Reconceptualizing zoos through Mille-Oeille : A posthuman techno-architecture to sustain a human/non-human/culture continuum

Technological mediation expands and multiplies our bodily capacities, since it influences the way we relate to our environment. This directly affects our notion of architecture, its scope and practice. From the body-machine to super-bodies and enhanced senses, to the virtual, or the de-codification of data into visual and physical experience, we nowadays require new ethical arguments and considered awareness. This architectural proposal presents a sensitive use of technology that supports and encourages environmental and social sustainability. Supported by scientific literature, it anticipates a novel use of augmented reality and proposes future architectural scenarios which include new materializations and forms of spatial and sensorial experiences.acceptedVersionPeer reviewe

Architecture, Community and IndividualityA Research Line at the Tampere University School of Architecture

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Introduction: Perspectives on Loneliness

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Loneliness in Place

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Collage LandscapeThe Integration of Recreational Villas of the Aragon Road in the 21st-Century City

This paper investigates the landscape of the north-eastern outskirts of Madrid, in the area where it links to the historical axis of the Camino de Aragón, today calle de Alcalá, from its historical configuration to its present reality. To this end, we analyse the transformation of the landscape identity of a route that condenses a distinct architectural type of Madrid, the country state, which, located between vast cereal fields, was progressively absorbed by a growing city. The purpose of this investigation is twofold: on the one hand, it aims to highlight the underresearched Quinta de los Molinos as a crucial part of the urban sequence. In addition, the study attempts to elucidate how a traditional typology has adapted to a new use, its insertion into a transformed urban fabric and its role in the future of the city.acceptedVersionPeer reviewe

Funkkis Mökkis : Paper Huts at the 1932 Enso-Gutzeit Competition in Finland

Finland lived, in the 1920s and 1930s, through an ephemeral time of peace and enthusiastic ideas in which it began to forge itself as a modern nation. Its borders still unstable, the country used its landscape as a social unifier and an element of national identity. Finland’s incipient welfare state, institutionalised holidays and the democratised consumer goods encouraged a new leisure lifestyle in natural settings. This article studies the recreational housing programme that responded to that demand. The new typology, later called mökki in Finland, was developed during the rise of Nordic functionalism (funkkis in Finnish) – the revision of the romantic villa and the traditional rural housing model, together with the emergence of prefabrication techniques. Among the architectural competitions and drawing albums published on the subject, this article studies the competition run by the Enso-Gutzeit paper company in 1932. Other studies have analysed this competition from constructive, stylistic or historical perspectives. This paper provides a different view by explaining that the competition was a testing ground where one of modern Finnish architecture’s distinctive features was forged: tuning into a constructed idea of nature. This fact is revealed through a graphical analysis of the competition’s proposals, as well as through the incipient personal traits in the work of the promising, young Finnish architects who participated in the competition.publishedVersionPeer reviewe

Et in Arcadia Ego : The Ruin Metaphor in Alvar Aalto’s Work as a Driver for Cultural Sustainability

Since the mid-1930s, as Alvar Aalto's work acquires a more personal character, it starts to represent a recurrent thought with increasing intensity: the constant negotiation between the equally prevalent natural environment and human civilisation, and the transitory condition of man's habitation. An image by Andrei Tarkovsky (Fig. 1) helps to illustrate the idea this paper explores. The frame of Nostalghia shows a world in a continuous state of becoming, expressed by natural elements colonising the space of a robust Gothic ruin, where an ephemeral hut enables human life to flourish again: the temporary man's habitation takes place in between the two spatiotemporal orders established by the Arcadia and the Civitas. On the one hand, Aalto's work represents these two necessary mythical human habitats and, on the other, it builds the actual space for man's contingent living. This investigation interprets that this two-fold strategy is an enduring Aaltian characteristic and discusses that the ruin metaphor drives it. The mechanism triggers an ethical-esthetical proposition that recalls the well-studied Aalto's humanism. However, this study portrays Aalto as an early precursor of cultural sustainability values, which is a less explored perspective.publishedVersionPeer reviewe

Alone in the Welfare StateFour Finnish Scenes

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Discussion: Mediated Loneliness

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Older Adults’ Loneliness, Social Isolation, and Physical Information and Communication Technology in the Era of Ambient Assisted Living: A Systematic Literature Review

Background: Loneliness and social isolation can have severe effects on human health and well-being. Partial solutions to combat these circumstances in demographically aging societies have been sought from the field of information and communication technology (ICT). Objective: This systematic literature review investigates the research conducted on older adults’ loneliness and social isolation, and physical ICTs, namely robots, wearables, and smart homes, in the era of ambient assisted living (AAL). The aim is to gain insight into how technology can help overcome loneliness and social isolation other than by fostering social communication with people and what the main open-ended challenges according to the reviewed studies are. Methods: The data were collected from 7 bibliographic databases. A preliminary search resulted in 1271 entries that were screened based on predefined inclusion criteria. The characteristics of the selected studies were coded, and the results were summarized to answer our research questions. Results: The final data set consisted of 23 empirical studies. We found out that ICT solutions such as smart homes can help detect and predict loneliness and social isolation, and technologies such as robotic pets and some other social robots can help alleviate loneliness to some extent. The main open-ended challenges across studies relate to the need for more robust study samples and study designs. Further, the reviewed studies report technology- and topic-specific open-ended challenges. Conclusions: Technology can help assess older adults’ loneliness and social isolation, and alleviate loneliness without direct interaction with other people. The results are highly relevant in the COVID-19 era, where various social restrictions have been introduced all over the world, and the amount of research literature in this regard has increased recently.Peer reviewe