Making the unseen visible : transforming the red light district of Bogotá

El proyecto nace por una dicotomía entre ciudad ideal y ciudad actual. Se considera que la ciudad actual se formuló para el control de una población sobre otra, lo que generó una jerarquía dispar que restringe fuertemente a la población dominada en su espacialidad. Por el contrario, la ciudad ideal devuelve la potestad a la población dominada de apropiarse del espacio. Para llegar a esa ciudad ideal se usa el concepto de utopía experimental, que es la persecución de un objetivo incluyente y aparentemente inalcanzable por medio de bases reales que lo hagan viable. Parte de las bases reales dependen de factores ajenos a la arquitectura (como la voluntad política) pero necesitan de la capacidad imaginativa de esta. Por ello es importante dentro de esta metodología formular proyectos que no se limiten por restricciones de morfología, tiempo y espacio. En Bogotá estos proyectos son necesarios, pues la desigualdad afecta con toda clase de matices. Mientras la mayor parte de este fenómeno se da por lógicas de desplazamiento que llevan a la conurbación en las periferias de la ciudad, hay un problema específico que no obedece esa lógica. En el barrio Santa Fe está la denominada zona de tolerancia, un límite político establecido por el distrito para confinar el comercio sexual a 13.6 hectáreas en edificaciones de baja densidad. La población que habita el barrio sufre el estigma que conlleva el trabajo sexual y por ello es invisibilizada, a la vez que tiene condiciones poco dignas de vida. Junto con esta problemática cultural, los lineamientos políticos hacen que la zona sea homogénea y aislada, por lo cual el espacio público es inadecuado para sus usuarios. Esto se dio por concebir el comercio sexual como un uso del suelo y no como una actividad comercial, aislando así la zona en cuestión. Sí por el contrario, se entendiera en su realidad, se podría proponer una zona heterogénea a partir de la mezcla de usos, que se integraría más eficazmente con el resto de la ciudad propiciando así mejores condiciones de vida para la población vulnerada del barrio. Dicha zona heterogénea da posibilidad para el proyecto que se propone. En él se concibe que el centro de manzana se relacione con el espacio público a través de la filtración del mismo, como una zona de transición entre niveles de privacidad. Esto funcionaría como un pasaje comercial de carácter barrial. En las edificaciones perimetrales se ubicaría la vivienda. La densidad de la manzana aumentaría en la medida que un tipo de arquitectura se va montando sobre las edificaciones existentes. Esto posibilita un punto medio entre la renovación y la reutilización de edificaciones con el fin de reducir el impacto ecológico de la demolición y plantea la adición como una herramienta de diseño. Estas nuevas arquitecturas albergarían los usos de mayor impacto, que se mantendrán independientes entre ellos para evitar conflictos. La circulación se vuelve fundamental en la composición. Estos lineamientos aplicados a las dos manzanas tratadas darían como producto una pieza del rompecabezas que sería la ciudad ideal.ProstitutasTrabajadores sexualesThe project was born by a dichotomy between ideal city and current city. Consider that the current city was formulated for the control of one population over another, which generated an unequal hierarchy that strongly restricts the population dominated in its spatiality. Although, the ideal city returns the power to the dominated population to appropriate the space. To reach that ideal city, the concept of experimental utopia is used, which is the pursuit of an inclusive and seemingly unattainable goal through real bases that make it viable. To begin constructing the utopia, depends on factors outside the architecture (such as political will) but they need the imaginative capacity of it. Therefore, it is important within this methodology to formulate projects that are not limited by morphology, time and space restrictions. In Bogotá these projects are necessary, because inequality affects in different ways. While most of this phenomenon is taken as displacement logics that lead to the conurbation in the peripheries of the city, there is a specific problem that does not obey that logic. In the neighborhood of Santa Fe is the tolerance zone or red light district, a political limit established by the city to confine sex trade to 13.6 hectares in low-density buildings. The population that inhabits the neighborhood suffers the stigma that comes with sex work and is therefore invisible, while having a low quality of life. Together with this cultural problem, the political guidelines make the area of ​​the sea homogeneous and isolated, so that the public space is isolated for its users. This was because the sexual market was conceived as a way of using land and not as a commercial activity, isolating the area in question. If, on the contrary, it was understood in its reality, one could think of a heterogeneous area from a mixture of uses, which would be integrated more effectively with the restoration of the city, promoting better living conditions for the vulnerable population in the neighborhood. This heterogeneous area gives new possibilities for the project that is being proposed. It is conceived that the center of the block is related to the public space through its filtration, as a transition zone between privacy levels. This works like a commercial passage of a neighborhood nature. In the perimeter buildings the housing would be located. The density of the block would increase as a different type of architecture climbs over the extended buildings. This allows a midpoint between renovation and reuse of buildings in order to reduce the ecological impact of the demolition and presents it as a design tool. These new architectures would have the most impactful uses, which will remain independent of each other to avoid conflicts. Circulation becomes fundamental in the composition. These guidelines applied to the two transformed blocks would result in a piece of the puzzle that would be the ideal city.Arquitecto (a)Pregrad

Subject to Change

Making visible what is often unseen, muted, or ignored, Shauna Steinbach discusses the unscientific models that make up their sculpture and installation practice. Steinbach’s work explores philosophical thoughts and inquiries surrounding imprints, impermanence, and interdependence. The deaths are small until they are big

Invisible Disability: Georgina Kleege\u27s Sight Unseen

This essay discusses Sight Unseen, Georgina Kleege\u27s collection of personal essays about partial blindness from macular degeneration, and explores the challenge Kleege poses to the presumably universal relation between vision, knowledge, and stable subjectivity. I argue that the semiotic and personal analysis Kleege performs in her essays disrupts the entrenched connection between seeing and selfhood whereby the blind are construed as diminished or helpless figures. Sight Unseen maximizes the specular effects of the autobiographical situation, making transgressively visible the anomalous body that patriarchal discourse has sought to control and that feminist theory has largely ignored as a meaningful category of identity. The text manifests the defining impact of disability on a woman\u27s idea of herself in a culture in which the parameters of normative gendered identity are circulated largely through visual imagery, but in turn contests the ontological primacy of vision by orienting the narrative toward the new focal point of blindness. Unveiling the fictions surrounding sightedness as a stable mode of access to identity and reality, Kleege subverts the dominance of myths of knowledge and mastery granted to the eyes

Tidal Dwarf Galaxies and missing baryons

Tidal dwarf galaxies form during the interaction, collision or merger of massive spiral galaxies. They can resemble "normal" dwarf galaxies in terms of mass, size, and become dwarf satellites orbiting around their massive progenitor. They nevertheless keep some signatures from their origin, making them interesting targets for cosmological studies. In particular, they should be free from dark matter from a spheroidal halo. Flat rotation curves and high dynamical masses may then indicate the presence of an unseen component, and constrain the properties of the "missing baryons", known to exist but not directly observed. The number of dwarf galaxies in the Universe is another cosmological problem that can be significantly impacted if tidal dwarf galaxies formed frequently at high redshift, when the merger rate was high, and many of them survived until today.Comment: Tutorial Review for the special issue "Dwarf galaxies and Cosmology" in Advances in Astronomy. (10 pages, 4 figures

Unseen Affective Faces Influence Person Perception Judgments in Schizophrenia.

To demonstrate the influence of unconscious affective processing on consciously processed information among people with and without schizophrenia, we used a continuous flash suppression (CFS) paradigm to examine whether early and rapid processing of affective information influences first impressions of structurally neutral faces. People with and without schizophrenia rated visible neutral faces as more or less trustworthy, warm, and competent when paired with unseen smiling or scowling faces compared to when paired with unseen neutral faces. Yet, people with schizophrenia also exhibited a deficit in explicit affect perception. These findings indicate that early processing of affective information is intact in schizophrenia but the integration of this information with semantic contexts is problematic. Furthermore, people with schizophrenia who were more influenced by smiling faces presented outside awareness reported experiencing more anticipatory pleasure, suggesting that the ability to rapidly process affective information is important for anticipation of future pleasurable events

On things seen and unseen: enlarging the vision in sociology of religion

Our earliest sociological forebears gave us big ideas to think with and often turned their foundational questions to the analysis of religion. Durkheim (1964) asked how the energy of a gathered community became condensed into symbols that endure and bind that community together. Weber (1958) showed us how cultural virtuosi (and the communities that form around them) create meaningful ways of life that can transform the world. Marx (1964) told us to ask how powerful people mystify others into believing their power is justified. DuBois (1989) pointed to the myriad empirical ways the color line fundamentally shapes the social world. Religion was at the heart of their inquiry and therefore foundational to what we do, but the way we ask questions about religion and society has changed in important ways over the last century. After a brief look at how those original foundations were transformed into a "modern" scholarly discipline, this essay will turn to more recent transformations as they point us toward the future. I will argue that seeing the previously unseen has introduced critical new questions into our work

Do lemurs know when they could be wrong? An investigation of information seeking in three species of lemur (<i>Lemur catta, Eulemur rubriventer, </i>and<i> Varecia variegata</i>)

Sixteen lemurs, including representatives from three species (Lemur catta, Eulemur rubriventer, Varecia variegata), were presented with a food seeking task where information about the rewards location, in one of two plastic tubes, was either known or not known. We evaluated whether lemurs would first look into the tube prior to making a choice. This information-seeking task aimed to assess whether subjects would display memory awareness, seeking additional information when they became aware they lacked knowledge of the rewards location. We predicted lemurs would be more likely to look into the tube when they had insufficient knowledge about the rewards position. Lemurs successfully gained the reward on most trials. However, they looked on the majority of trials regardless of whether they had all the necessary information to make a correct choice. The minimal cost to looking may have resulted in checking behaviour both to confirm what they already knew and to gain knowledge they did not have. When the cost of looking increased (elevating end of tube requiring additional energy expenditure to look inside - Experiment 2), lemurs still looked into tubes on both seen and unseen trials; however, the frequency of looking increased when opaque tubes were used (where they could not see the rewards location after baiting). This could suggest they checked more when they were less sure of their knowledge state

Learning to Reconstruct Shapes from Unseen Classes

From a single image, humans are able to perceive the full 3D shape of an object by exploiting learned shape priors from everyday life. Contemporary single-image 3D reconstruction algorithms aim to solve this task in a similar fashion, but often end up with priors that are highly biased by training classes. Here we present an algorithm, Generalizable Reconstruction (GenRe), designed to capture more generic, class-agnostic shape priors. We achieve this with an inference network and training procedure that combine 2.5D representations of visible surfaces (depth and silhouette), spherical shape representations of both visible and non-visible surfaces, and 3D voxel-based representations, in a principled manner that exploits the causal structure of how 3D shapes give rise to 2D images. Experiments demonstrate that GenRe performs well on single-view shape reconstruction, and generalizes to diverse novel objects from categories not seen during training.Comment: NeurIPS 2018 (Oral). The first two authors contributed equally to this paper. Project page: http://genre.csail.mit.edu