Critical Dialogues : Scotland + Venice 2012

Alberto Campo Baeza writing in the catalogue, Young Spanish Architecture, an Ark Monograph of 1985, talks about, ‘’a world riddled with noise and yet paradoxically mute, creatively speaking, a group of young Spanish architects are playing a very engaging song, their own song, the most beautiful song.’’ Twenty-seven years later that Spanish song has grown in quality and projection as subsequent architects took their lead from this earlier generation resulting in a Spanish architectural culture of great stature and depth. New voices are occasionally heard, often emanating from the architectural edge, such as Pascal Flammer and Raphael Zuber’s work in Switzerland and Alejandro Aravena’s Elemental Housing in Chile. Some of the most beautiful and poignant songs have emerged from China in Atelier Archmixing’s Twin Trees Pavilion and Amateur Architecture Studio’s early Ceramic House, projects that can be heard through the din of the architectural circus that travels the globe, a circus with an increasingly desperate and cynical appetite. For a song to become engaging and powerful, three components are critical: personality, passion and technique. Scotland’s presence in Venice 2012 is about the recognition of four voices that are on the verge of making themselves heard. Scotland lies on the periphery of Europe, nascent both politically and in contemporary terms architecturally. Yet once its architects stood shoulder to shoulder with the best in Europe and many claim that Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s sublime Glasgow School of Art 1899-1909 heralded modernism not just in the UK but also in Europe. In the post-Second World War period Gillespie Kidd and Coia in the West and Morris and Steedman in the East helped propel Scottish architecture in new directions, the former becoming part of a west coast figurative culture that explored a phenomenological sense of section and atmosphere, the latter by an east coast sense of abstraction, detachment and refinement. It seems to me there has always been this kind of architectural watershed that splits Scotland in two. The west possesses a character like its fractured romantic coastline that is passionate about layers, complexity and conversation, whilst the east with its more austere coastline nurtures a more ascetic, reflective, emotionless and silent quality in both its art and architecture. More recently the architectural scene seems to have lost this sense of split personality that came out of place. The new architecture has a tendency towards an image of rediscovered modernism albeit executed with a new graphic material suaveness that could equally be seen anywhere in the UK. The years from the 1970’s have seen a gradual dissolution in the architect’s role. It is a situation that has been greatly exacerbated by the current recession in which many architects have lost not just their voice, but their ability to make architecture altogether. The four architectural practices represented in Venice are all based in Glasgow; they all share a concern for people, the ordinary, and the street. They all have passion and an emerging personality even though their technique has had little opportunity to develop. The critical word that connects these architects is architectural practice. They explore the act of practicing as an architect in a marginal situation, politically, socially, professionally and culturally. Their approach is primarily concerned with conversation and engagement. Venice itself is a city on the edge. Once the edge of Europe and a portal to a far eastern imagination, a city barely founded on land or sea, a mirage. The Scottish contribution to the Venice Biennale itself is a marginal act, emerging, hopeful, outside the main event. Four Northern figures flit amongst southern shadows

COSHes Help Build Healthy Unions

[Excerpt] Boston\u27s current fiscal crisis has made the refrain we have no money to fix it seem like a broken record. Yet, recently, Boston City Hospital workers have won improved ventilation, larger work rooms, air conditioning in certain areas, and the closing of a particularly noxious area with the transfer of workers who had been assigned there. A key to these victories was the establishment of a well-trained three-union hospital-wide health and safety committee that meets regularly to tackle both ongoing problems and crises

A New Record for \u3ci\u3eMagicicada Septendecim\u3c/i\u3e in Michigan (Homoptera: Cicadidae)

Adult 17-year cicadas, Magicicada septendecim were collected on the Michigan State University campus, East Lansing, Michigan in 1982. Their probable origin and chances for surivial are discussed

HappyThink.Inc

For many years I have been writing a city in which all of the contradictions of capitalist society and urban development are condensed and exaggerated with brutal clarity. Every aspect of daily life from education, to body parts, and views of trees, has been commodified in a manner that even the pessimists of former times could barely have imagined. It is a city that sprawls to the horizon in all directions and sits on the brink of ecological catastrophe. As is usual in such tales, the dark cunning of the human imagination works hard on ways to categorise and control human behaviour. However, like all dystopian narratives, it is a vision of the future that is rooted in the present, a story that simply stretches and distorts the social and material reality of everyday life. For example, to speculate on the collapse of urban civilisation and of the metamorphosis of education into a grotesque parody of a retail outlet, is only possible, because the forces that could make it happen have already been unleashed. What follows is a fragment from the testament of the City's last librarian

Porcine innate and adaptative immune responses to influenza and coronavirus infections

Both innate and adaptative immune responses contribute to the control of infectious diseases, including by limiting the spreading of zoonotic diseases from animal reservoirs to humans. Pigs represent an important animal reservoir for influenza virus infection of human populations and are also naturally infected by coronaviruses, an important group of viruses, which includes the recently emerged severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) virus. Studies on both innate and adaptative immune responses of pigs to influenza virus and coronaviruses contribute, therefore, to a better control of these infections in their natural hosts and will be briefly reviewed in this article. Pro-inflammatory cytokines, including type I interferon (IFN), tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-alpha), and interleukin-6 (IL-6), were found in lung secretions of influenza virus infected pigs, and correlated with the intensity of clinical signs, whereas prior vaccination against influenza strongly reduced the production of infectious virus and cytokines in the lungs upon challenge, which was associated with clinical protection. An early type I IFN production was also found in coronavirus infected pigs, including at mucosal sites. IFN induction by coronavirus is shown to involve interaction between a viral glycoprotein and a leukocyte subset, likely equivalent to plasmacytoid dendritic cells, present in the mucosae and associated lymphoid tissues. Given the IFN mediated antiviral and immunomodulatory effects, the use of IFN or IFN inducers may prove an efficient strategy for a better control of influenza virus and coronavirus infections in pigs. Because influenza and coronaviruses target mucosal surfaces, adaptative immune responses have to be characterized at mucosal sites. Thus, nasal and pulmonary antibody responses were analyzed in influenza virus infected or vaccinated pigs showing short-lived, but potentially protective local IgA and IgG antibody (Ab) responses. Interestingly, primary influenza virus infection induced long-lived increase of lung CD8(+) T cells and local lymphoproliferative responses. Pigs infected by a respiratory coronavirus (PRCV) showed virus-specific IgG Ab-secreting cells in the bronchial lymph nodes, whereas the transmissible gastroenteritis coronavirus (TGEV) induced more IgA Ab-secreting cells in gut tissues, which illustrates the importance of the route of antigen administration for inducing local immune effector mechanisms. Porcine viral infections provide, therefore, valuable models for evaluating the immune parameters that are important for controlling transmission of important viral zoonotic infections