Paolo Caccia Dominioni’s work for the Italian embassy at Ankara

Based on research carried out at the Caccia Dominioni family archive, this contribution tells the intriguing story of the Italian Embassy at Ankara (1938-1940), a project involving Paolo Vietti Violi (1882-1965), Florestano di Fausto (1890-1965) and Paolo Caccia Dominioni (1896-1992). The main point of our paper is assessing Caccia Dominioni’s role, from a construction manager to the author of a “variant” which actually introduced a completely new layout. He was working at the site from April 1938 to 1940, running day-to-day operations, taking care of the financial management, hiring and looking after workers, maintaining official relations with Italian and Turkish authorities, supervising the supply of materials, and developing Di Fausto’s drawings, which arrived rarely and mostly incomplete. Caccia Dominioni’s “variant” introduced a completely new layout, resulting from a thorough understanding of the landscape potential, fully exploiting the opportunities provided by the diagonally sloping ground. Rather than a single group of monumental buildings, Caccia Dominioni envisaged a variety of structures, each dedicated to a specific function, sized and shaped accordingly. Altogether, the Embassy looked like a village, a “city within a city” so common for foreign legations in the Levant

The project by Paolo Caccia Dominioni for the Italian Embassy in Ankara

The paper focuses on building of the Italian Embassy in Ankara (1938-1940), involving Paolo Vietti Violi, Florestano di Fausto and Paolo Caccia Dominioni. In those years Ankara was itself a huge building site: the new capital of Republican Turkey was then rising at the feet of the ancient citadel. According to the plan by the German architect Hermann Jansen (1928) an “embassy district” was to develop at the southern edge of Gazi Boulevard, just where the Italian Embassy had been planned. Paolo Caccia Dominioni (1896-1992), son of a diplomat from a noble family and an officer in the Italian army, has settled as an engineer in Cairo in 1924, where had directed the building of the Italian Embassy designed by Di Fausto (1928-30). Based on research carried out at the family archive this paper attempts to reconstruct the history of the project and its implementation, clarifying the role of Caccia Dominioni in the architectural configuration of the embassy complex. Caccia Dominioni reinterpreted Di Fausto’s project, developing a new layout: the embassy - a complex of ten buildings - could feature a sort of “village”, where each functional unit could acquire an autonomous architectural character

The space of diplomacy

This thematic section of ABE features contributions on the role and meanings of embassies and other structures designed for diplomacy, in urban fabrics situated east and south of the Mediterranean. Albeit inherently representative objects, embassies are seldom considered as architectural signifiers, or as parts of the cultural landscape of a city. Starting from Addis Abeba and moving on to Ankara, Kabul and Beijing, the four papers of the section show that while the architecture of diplomacy displaces a fragment of the nation beyond its territorial borders, this movement is never limited to the transfer of technologies and architectural styles. The making of diplomatic landmarks can be assessed as a dialogic process of space production, entailing negotiation and domestication in the foreign context, appropriation and reworking of local symbolic and material resources, interaction with the surrounding social and physical landscape

Measurement of a Peak in the Cosmic Microwave Background Power Spectrum from the North American Test Flight of Boomerang

2000ApJ...536L..59

THE BOOMERANG EXPERIMENT

BOOMERanG (Balloon Observations Of Millimetric Extragalactic Radiation and Geophysics) is a "new generation" Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB)Anisotropy experiment. We shortly describe the rationale of the experiment, the main features of the instrument and the technology breakthroughs which made its development possible and present a map of the CMB obtained from the long duration flight of the instrument

Investigating the Early Universe with the Cosmic Microwave Background Anisotropy

Several experiments (including BOOMERanG, MAXIMA, DASI, VSA,CBI) have recently detected very low contrast structures in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the otherwise isotropic radiation coming from the early Universe. These structures have a contrast of the order of 25 ppm and a dominant angular size of one degree. In the current cosmological model, these structuresresult from acoustic oscillations of the primeval plasma within the horizon at recombination (z » 1100). In the framework of the Hot Big Bang theory with the inflationary hypothesis, the statistical properties of the image of the CMB allowus to measure most of the cosmological parameters

Multiple peaks in the angular power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background: Significance and consequences for cosmology

Three peaks and two dips have been detected in the power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background by the BOOMERANG experiment, at and l = (213(-13)(+10)), (541(-32)(+20)), (845(-25)(+12)) and l = (416(-12)(+22)), (750(-750)(+20)), respectively. Using model-independent analyses, we find that all five features are statistically significant, and we measure their location and amplitude. These are consistent with the adiabatic inflationary model. We also calculate the mean and variance of the peak and dip locations and amplitudes in a large seven-dimensional parameter space of such models, which gives good agreement with the model-independent estimates. We forecast where the next few peaks and dips should be found if the basic paradigm is correct. We test the robustness of our results by comparing Bayesian marginalization techniques on this space with likelihood maximization techniques applied to a second seven-dimensional cosmological parameter space, using an independent computational pipeline, and find excellent agreement: Omega02/tot / (+0.05)(-0.06) versus 1.04 +/- 0.05, Omega(b) h(2) =0.022(-0.003)(+0.004) versus 0.019(-0.004)(+0.005), and n(s) = 0.96(-0.08)(+0.09) versus 0.90 +/- 0.08. The determination of the best fit by the maximization procedure effectively ignores nonzero optical depth of reionization tau(C) > 0, and the difference in primordial spectral index between the two methods is thus a consequence of the strong correlation of n(s) with the tau(C)

Evidence for a Flat Universe from the North American Flight of BOOMERANG

BOOMERanG (Balloon Observations Of Millimetric Extragalactic Radiation and Geophysics) is a "new generation" Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB)Anisotropy experiment. We shortly describe the rationale of the experiment, the main features of the instrument and the technology breakthroughs which made its development possible and present a map of the CMB obtained from the long duration flight of the instrument