Seven notes on the program and design of healthcare buildings’ rehabilitation

One of the characteristics of the 20th century heritage hospital is the permanent remodeling of its spaces, a sign of the frequent changes in clinical practices which, in turn, bring about functional, construction and spatial changes. This characteristic, due to the functional prevalence of health facilities, generates forms of environmental and territorial consumerism. Contrary to any conservation or crystallizing idea of the heritage hospital, this present reflection seeks to find the aspects of this heritage that may be preserved in the remodeling processes, informed by the recent trends in the design of healthcare facilities, which ultimately constitute opportunities for their rehabilitation, reuse or restoration

On the Influence of Local-Distortional Interaction in the Behavior and Design of Cold-Formed Steel Web-Stiffened Lipped Channel Columns

This paper reports the results of a numerical (ABAQUS shell finite element analysis) investigation on the influence of local-distortional (L-D) interaction in the ultimate strength and design of cold-formed steel fixed-ended web-stiffened lipped channel columns -- hereafter termed “WSLC columns”. These results concern columns with various geometries and yield stresses, ensuring a wide variety of combined ratios between (i) the distortional and local critical buckling stresses, and (ii) the yield and the higher of the above buckling stresses. The objectives of this work are two-fold: (i) to acquire in-depth understanding on the mechanics underlying the L-D interaction in the WSLC columns analyzed, all selected to ensure that local buckling is triggered by the flanges, and also (ii) to provide a first contribution towards the efficient Direct Strength Method (DSM) design of these structural elements. The results presented and discussed concern the (i) post-buckling behavior (elastic and elastic-plastic), (ii) ultimate strength and (iii) failure mechanisms of the WSLC columns previously selected to undergo L-D interaction. Special attention is paid to comparing the ultimate strength erosions, due to L-D interaction, exhibited by the WSLC columns investigated here and the “plain cross-section” (i.e., without intermediate stiffeners) columns studied earlier by the authors (Martins et al. 2014a). Finally, the paper closes with some considerations about the impact of the findings reported in this work on the design of cold-formed steel columns undergoing different levels of L-D interaction

Buckling length of a steel column for fire design

The Eurocode 3 part 1-2 gives some simple rules to determine the buckling length lfi of a steel column for fire design. In the case of a braced frame in which each storey comprises a separate fire compartment with sufficient fire resistance, Eurocode 3 suggests that the buckling length may be taken as lfi=0.5L in an intermediate storey and as lfi=0.7L in the top storey, where L is the system length in the relevant storey.http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6V2Y-4MYMP09-1/1/a7f3181ad12d91b9f77b14c13ecb449

Ronchamp, South Wall

The Ronchamp Chapel was conceived under the sign of the metamorphoses of memory, appearing as a particular case of memorabilia. Among the memory objects produced by L-C, a plaster model of the first version of the south wall remains as a fragment. Produced through sculpture molding techniques, the perforated surface opens up new possibilities of interpretation of the chapel's analogical design process. The design method of Ronchamp moves between emotional, unconscious images, in search of an architectural experience in response to the “archaisms surviving in man.” The experience of an architectural journey is no longer the promenade architecturale, determined by visual compositions, but the anthropological experience of contact with surfaces, the recognition of the object by the circumscription, the crossing of the threshold, the spatial compression, the illumination of the concave surface of the apse, and of the dazzling by the backlight, expanding the unconscious archaic