Seismic vulnerability of Modern Architecture building's: Le Corbusier style: a case study

In Portugal, at the end of the World War II, a new generation of architects emerged, influenced by the Modern Movement Architecture, born in Central-Europe in the early twenties but now influenced also by the Modern Brazilian Architecture. They worked with new typologies, such as multifamily high-rise buildings, and built them in the most important cities of the country, during the fifties, reflecting the principles of the Modernity and with a strong formal conception inspired in the International Style’s codes. Concrete, as material and technology, allowed that those “Unity Centre” buildings become modern objects, expressing the five-point formula that Le Corbusier enounced in 1927 and draw at the “Unité d’Habitation de Marseille”, namely: the building lifted in pilotis, the free design of the plan, the free design of the façade, the unbroken horizontal window and the roof terrace. In Lisbon, late forties urban plans transformed and expanded the city, creating modulated buildings repeated in great extensions – that was a progressist idea of standardization. The Infante Santo complex is a successful adaptation to the Lisbon reality of the Modern Urbanism and Architecture. In the fifties, it was built a large number of Modern housing buildings in Lisbon, with structural characteristics that, in certain conditions, can induce weaknesses in structural behaviour, especially under earthquake loading. For example, the concept of buildings lifted in pilotis can strongly facilitate the occurrence of soft-storey mechanisms, which turns these structures very vulnerable to earthquake actions. The development and calibration of refined numerical tools, as well as, assessment and design codes makes feasible the structural safety assessment of existing buildings. To investigate the vulnerability of this type of construction, one building representative of the Modern Architecture, at the Infante Santo Avenue, was studied. This building was studied with the non-linear dynamic analysis program PORANL, which allows the safety evaluation according to the recently proposed standards

La fantasía debe ser devuelta a la arquitectura

El arquitecto luso-africano Pancho Guedes (1925), fue uno de los protagonistas principales de la revalorización de la arquitectura moderna en Mozambique (colonia portuguesa hasta su independencia en 1975). A través de sus escritos y su producción arquitectónica conectó diferentes disciplinas y culturas, estableciendo afinidades con diversos artistas como el pintor Malangatana Ngwenya (1936-2009). Su “fantástica y mágica arquitectura” es el resultado de la recepción de estímulos provenientes de una enorme red mundial de artistas y pensadores que recopiló de fuentes como: el propio Movimento Moderno, desde la Sudáfrica de Martiessen hasta el Brasil de Lucio Costa y Óscar Niemeyer; la contestación crítica a los CIAM por parte del Team 10, del cual fue fundador en el congreso de Royaumont junto con los Smithson, Aldo Van Eyck, Candilis y Giancarlo di Carlo; y, finalmente, un gran número de artistas africanos a los que impulsó.Pancho Guedes (1925), the luso-african architect (Witwatersrand University, 1953) active in Mozambique, the former Portuguese colony till the independence in 1975, made in his writings and architectural production a major contribution to the reassessment of architectural modernity, connecting different disciplines and cultures and carrying out affinities with various creators namely with the painter Malangatana Ngwenya ( 1936-2009). His fantastic and magic architecture comes from the stimulus of a large worldwide network of artists and thinkers that he himself put up from different sources such as: the Modern Movement architects, namely the South African contributors as Martiessen or the Brazilian inspiring influence referred to Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer; Frank Lloyd Wright inspiring legacy or the CIAM’s critic contestation movement under the scope of Team 10 which he joined as founder member at CIAM’s Royaumont meeting together with the Smithson’s, Aldo Van Eyck, Candilis and Giancarlo di Carlo; or finally the new African artists which he promoted. Besides being one of Mozambique’s major architects, Pancho had the sagacity to detect talent, to promote creativity, having the ability to establish a network of creative, functioning himself as a sort of mediator between art and architecture. In Lourenço Marques ( currently Maputo) Pancho created a profound complicity with Malangatana, the surrealist painter, whom inventive spirit allowed no limits. Supernatural summoned, Malangatana stimulated Pancho in his will to “ ear the voices speaking from the other side of dream”. In The 50s, in an Africa of Apartheid between Mozambique, Rhodesia and South Africa, Pancho knew that there was the need to found an authentic and raw art, the art for authentic artists”5. Therefore he sought for an Architecture full of significance, carrying a personal dimension based on a research focused on all formal dimensions and on the possibility for architectonical elements to contain and express emotion: “ I claim for architects to have the same rights and freedom painters and poets have for so long”6. Pancho wanted to appropriate the primitive’s universal motifs, mixing them with his own sophisticated architectonical culture, in order to achieve in his buildings the ambience of Chirico’s painting. Pancho knew that Architecture is not perceived as an intellectual experience but as a sensation, an emotion7. Therefore he was interested in the quest for such quality “ long ago lost among architects but able to reach a spontaneous architecture capable of magic intensity”. In the 50s, this search resulted from the desire to create an alternative modernity, different from the mechanical international style growing also in Africa9. Unlike the majority of architects working in Africa forced to draw in dialogue to climate constrains, Pancho assumes the creator’s right to innocence stimulated by the sensuality and drama of the surrounding African culture. The creation and growth of Dori10 and Pancho African art collection, which has been recently exhibited in Lisbon, bears witness to his constant interest in the dialogue with other forms of expression. The objects he collected, as he himself has stated, helped him free himself “ from the dominant Eurocentric point of view of the white man who lives in the land of others”. The will to discover an alternative modernity was the answer to an inner appeal, but also to an Africa dawning to contemporaneity, to a new world which was in a state of ferment13. Pancho witness and acts in a time when Architecture is open to popular culture, when architecture without architects and architecture of fantasy are accepted14. But it is also the time for complexity and multiple solutions opened to the Modern Movement continuity or crises15, the ones Giedion identified as a result from reason and emotion related equation. Pancho gathered the conditions to follow an alternative, original and idiosyncratic path of his own. Besides his huge talent, wide culture, experimentalist and genuine curiosity, he had the term of living in Africa at the time: conditions he managed with cleverness. On one hand being apart from the Eurocentric European culture spreader, living in Africa in an European imperialistic peculiar colony17; on the other hand, living the period of colonial emancipation spreading throughout Africa, where, despite the imperialistic presence “ anything seemed possible”. As Pomar states Pancho “was one of the most inventive of the architects that were building in Africa, as well as one of the three or four recognised white mediators who sought out and promoted contemporary African art in various places on the continent. Lourenço Marques was, at the time ( in the early 1960s and before the surge of arrests that followed the start of the war for independence), a dynamic city and one of Africa’s cultural capitals, due, by and large, to Pancho’s international contacts in areas with quicker communicability with the outside world, such as architecture and the visual arts”

Restauro ou conservação no reforço sísmico da unidade tipo A da Avenida Infante Santo

As Unidade Tipo A do Conjunto da Avenida Infante Santo são edifícios de habitação colectiva projectados entre 1949 e 1954 e constituem um exemplo da arquitectura do Movimento Moderno em Portugal. Também neste caso se revela uma estreita relação entre a Arquitectura e a Engenharia, isto é, entre a Forma e a Estrutura, que foi determinante na definição da sua implantação, volumetria, organização em planta, alçados, etc. O bloco suspenso do solo e assente em pilotis – a imagem da conciliação entre a Arte e a Técnica, pode representar um ponto vulnerável da estrutura às acções sísmicas. Alguns estudos de análise dinâmica não linear [1] avaliam a segurança sísmica deste edifício, de acordo com os padrões de segurança actuais, e propõem soluções de reforço estrutural tendo em vista a melhoria do comportamento sísmico. É no piso térreo do edifício que deve ocorrer, preferencialmente, uma intervenção de reforço estrutural pois é aqui pode surgir um mecanismo de comportamento tipo soft-storey em caso de sismo. Tendo sido concebido como um “terreno ajardinado e útil”[2], visualmente aberto e livre para a passagem pedonal, uma intervenção dessa natureza levanta uma questão de fundo: deverá ser assinalada, ou não, a presença do reforço estrutural? Trata-se de uma reflexão teórica de sentido prático, cujas hipóteses de resolução podem ir desde uma integração na construção existente – com um sentido mimético e destruindo alguns elementos originais, até uma sobreposição de um novo projecto ao inicial – uma operação visível mas reversível e não destrutiva. Assim, no âmbito deste paper, propõem-se equacionar possíveis soluções de reforço estrutural, para evitar o mecanismo tipo soft-storey no piso 0, que representem os extremos da problemática do universo da intervenção no património – da integração até à sobreposição, ou seja , abordando o tema do Restauro vs. Conservação. Pretende-se com este trabalho testar uma solução de reforço com diferentes configurações, avaliando tanto ao nível formal como técnico a sua eficácia numa perspectiva projectual conjunta, cruzando os domínios da arquitectura e da engenharia dos seus autores

Rescuing the "Machine à Habiter": The Palladian "Villa" in the second life of Lacaton & Vassal’s Transformed "Grands-Ensembles"

Approaching some of the questions raised in the “Material Oriented Ontology” call such as the Aesthetics and Ethics of Sustainability, this paper augues that the action of Recycling Social Housing stands for a model of Social Regeneration. In 1995 the awarded movie ‘La Haine’ revealed to the world the daily turmoil in which lived the inhabitants of the grands-ensembles (French post-war social housing): unemployment, criminality and violence were some of their constant companions. Faced by the unmistakable reality, the state promptly held as responsibles the urbanistic and architectonic models, setting into motion a large demolition-reconstruction plan, that is still up to date. Since 2004, the architects Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal have been active opposers to this unfounded policy. Not only through writing, but also through their built work, they’ve shown that the grands-ensembles are passible of a second life. Taking as their prime ‘raw material’ the already built context, they’ve successively rescued the Modern Movement’s machine à habiter by bringing the transition spaces of the Palladian villa into each one of the inhabited apartments

Bioreactor technologies to support liver function in vitro

Liver is a central nexus integrating metabolic and immunologic homeostasis in the human body, and the direct or indirect target of most molecular therapeutics. A wide spectrum of therapeutic and technological needs drives efforts to capture liver physiology and pathophysiology in vitro, ranging from prediction of metabolism and toxicity of small molecule drugs, to understanding off-target effects of proteins, nucleic acid therapies, and targeted therapeutics, to serving as disease models for drug development. Here we provide perspective on the evolving landscape of bioreactor-based models to meet old and new challenges in drug discovery and development, emphasizing design challenges in maintaining long-term liver-specific function and how emerging technologies in biomaterials and microdevices are providing new experimental models.National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (R01 EB010246)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (P50-GM068762-08)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (R01-ES015241)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (P30-ES002109)5UH2TR000496-02National Science Foundation (U.S.). Emergent Behaviors of Integrated Cellular Systems (CBET-0939511)United States. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Microphysiological Systems Program (W911NF-12-2-0039

La fantasía debe ser devuelta a la arquitectura

El arquitecto luso-africano Pancho Guedes (1925), fue uno de los protagonistas principales de la revalorización de la arquitectura moderna en Mozambique (colonia portuguesa hasta su independencia en 1975). A través de sus escritos y su producción arquitectónica conectó diferentes disciplinas y culturas, estableciendo afinidades con diversos artistas como el pintor Malangatana Ngwenya (1936-2009). Su “fantástica y mágica arquitectura” es el resultado de la recepción de estímulos provenientes de una enorme red mundial de artistas y pensadores que recopiló de fuentes como: el propio Movimento Moderno, desde la Sudáfrica de Martiessen hasta el Brasil de Lucio Costa y Óscar Niemeyer; la contestación crítica a los CIAM por parte del Team 10, del cual fue fundador en el congreso de Royaumont junto con los Smithson, Aldo Van Eyck, Candilis y Giancarlo di Carlo; y, finalmente, un gran número de artistas africanos a los que impulsó.Pancho Guedes (1925), the luso-african architect (Witwatersrand University, 1953) active in Mozambique, the former Portuguese colony till the independence in 1975, made in his writings and architectural production a major contribution to the reassessment of architectural modernity, connecting different disciplines and cultures and carrying out affinities with various creators namely with the painter Malangatana Ngwenya ( 1936-2009). His fantastic and magic architecture comes from the stimulus of a large worldwide network of artists and thinkers that he himself put up from different sources such as: the Modern Movement architects, namely the South African contributors as Martiessen or the Brazilian inspiring influence referred to Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer; Frank Lloyd Wright inspiring legacy or the CIAM’s critic contestation movement under the scope of Team 10 which he joined as founder member at CIAM’s Royaumont meeting together with the Smithson’s, Aldo Van Eyck, Candilis and Giancarlo di Carlo; or finally the new African artists which he promoted. Besides being one of Mozambique’s major architects, Pancho had the sagacity to detect talent, to promote creativity, having the ability to establish a network of creative, functioning himself as a sort of mediator between art and architecture. In Lourenço Marques ( currently Maputo) Pancho created a profound complicity with Malangatana, the surrealist painter, whom inventive spirit allowed no limits. Supernatural summoned, Malangatana stimulated Pancho in his will to “ ear the voices speaking from the other side of dream”. In The 50s, in an Africa of Apartheid between Mozambique, Rhodesia and South Africa, Pancho knew that there was the need to found an authentic and raw art, the art for authentic artists”5. Therefore he sought for an Architecture full of significance, carrying a personal dimension based on a research focused on all formal dimensions and on the possibility for architectonical elements to contain and express emotion: “ I claim for architects to have the same rights and freedom painters and poets have for so long”6. Pancho wanted to appropriate the primitive’s universal motifs, mixing them with his own sophisticated architectonical culture, in order to achieve in his buildings the ambience of Chirico’s painting. Pancho knew that Architecture is not perceived as an intellectual experience but as a sensation, an emotion7. Therefore he was interested in the quest for such quality “ long ago lost among architects but able to reach a spontaneous architecture capable of magic intensity”. In the 50s, this search resulted from the desire to create an alternative modernity, different from the mechanical international style growing also in Africa9. Unlike the majority of architects working in Africa forced to draw in dialogue to climate constrains, Pancho assumes the creator’s right to innocence stimulated by the sensuality and drama of the surrounding African culture. The creation and growth of Dori10 and Pancho African art collection, which has been recently exhibited in Lisbon, bears witness to his constant interest in the dialogue with other forms of expression. The objects he collected, as he himself has stated, helped him free himself “ from the dominant Eurocentric point of view of the white man who lives in the land of others”. The will to discover an alternative modernity was the answer to an inner appeal, but also to an Africa dawning to contemporaneity, to a new world which was in a state of ferment13. Pancho witness and acts in a time when Architecture is open to popular culture, when architecture without architects and architecture of fantasy are accepted14. But it is also the time for complexity and multiple solutions opened to the Modern Movement continuity or crises15, the ones Giedion identified as a result from reason and emotion related equation. Pancho gathered the conditions to follow an alternative, original and idiosyncratic path of his own. Besides his huge talent, wide culture, experimentalist and genuine curiosity, he had the term of living in Africa at the time: conditions he managed with cleverness. On one hand being apart from the Eurocentric European culture spreader, living in Africa in an European imperialistic peculiar colony17; on the other hand, living the period of colonial emancipation spreading throughout Africa, where, despite the imperialistic presence “ anything seemed possible”. As Pomar states Pancho “was one of the most inventive of the architects that were building in Africa, as well as one of the three or four recognised white mediators who sought out and promoted contemporary African art in various places on the continent. Lourenço Marques was, at the time ( in the early 1960s and before the surge of arrests that followed the start of the war for independence), a dynamic city and one of Africa’s cultural capitals, due, by and large, to Pancho’s international contacts in areas with quicker communicability with the outside world, such as architecture and the visual arts”

Rescuing the "Machine à Habiter": The Palladian "Villa" in the second life of Lacaton & Vassal’s Transformed "Grands-Ensembles"

Approaching some of the questions raised in the “Material Oriented Ontology” call such as the Aesthetics and Ethics of Sustainability, this paper augues that the action of Recycling Social Housing stands for a model of Social Regeneration. In 1995 the awarded movie ‘La Haine’ revealed to the world the daily turmoil in which lived the inhabitants of the grands-ensembles (French post-war social housing): unemployment, criminality and violence were some of their constant companions. Faced by the unmistakable reality, the state promptly held as responsibles the urbanistic and architectonic models, setting into motion a large demolition-reconstruction plan, that is still up to date. Since 2004, the architects Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal have been active opposers to this unfounded policy. Not only through writing, but also through their built work, they’ve shown that the grands-ensembles are passible of a second life. Taking as their prime ‘raw material’ the already built context, they’ve successively rescued the Modern Movement’s machine à habiter by bringing the transition spaces of the Palladian villa into each one of the inhabited apartments

Don’t Shoot the Messenger SVP: A Brief Essay on the Theory of Typology

The evolution of architecture has been recurrently dependent, either consciously, or subconsciously, on inherited knowledge. However, not within a scheme of literal replicas, but yes through a symbiosis between copy and invention on abstract core characteristics. The present essay intends to shine some light on Type and Typology’s role on the awareness of such process, by developing a brief journey through their juvenile and tumultuous existence as a theoretical problem. Besides that, this essay also explores two collateral reasonings. Firstly, that Typology, although being only a tool, has been taken as the ‘scapegoat’ of the architectonic ideologies that took profit of it. And secondly, that Types, in architecture, should not be solely associated with the structure of forms, but to the larger realm of Concepts.Una y otra vez, la evolución de la arquitectura ha dependido, consciente o inconscientemente, del conocimiento heredado. No obstante, no se ha basado en un esquema fijo de réplicas literales, sino en una simbiosis entre la copia y la invención de sus características definitorias abstractas. En este ensayo se intentan esclarecer algunos puntos sobre el papel del tipo y la tipología en dicho proceso mediante un breve viaje a través de su joven y tumultuosa existencia en cuanto planteamiento teórico. Por otra parte, también se exploran dos recorridos colaterales. El primero, que la tipología, a pesar de ser solo una herramienta, se ha tomado como “chivo expiatorio” de las ideologías arquitectónicas que se han apoyado en ella. Y, el segundo, que en arquitectura los tipos no deberían asociarse únicamente con la estructura de las formas, sino con el amplio reino de los conceptos

Don’t Shoot the Messenger SVP: A Brief Essay on the Theory of Typology

The evolution of architecture has been recurrently dependent, either consciously, or subconsciously, on inherited knowledge. However, not within a scheme of literal replicas, but yes through a symbiosis between copy and invention on abstract core characteristics. The present essay intends to shine some light on Type and Typology’s role on the awareness of such process, by developing a brief journey through their juvenile and tumultuous existence as a theoretical problem. Besides that, this essay also explores two collateral reasonings. Firstly, that Typology, although being only a tool, has been taken as the ‘scapegoat’ of the architectonic ideologies that took profit of it. And secondly, that Types, in architecture, should not be solely associated with the structure of forms, but to the larger realm of Concepts.Una y otra vez, la evolución de la arquitectura ha dependido, consciente o inconscientemente, del conocimiento heredado. No obstante, no se ha basado en un esquema fijo de réplicas literales, sino en una simbiosis entre la copia y la invención de sus características definitorias abstractas. En este ensayo se intentan esclarecer algunos puntos sobre el papel del tipo y la tipología en dicho proceso mediante un breve viaje a través de su joven y tumultuosa existencia en cuanto planteamiento teórico. Por otra parte, también se exploran dos recorridos colaterales. El primero, que la tipología, a pesar de ser solo una herramienta, se ha tomado como “chivo expiatorio” de las ideologías arquitectónicas que se han apoyado en ella. Y, el segundo, que en arquitectura los tipos no deberían asociarse únicamente con la estructura de las formas, sino con el amplio reino de los conceptos

Architectural Regeneration Through Public Education in Portugal

The architectural regeneration of historic school buildings in Portugal clearly illustrates how different architects may use the core principles of architectural regeneration to successfully adapt schools to meet twenty‐first century educational requirements. The liceus are purpose‐designed secondary schools, built from the late nineteenth century up until the democratic revolution in 1974. The significance of early liceus is reflected in their monumental mass and façade design. As educational practices change, so are these buildings required to adapt. As in the case of new architectural design, there was no single way to do this and architects favoured different approaches. This case study shows that, despite this variety, the awareness of the existing building values and conservation principles in each case generated a greater desire to act ethically and consider cultural and social sustainability