Socialist facades parametrized

Abstract. In my explorative diploma thesis “Socialist Facades Parametrized” I study and try to understand the facades of buildings from 27 countries of the Eastern Bloc built between the years 1954 and 1991.Through analyzing, understanding and parameterizing these facades my aim is to present a logical continuation of the development of architectural language which ceased to exist by the start of the 1990s. This thesis is not meant to propagate any kind of post-communist nostalgia or support any political movement, its goal is to recognize interesting approaches to façade ornamentality and possible uses in the contemporary context. The thesis consists of two equally important parts: the analytical part and the creative part. The first, analytical part of the thesis is based on the collection, selection, and further sorting of those facades into categories based on geometric similarity. This geometric similarity is then used for exploring parametric possibilities of such facades. The first goal of this thesis is to both learn more about Eastern Bloc’s so-called Socialist Modernism facades (1954–1991) and to change the perception of socialist architecture as just a group of grey boxes by presenting interesting examples. Also, there is my wish to learn more about the visual and general identity and cultural space of the Eastern Bloc. The second, creative part of the thesis is about the exploration of parametric modeling to create facades inspired by Socialist Modernism facades using parametric tools and their flexibility. An important task in this part is to learn and understand parametric modeling tools and the creation of a parametric generator of facades inspired by Socialist Modernism. Another goal is to explore the facade generator in the everyday practice of building design to experiment quicker. This step goes together with a general understanding of this emerging phenomenon and its use in architecture. In addition to enriching and developing my current architectural language with historical elements, I hope that my diploma thesis will be a source of inspiration to colleagues too

On the regularity up to the boundary for second order nonlinear elliptic systems

In several earlier papers, the first two authors have shown that the question of interior regularity for solutions of boundary value problems for second-order nonlinear elliptic systems is equivalent (in some sense) to a certain Liouville property. The present paper demonstrates that a similar result is true for regularity up to the boundary of the uniformly Lipschitz-continuous weak solutions of the boundary value problems

Preparation and physical properties of hyaluronic acid-based cryogels

Macroporous hydrogels based on hyaluronan (HA), a natural polysaccharide occurring in extracellular matrix, have attracted interest over many years owing to their numerous applications in the biomedical area. However, HA hydrogels produced so far suffer from low mechanical strength and slow rate of response against external stimuli, which limit their applications. Here, we prepared macroporous HA cryogels of high mechanical stability and fast responsivity from aqueous HA solutions at subzero temperatures using ethylene glycol diglycidyl ether as a crosslinking agent. HA cryogels are squeezable and no crack development was exhibited when compressed up to 80% strain. Depending on the synthesis parameters, the cryogels exhibit an elastic modulus between 0.2 and 2 kPa, and show fast swelling/deswelling behavior. The microstructure of the cryogels consists of large, interconnected pores on the order of 100 mu m separated by thick pore walls, as observed by scanning electron microscopy and confocal scanning laser microscopy

Polarity reversal of wakefields driven by ultrashort pulse laser

With analytical calculations and computer simulations, we show that the properties of wakefield excited by an ultrashort laser pulse in high-density plasmas are determined by the effects of dispersion and carrier-envelope phase shift of the driving pulse. The main observed feature is a periodic long-wavelength modulation of the wakefield amplitude. The results obtained are important, e.g., for the enhancement of the quality of electron beams accelerated via laser-wakefield mechanism under the conditions relevant to high-repetition-rate laser systems