NAVIGATING THROUGH ‘LAYERS’ AS A PEDAGOGICAL APPROACH IN ARCHITECTURAL TEACHING

The pedagogical approach presented here looks at the benefits of teaching design by encouraging the creation of layers and layers of ‘presented’, as opposed to ‘represented’, material, the navigation through which can prove to be a quite creative process. For the longest time architecture has been using a rather narrow set of media; the sketch, the diagram, the orthogonal and perspectival views, and the model were the main means through which the student of architecture followed a rather linear design process which led from concept to an architectural proposal. And while acknowledging that the use of the computer clearly offers new possibilities, the focus of the present piece of research is the way alternative ways of thinking about the setup may trigger the development of novel pedagogies of teaching design through new means of representation or communication which may in turn result in new design methodologies. The virtual is here not understood as the digital but, rather, as potentiality

Multicolour Optical Imaging of IR-Warm Seyfert Galaxies. I. Introduction and Sample Selection

The standard AGN unification models attempt to explain the diversity of observed AGN types by a few fundamental parameters, where orientation effects play a paramount role. Whether other factors, such as the evolutionary stage and the host galaxy properties are equally important parameters for the AGN diversity, is a key issue that we are addressing with the present data. Our sample of IR-selected Seyfert galaxies is based on the important discovery that their integrated IR spectrum contains an AGN signature. This being an almost isotropic property, our sample is much less affected by orientation/obscuration effects compared to most Seyfert samples. It therefore provides a test-bed for the orientation-dependent models of Seyferts, involving dusty tori. We have obtained multi-colour broad and narrow band imaging for a sample of mid-IR ``warm'' Seyferts and for a control sample of mid-IR ``cold'' galaxies. In the present paper we describe the sample selection and briefly discuss their IR properties. We then give an overview of the data collected and present broad-band images for all our objects. Finally, we summarize the main issues that will be addressed with these data in a series of forthcoming papers.Comment: 18 pages including 3 figures and 5 tables (tables 1,4,5 are included as independent files

Active galactic nuclei and the minor merger hypothesis

We have investigated the dynamics of the merging process in the minor merger hypothesis for active galactic nuclei. We find that for a satellite galaxy to be able to merge directly with the nucleus of the host galaxy (for example, to give rise to the compact dust discs which are seen in early type active galaxies) requires the initial orbit of the satellite to be well aimed. For the case of the host galaxy being a disc galaxy, if the initial orbits of the satellites are randomly oriented with respect to the host galaxy, then the orbits of those which reach the host nuclear regions in a reasonable time, are also fairly randomly oriented once they reach the nucleus. We note that this result might be able to provide an explanation of why the jet directions in the nuclei of Seyfert galaxies are apparently unrelated to the plane of the galaxy discs.Comment: Accepted for publication by MNRA