s have yielded converging trends in the transformation of the dominant Fordist paradigm of social housing in terms of its societal function and institutional and spatial form. In this article I draw from a comparative case study on two cities in Germany to show that the resulting new paradigm is simultaneously shaped by the idiosyncrasies of the country's national housing regime and local housing policies. While German governments have successively limited the societal function of social housing as a legitimate instrument only for addressing exceptional housing crises, local policies on providing and organizing social housing within this framework display significant variation. However, planning and design principles dominating the spatial forms of social housing have been congruent. They may be interpreted as both an expression of the marginalization of social housing within the restructured welfare housing regime and a tool of its implementation according to the logics of entrepreneurial urban politics

The Design of a Middle School Manual to Aid Core Teachers in the Development of Integrated Curriculum Units

This project purports to design a manual for middle-school teachers to aid in the development of core-integrated curriculum units. The manual will serve as an ally to the knowledge in textbooks, technology bases, and other available printed and nonprinted library and classroom resources. It will illustrate specific ways to integrate core curriculum knowledge and activities. The manual is intended for use by school-based subject core teachers by providing a common field of knowledge on the development of integrated curriculum units for middle level grades. The manual will enable educators to develop integrated core curriculum units that utilize themes and knowledge from a variety of resources, including current textbooks and printed and nonprinted library resources. Teachers will be encouraged to tie this knowledge in to community resources and to intentionally and contextually restructure teaching and learning

A Generic Storage API

We present a generic API suitable for provision of highly generic storage facilities that can be tailored to produce various individually customised storage infrastructures. The paper identifies a candidate set of minimal storage system building blocks, which are sufficiently simple to avoid encapsulating policy where it cannot be customised by applications, and composable to build highly flexible storage architectures. Four main generic components are defined: the store, the namer, the caster and the interpreter. It is hypothesised that these are sufficiently general that they could act as building blocks for any information storage and retrieval system. The essential characteristics of each are defined by an interface, which may be implemented by multiple implementing classes.Comment: Submitted to ACSC 200