Designing Unstable Landscapes

The concept of «unstable landscapes» refers to sections of territory produced by the contact/crash between different and conflicting morphological conditions. Contexts irrevocably exposed to the dynamics of the world, natural events and use way; processed, rejected, forgotten and recycled over the centuries; in-between lands grew up without a permanent order that however can be recovered. This condition is typical of the rivers, whose untamed nature, combined with the necessity to exploit their resources, has produced a particular condition of instability related to different conditions: the urgent requirement of infrastructural intervention due to a constant and increasing risk both for urban and rural areas; the request to reduce the marginality of these spaces whose landscape is impossible to recognize because fragmentary and dominated by the disorder; the necessity to find solution useful to readdress unsustainable ecological conditions. The urgency of intervention, combined with the lost potentialities and the latent richness of these spaces requires an integrated approach within which the role of architectural and landscape design is crucial. The purpose to minimize the risk, to return a sense to these territories, especially working on the public space, and to re-establish sustainable ecological conditions are singular objectives to express through a plural vision. In this sense the ability of the architect to address each problem from the point of view of the space (shape, values, relations) is fundamental. Thinking to the design process as a “therapy” or “treatment” implies an “anamnesis” process (collection of data related to the conditions of the landscape), the formulation of a “diagnosis” (development of a strategic view) and the identification of possible solutions (proposals of construction, maintenance and care). Those are indispensable preconditions to the formulation of operative strategies oriented to clear, to protect, to connect and to restore order within different the parts and to the disposition of architectural works characterized by technical and formal rigor, relationship with the spaces, multi- functionality and open possibilities of completion over time

The ‘new’ invisible Landscapes of Covid-19

The landscape is the result of the relationship between the perception of a subject and an object. Such phenomena, in times of Covid-19, assume a new ‘invisible’ form, where the microscopic dimension re-orients our way of using the space, influencing a consolidated idea of the landscape. Everywhere, at the first alarm, some form of self-protection will be triggered, making the ‘ordinary’ landscapes uncomfortable and potentially dangerous. However, there is also something positive in this unforeseen critical period. It is the emergence of territories able to play an antagonistic role in the spread of coronavirus. Spaces that were more marginalized territorial forms can now assume a unique, central role. The residual and enclosed space of large metropolitan areas appears as the centre of a new landscape design hypothesis, where new grounds impose themselves as antagonists to the dynamics that represent the crisis of our territories

The ‘new’ invisible Landscapes of Covid-19

The landscape is the result of the relationship between the perception of a subject and an object. Such phenomena, in times of Covid-19, assume a new ‘invisible’ form, where the microscopic dimension re-orients our way of using the space, influencing a consolidated idea of the landscape. Everywhere, at the first alarm, some form of self-protection will be triggered, making the ‘ordinary’ landscapes uncomfortable and potentially dangerous. However, there is also something positive in this unforeseen critical period. It is the emergence of territories able to play an antagonistic role in the spread of coronavirus. Spaces that were more marginalized territorial forms can now assume a unique, central role. The residual and enclosed space of large metropolitan areas appears as the centre of a new landscape design hypothesis, where new grounds impose themselves as antagonists to the dynamics that represent the crisis of our territories

Milan and its lost river: when surviving images represent unique narrations of invisible relationships

One of the most predictable implications of photography consists of the ability to fix some images returning them in a variable timeframe for the observation. In all the major world cities, it is common to incur in some book where recent photos are compared to old ones searching the same point of view in order to make the comparison more accurate and stimulate the critical ability of the observer. An exercise that sometimes stimulates a sort of regret for the past, pointing out a diffused excess of nostalgia for times gone by. Nevertheless, the reality and meaning of modern city images are not always so prosaic. What happens when photographs are evocative of a reality that is completely lost in the collective imaginary even though it still exists and functions, despite being forgotten and buried in the depths of the city? This is the case of very few pictures capable of telling the story of a city, Milan, and its only “real” river, the Olona, whose waters, humiliated and rejected, continue to flow in total amnesia. It is a different story when photography does not have the role of nourishing nostalgia, but the power to make visible and explain the variation of a presence and its progressive obliteration. Some pictures testify to the passage from the bucolic amenity of the river and its banks in a pre-urban context to a muscular urban infrastructure. A rigid channelized river, shown with confidence, is trying to keep its presence, until the moment of its inevitable decline and disappearance. It is in these images that the possibility of reconsidering the Olona as a part of the new project for the city lies

The ‘new’ invisible Landscapes of Covid-19

The landscape is the result of the relationship between the perception of a subject and an object. Such phenomena, in times of Covid-19, assume a new ‘invisible’ form, where the microscopic dimension re-orients our way of using the space, influencing a consolidated idea of the landscape. Everywhere, at the first alarm, some form of self-protection will be triggered, making the ‘ordinary’ landscapes uncomfortable and potentially dangerous. However, there is also something positive in this unforeseen critical period. It is the emergence of territories able to play an antagonistic role in the spread of coronavirus. Spaces that were more marginalized territorial forms can now assume a unique, central role. The residual and enclosed space of large metropolitan areas appears as the centre of a new landscape design hypothesis, where new grounds impose themselves as antagonists to the dynamics that represent the crisis of our territories

Il monastero di San Prospero nella crisi del Trecento: aspetti gestionali e relazionali

The aim of this paper is to illustrate the management of the properties and the relational network of the monastery of S. Prospero in Reggio Emilia during the 14th century. The analysis of an unpublished source allow us to see how different causes of the Crisis of the 14th century (economic, social, demographic and political) affected the monastery, showing aspects of continuity and discontinuity. On one hand continuity can be spotted in the relational network gravitating around the abbey, consisting of both rural and urban population. The members of the urban oligarchy in order to establish deep roots in the monastery of S. Prospero used to receive monastic lands in feud or in leasing. On the other hand, discontinuity can be obviously spotted in the agrarian contracts. Under the pressure of economical (increasing the land’s yield and compacting the farms) and political needs (restoring the relational network after the Black Plague and the Feltrino Gonzaga’s government) the agrarian contracts reduced their duration, from long time ones to short ones, and sometimes they added new clauses, whose aim was to increase the dependency between the abbot and the peasants. Keywords: Reggio Emilia, San Prospero, crisi del Trecento, congiuntura del Trecento, monastero benedettino; crisis of the 14th century, conjuncture of the 14th century, benedictine monaster

Bioengineering the Pancreas: Cell-on-Scaffold Technology

Nowadays, type I diabetes mellitus is a pathology afflicting millions of people globally with a dramatic assessment in the next future. Current treatments including exogenous insulin, pancreas transplantation and islets transplantation, are not free from important lifelong side effects. In the last decade, tissue engineering and regenerative medicine have shown encouraging results about the possibility to produce a functional bioengineered pancreas. Among many technologies, decellularization offers the opportunity to produce an organ-specific acellular matrix that could subsequently repopulate with endocrine cellular population. Herein, we aim to review the state-of-art and this technology highlighting the diabetes burden for the healthcare system and the major achievements toward the manufacturing of a bioengineered pancreas obtained by cell-on-scaffold technology

Machine learning approach to the safety assessment of a prestressed concrete railway bridge

Early structural anomalies identification allows to hold maintenance activities that avoid loss of both economic resources and human life. This is extremely important for crucial infrastructures like railway bridges. This paper illustrates the structural health monitoring approach applied to a simply supported prestressed concrete railway bridge. In the framework of long-term monitoring, both static quantities (displacements, strains, and rotations) and environmental measurements (temperatures) have been recorded. Machine learning techniques, Extreme Gradient boosting machine and Multi-Layer Perceptron, have been exploited to build regression correlation models associated with the undamaged structural condition after adequate pre-processing operations. In this way, alarm thresholds based on the expected residuals between the predicted structural quantities and the measured ones, have been defined. The thresholds turned out to be able to catch early-stage anomalies not pointed out by traditional damage thresholds based on the design values. The proposed damage index is chosen as the moving median of the residuals, allowing a significant reduction of false alarms. The used correlation models and the obtained results represent a starting point for the generalization of this approach to the bridges belonging to the same static typology

La importancia del color en el diagnóstico de lesiones de caries

Introducción: Se han desarrollado diferentes métodos de detección de lesiones caries que hacen énfasis en la medición de lesiones tempranas. A través de la inspección visual, es posible detectar los primeros cambios en las propiedades ópticas del esmalte y establecer la presencia de la enfermedad de caries. Objetivos: Interpretar los diversos cambios de color que se presentan en los tejidos dentales durante el proceso físico/químico de desmineralización y remineralización; cuantificar la magnitud de la lesión y asignar una categoría a la pérdida de tejido y definir el tratamiento específico.Facultad de Odontologí

The CDC42-Interacting Protein 4 Controls Epithelial Cell Cohesion and Tumor Dissemination

SummaryThe role of endocytic proteins and the molecular mechanisms underlying epithelial cell cohesion and tumor dissemination are not well understood. Here, we report that the endocytic F-BAR-containing CDC42-interacting protein 4 (CIP4) is required for ERBB2- and TGF-β1-induced cell scattering, breast cancer (BC) cell motility and invasion into 3D matrices, and conversion from ductal breast carcinoma in situ to invasive carcinoma in mouse xenograft models. CIP4 promotes the formation of an E-cadherin-CIP4-SRC complex that controls SRC activation, E-cadherin endocytosis, and localized phosphorylation of the myosin light chain kinase, thereby impinging on the actomyosin contractility required to generate tangential forces to break cell-cell junctions. CIP4 is upregulated in ERBB2-positive human BC, correlates with increased distant metastasis, and is an independent predictor of poor disease outcome in subsets of BC patients. Thus, it critically controls cell-cell cohesion and is required for the acquisition of an invasive phenotype in breast tumors