Chapter Dialoghi tra disegno e testo nelle opere di Rem Koolhaas

The 43rd UID conference, held in Genova, takes up the theme of ‘Dialogues’ as practice and debate on many fundamental topics in our social life, especially in these complex and not yet resolved times. The city of Genova offers the opportunity to ponder on the value of comparison and on the possibilities for the community, naturally focused on the aspects that concern us, as professors, researchers, disseminators of knowledge, or on all the possibile meanings of the discipline of representation and its dialogue with ‘others’, which we have broadly catalogued in three macro areas: History, Semiotics, Science / Technology. Therefore, “dialogue” as a profitable exchange based on a common language, without which it is impossible to comprehend and understand one another; and the graphic sign that connotes the conference is the precise transcription of this concept: the title ‘translated’ into signs, derived from the visual alphabet designed for the visual identity of the UID since 2017. There are many topics which refer to three macro sessions: - Witnessing (signs and history) - Communicating (signs and semiotics) - Experimenting (signs and sciences) Thanks to the different points of view, an exceptional resource of our disciplinary area, we want to try to outline the prevailing theoretical-operational synergies, the collaborative lines of an instrumental nature, the recent updates of the repertoires of images that attest and nourish the relations among representation, history, semiotics, sciences

Among territorial project and architectural design

AbstractThe contribution develops a reflection on the urban space project in contexts characterized by historical-cultural relevance by exploring interdisciplinary approaches through the intersection of research and didactic actions in the field, which make the project emerge from specific ways of interacting with local societies. These relationships find a sense starting from the identification of some traditionally configured places in the city that present obsolete functions or abandoned conditions, but characterized by a strong urban value and can become hubs of potential and learning laboratories. In this sense, knowledge can be a tool capable of favouring forms of social relations and initiating the construction of new citizenships.The research identifies in the context of the historic city of Sassari some nuclei of urbanity, spaces and significant areas of the city that more than others recall an educational dimension. The relationship between the formative character of the historic city and the emergence of new forms of sociality favours the possibility of identifying areas outside standardization that contain the genetic code of urban conviviality. In this perspective, public space defined as the place of production of sociality, designed to bring out a different urban organization.The identification of these latent traces of a system full of meaning and full of potential for urban life can open fertile perspectives to think of new spaces of relationship for active participation in the project of the city. Marking the distance from an object-oriented position in favor of an ontology of urban and territorial relations, the project continuously aimed at revealing new forms of spatial distribution that relate different nuclei, interpreting their specific role in the overall system of generative structures environmental aspects of the city

Il Progetto dei territori urbani: la dimensione ambientale nel progetto della città

The research develops from the assumption that “the urban” can be identified and extended to encompass an entire territory. Considering the complexity which challenges the consolidated idea of city, what type of approach can we use to read, know and design the city and the contemporary territory? What meanings does the territory take on in the urban life? What new forms of cities are emerging? Urban contexts and their representation have changed considerably during the last decades. The contemporary city manifests itself in many forms and on various scales. Numerous large urban concentrations characterized by continuous transformation exist alongside small and medium-sized cities generated by processes of urban development marketing which have been applied in a similar manner in the majority of urban contexts. The latter are “marginal” territories, where low density is a common feature. These small and medium centres have gradually lost their urban qualities, and currently many of them are struggling for survival. The contemporary city that shows itself in unusual spatial configurations compared to the consolidated city, is due to the changes in settlement and the social, economic, cultural and landscape changes that have taken place and continue to take place on the territory. The need to seek new definitions, connected with a widening of the concept of inhabiting, to which corresponds an expansion in the use of territory, projects spatial images which require new interpretative categories at the border between different analytical and project-oriented disciplines. The aim of this research is to trace the relationship between natural resources and the potential evolution of future urban landscapes in urban territory. This means referring to “urban” as “social” and to examine closely the spatial dynamics of the contemporary city. The approach is based on the recognition of “settlement ecologies” as territorial contexts through which social and spatial organization gives meaning to space settlement. The research aims at destructuring the axial rigidity of the dichotomous system by picking out territory and urban, beginning from the identification of semantic relationships, in trying to rethink the discipline of urban planning through the irruption of the “landscape” as structural element of the city, checking contributions in terms of methodology

Cohesive fracture in composite systems: experimental setup and first results

Composite systems are widely used in many engineering applications for new structures and strengthening of existing ones. Within the structural rehabilitation of civil constructions, the plating technique of beams with Fiber Reinforced Polymer (FRP) represents a quick and optimal intervention with respect to traditional ones. The failure of these composite systems usually occurs due to the FRP debonding, which corresponds to a mode II fracture of concrete specimens. In this paper, a new experimental setup for investigating the mode II fracture behavior of FRP-concrete composite structures is presented. The test equipment consists of both conventional equipment and a non-contact optical technique, Digital Image Correlation (DIC), and the test system was realized at the Design Machine Laboratory of the University of Salerno. A preliminary test was performed and the corresponding results are shown and discussed

Do we value mobility?

Is there a trade-off between people’s preference for income equality and income mobility? Testing for the existence of such a trade-off is difficult because mobility is a multifaceted concept. We analyse results from a questionnaire experiment based on simple precise concepts of income inequality and income mobility. We find no direct trade-off in preference between mobility and equality, but an indirect trade-off, applying when more income mobility can only be obtained at the expense of some income inequality. Mobility preference—but not equality preference—appears to be driven by personal experience of mobility

Incidentally detection of non-palpable testicular nodules at scrotal ultrasound: What is new?

The increased use of ultrasound in patients with urological and andrological symptoms has given an higher detection of intra-testicular nodules. Most of these lesions are hypoechoic and their interpretation is often equivocal. Recently, new ultrasound techniques have been developed alongside of B-mode and color-Doppler ultrasound. Although not completely standardized, contrast-enhanced ultrasound (CEUS) and tissue elastography (TE), added to traditional ultrasonography, can provide useful information about the correct interpretation of incidentally detected non-palpable testicular nodules. The purpose of this review article is to illustrate these new techniques in the patient management

Building Envelope Prefabricated with 3D Printing Technology

The Fourth Industrial Revolution represents the beginning of a profound change for the building sector. In the last decade, the perspective of shapes, materials, and construction techniques is evolving fast due to the additive manufacturing technology. On the other hand, even if the technology is growing fast and several 3D printed buildings are being developed worldwide, the potential of concrete 3D printing in building prefabrication remains unexplored. Consequently, the application of new digital fabrication technologies in the construction industry requires a redesign of the construction process and its components. This paper proposes a novel conception, design, and prototyping of a precast building envelope to be prefabricated with extrusion-based 3D concrete printing (3DCP). The new design and conception aim to fully exploit the potential of 3D printing for prefabricated components, especially in terms of dry assembly, speed of implementation, reusability, recyclability, modularity, versatility, adaptability, and sustainability. Beyond the novel conceptual design of precast elements, the research investigated the 3D printable cementitious material based on a magnesium potassium phosphate cement (MKPC), which was devised and tested to ensure good performances of the proposed component. Finally, a prototype has been realised in scale with additive manufacturing technology in order to verify the printability and to optimize the extruder path. This study leads us to believe that the combined use of prefabricated systems, construction automation, and innovative materials can decisively improve the construction industry's sustainability in the future

Accelerating Transformer Inference for Translation via Parallel Decoding

Autoregressive decoding limits the efficiency of transformers for Machine Translation (MT). The community proposed specific network architectures and learning-based methods to solve this issue, which are expensive and require changes to the MT model, trading inference speed at the cost of the translation quality. In this paper, we propose to address the problem from the point of view of decoding algorithms, as a less explored but rather compelling direction. We propose to reframe the standard greedy autoregressive decoding of MT with a parallel formulation leveraging Jacobi and Gauss-Seidel fixed-point iteration methods for fast inference. This formulation allows to speed up existing models without training or modifications while retaining translation quality. We present three parallel decoding algorithms and test them on different languages and models showing how the parallelization introduces a speedup up to 38% w.r.t. the standard autoregressive decoding and nearly 2x when scaling the method on parallel resources. Finally, we introduce a decoding dependency graph visualizer (DDGviz) that let us see how the model has learned the conditional dependence between tokens and inspect the decoding procedure.Comment: Accepted at ACL 2023 main conferenc