MOVE: a fun Playground

“Most people, talking of their happiest childhood experiences, will describe places that were wild, overgrown, mysterious, hidden from adult eyes; trees where they built houses, undergrowth where they created smugglers' passages, dumps where they could find scraps of wood and empty boxes. Rarely if ever will their treasured memories revolve around schoolyards or parks or other formal spaces provided for play.” (Cooper, 1970) The objec/ve of MOVE is to revamp the Sant’Agos/no primary school to meet the needs of the pupils, recognizing that the physical condi/ons of educa/onal buildings significantly influence the effec/veness of educa/on (Al et al., 2012). It is widely acknowledged that during the forma/ve years of children, a diverse range of experiences promotes independent learning and enhances cogni/ve development (Cooper, 1970; Bruni et al., 2018). Therefore, the learning spaces must be designed based on a thorough understanding of children's development to s/mulate interac/on, imagina/on, and diversity (Dudek, 2014). The school's architecture should enable pupils to have the freedom to be crea/ve and take ownership of their development, with minimal interference from adults, but under adequate supervision to ensure safety, known as "freedom within limits" (Cooper, 1970; Plummer, 1987). The proposal is centred on the spaces of movement, specifically the connec/on spaces, which should serve as areas for expanding tradi/onal learning. Our proposal redefines these spaces as not just connec/ons but as interac/ve spaces. The new spa/al configura/on shirs the focus from a frontal learning approach to an explora/ve one, providing every individual with the opportunity to grow based on their own inclina/on. The tradi/onal courtyard is transformed into a square, which serves as a fun playground for the en/re school community. The slides, which connect the two floors of the school via the staircases and courtyard, serve as a visual representa/on of MOVE's principles. Simultaneously, they func/on as machines that place pupils at the focal point of their educa/onal experience. These slides are inspired by Carsten Höller's “Test Site” (2006) installa/on at the Tate Modern in London, which sought to introduce a sense of playfulness into architectural design. Höller's installa/on raised two main ques/ons: “How might a daily dose of sliding affect the way we perceive the world? Can slides become part of our experien/al and architectural life?” (Tate, 2006). According to Höller, the installa/on created “a laboratory of doubt” that challenged spectators and provided them with breath-taking sensa/ons as they tumbled down the slide amidst the exis/ng space. The slides installa/on serves as a space where both users and spectators play a crucial role, with Höller himself sta/ng, "I've come to realize that the real material in my art is the spectators" (Höller et al). As the slides connect different floors, they create a playful moment of sharing, enabling pupils to redesign and re-appropriate the space collabora/vely, placing the experience of the space at the centre of their learning. The classrooms are now openly designed with large and transparent door frames. Through the corridors, interfaces between the inside and outside, classrooms could expand to the outside area fostering innova/ve ac/ons. (Bruni at al., 2018). Classrooms are manifold rather than singular, incomplete rather than cellular, and overlapping rather than serial. (Plummer 1987) The corridors, which once played an ancillary role, have been reimagined as spaces for interac/on. The new layout entails a flexible and mul/faceted playground, which children will remember, and which will have a posi/ve impact on their growth as adults during their crucial developmental years. Given the urban, central loca/on of the Sant'Agos/no primary school, we believe that our proposal will have a significant impact in revitalizing the old Civitanova Alta conserva/on project. As an open space, the school's courtyard will serve as an extension of the town's open spaces system, par/cularly the Piazza della Libertà, Corso Annibal Caro, and Via Guglielmo Oberdan. Likewise, the educa/on building will be situated at the heart of both the pupils' learning experience and the town's social and civic life.Peer reviewe

MEASURING RESILIENT COMMUNITIES : An analytical and predictive tool

© 2022 and published by the Association for Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia (CAADRIA), Hong Kong. This is the accepted manuscript version of an article which has been published in final form at https://caadria2022.org/measuring_resilient_communities_an_analytical_and_predictive_tool/This work presents the initial results of an analytical tool designed to quantitatively assess the level of resilience of urban areas. We use Deep Neural Networks to extract features of resilience from a trained model that classifies urban areas using a pre-assigned value range of resilience. The model returns the resilience value for any urban area, indicating the distance between the centre of the selected area and relevant typologies, including green areas, buildings, natural elements and infrastructures. Our tool also indicates the urban morphological characteristics that have a larger impact on the resilience score. In this way we can learn why a neighbourhood is successful (or not) and how to improve its level of resilience. The model employs Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) with Keras on Tensorflow for the computation. The outputs are loaded onto a Node.JS environment and bootstrapped with React.js to generate the online demo.Final Accepted Versio

Resilient Communities: A Novel Workflow

© 2021 Carta, Pintacuda, Owen and Turchi. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This study presents a novel workflow to define how resilient communities can be analysed and improved through the optimisation of sustainable design principles through quantitative methods. Our model analyses successful sustainable communities extracting information about daily routines (commuting, working, use of buildings etc.). From these routines, we infer a set of key successful aspects based on location, density and proximity. We then model a resilient community and analyse it using a combination of clustering techniques to find patterns and correlations in the success of existing communities. The proposed workflow is applied to the city of Copenhagen as a case study. The aim of the proposed model is to suggest to designers and city-level policy makers improvements (with manipulation of variables like density, proximity and location of urban typologies) to help them to achieve different levels of sustainable goals as set out by the United Nations Global Challenges including integration inclusiveness and resilience. By using a clustering technique, patterns of proximity have been identified along with density and initial correlations in the observed urban typologies. Some of these correlations were used to illustrate the potential of this novel workflow.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

A QGIS plugin to calculate resilience based on the proximity of urban resources

This study presents our latest development of a plugin for QGIS to help designers and planners to calculate resilience values for specific areas in urban contexts. Instead of radial distance, the proposed approach considers isochrones as the main driver of the computation, considering the time required to reach each urban typology, thus accounting for the constraints of specific environments and providing more accurate results. This study illustrates how more accurate methods of time calculation in the built environment can address climate adaptation and urban performance of communities with promising results

RECOMM. Measuring Resilient Communities: an analytical and predictive tool

We present initial findings of our project RECOMM: an analytical tool that evaluates the resilience of urban areas. The tool utilises Deep Neural Networks to identify characteristics of resilience and assigns a resilience score to different urban areas based on the proximity to certain features such as green spaces, buildings, natural elements, and infrastructure. The tool also identifies which urban morphological factors have the greatest impact on resilience. The method uses Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) with the Keras library on Tensorflow for calculations and the results are displayed in an online demo built with Node.js and React.js. This work contributes to the analysis and design of sustainable cities and communities by offering a tool to assess resilience through urban form

CINT City Net-Zero tool: a method to quantitatively assess carbon data in urban areas

We present CINT (City Net-zero Tool): an analytical and predictive model de-signed to quantitatively assess carbon data in urban areas. We developed a work-flow to collect existing data from city councils on carbon footprint, consumption and production, and tested the inter-operability between urban public data and GIS data. We implemented the model using Kernel Density Estimation (KDE) to infer the carbon emissions related to individual buildings based on a station-based dataset. We present initial testing on the integration of data from OpenStreetMap with a vector model and initial testing on modelling data into graph networks to generate enquiries and inference on carbon data and urban scenarios. This method shows how we can integrate more datasets into our base model (graph-based geo-referenced map) to infer unknown information (for example the estimated NO2 emission per each building)

QRES, A QGIS plugin to calculate resilience based on proximity of urban resources

This study presents our latest development of a plugin for QGIS to help designers and planners to calculate resilience values for specific areas in urban contexts. Instead of radial distance, the proposed approach considers isochrones as the main driver of the computation, considering the time required to reach each urban typology, thus considering the constraints of specific environments, and providing more accurate results. This study illustrates how more accurate methods of time calculation in the built environment can address climate adaptation and urban performance of communities with promising results

A Shift in Teaching Architectural Design Studio: Adaptative Reuse and Retrofit as the Main Focus to Prepare Students for Complex Challenges of a Changing Profession

“The greenest building is the one that already exists”, Carl Elefante stated in 2007). In the last few years, this statement has been strengthened and the approach to sustainability in architecture has been focused more on understanding and decoding the potential and complexity of the existing built environment. To confirm this trend, in 2021 the Architecture Pritzker Prize was given to Lacaton & Vassal, whose mantra is “Never demolish, never remove or replace, always add, transform, and reuse!”. Considering this crucial shift in the profession, we need to adapt our teaching and equip students with specific tools to deal with this complex scenario. Re-use and retrofit are never an easy task and the constraints the existing building generates are an expression of the complex changing world. This new layer of complexity needs to be implemented in studio teaching to allow students to decode, investigate and take decisions after an existing artefact and contribute to the reduction of carbon emission and waste production. Since 2018 the research/teaching group (made of academics and professionals) tackled this issue in an integrated way where design, sustainability and technology, run across the semester in an interconnected delivery. From the appraisal of the existing building to the final scheme, fostering their peer-to-peer learning, students are teamed up stressing the potential of this fully integrated approach. Their final resolution is a design proposal informed by this wider complexity and able to improve and decode the world we are living and alongside this preserving its cultural values.Peer reviewe