Coupling Benefits: Strategies for Vacant Land Reuse along Cleveland\u27s Opportunity Corridor

This paper discusses large scale planning efforts pertaining to vacant land reuse, economic development, and public participation along the Opportunity Corridor project in Cleveland, Ohio. The Corridor is a $331 million roadway project that will span 3.3 miles through some of Cleveland’s most blighted neighborhoods. Issues of distributional justice including underperforming public education, poor public health indicators, high rates of vacancy, and aging infrastructure contribute to neighborhood blight throughout the area. Stormwater management, access to multi-modal transportation, brownfield mitigation, and economic development are also prevalent issues throughout the project area. Advocacy work by the Kent State University Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative (CUDC) seeks to integrate planning efforts between multiple jurisdictions, civic actors, and community desires surrounding the project. This paper describes the community planning process in Cleveland surrounding the Corridor project, emphasizing the CUDC’s role in advocacy for an integrated planning approach to meet community needs

Critical Proximity: Refiguring Research Cultures in The Design Curriculum

The architecture curriculum is usually divided into studio courses and lecture or seminar courses where design and research, respectively, are separately pursued. Although the curriculum is designed to unite the approaches of design, the humanities, and the sciences that together comprise the architectural endeavor, in practice these epistemological forms of inquiry are divided into separate courses and rarely allowed to crossover into one another. Two structures common to architecture programs avoid these divisions: the community design center and the research studio. The first unifies design with community engagement and exposure to the real-world issues of marginalized communities, while the second incorporates humanities-based research into the studio. In this paper, we will present the work of a three course-sequence recently taught at Miami University as a “Humanities Lab” that pursued methodological promiscuity by mixing community-based research and design. In so doing, we jettisoned the expertise traditionally claimed by architecture to create a more inclusive practice–inclusive of community members and their expertise and centering the experiences and histories of marginalized people instead of buildings. We do so by engaging in what Eyal Weizman has called “critical proximity,” in which the distanciated position of the researcher is jettisoned in favor of working alongside and for marginalized communities. Over the course of three semesters, we explored the impact of critical proximity in three different endeavors–a seminar, research studio, and exhibition design–and discovered inclusive pedagogical strategies: thickness, research-in-community, and decentered production. Together, these strategies allowed us to refigure the role of the architect as a researcher aligned with community interests

Multiple flexor tendon xanthomas and contractures in the hands of a child with familial hypercholesterolemia

A 6-year-old girl with familial hypercholesterolemia had flexion contractures of the fingers due to tendon and joint xanthomas. This unique problem was corrected by the combination of local hand surgery and a portacaval shunt. © 1986, American Society for Surgery of the Hand. All rights reserved

The Cosmic X-Ray Background NanoSat (CXBN): Measuring the Cosmic X-Ray Background using the CubeSat Form Factor

The CXBN mission goal is to significantly increase the Cosmic X-Ray Background measurement precision in the 30-50 keV range. The mission addresses a fundamental science question central to our understanding of the structure, origin, and evolution of the universe by potentially lending insight into the high energy background radiation. The CXBN spacecraft will map the Extragalactic Diffuse X-Ray Background (DXRB) with a new Cadmium Zinc Telluride (CZT) detector. The DXRB measurement will pose a powerful tool for understanding the early universe and a window to the far-away universe. The science objectives were condensed into a novel spacecraft concept characterized by a sun-pointing, spinning spacecraft in LEO with moderate inclination. Launch trajectories allow four nominal passes per day over the primary Earth station at Morehead State University (Morehead, KY). The science mission requirements fortunately allow adoption of the economical CubeSat form factor. The major subsystems comprising the satellite are new —having been developed by the team. Innovative systems include power distribution, command and data handling, and attitude determination and control systems. The launch is scheduled for August 2012 from Vandenberg AFB through the NASA ELaNa program. CXBN was developed at low cost and on a highly constrained 12 month timeline

Defining Unexpected Strategies to Inhabit Transitional Conflict Spaces

If war has always challenged architecture, threatening its permanence and layering its memory, it composes, at the same time, an important part of the design tradition (B. Cache, 2007). The paper investigates how architecture has tried to overcome this implied ambiguity through a reinterpretation of its own language, in the attempt to inhabit the transitory spaces and extreme conditions produced by the conflict. By comparing two extremely different case studies, the Nevada National Security Site and the villages established by the Serbian filmmaker Emir Kusturica, the paper underlines how war destructive and fascinating power has been reinterpreted, in the first case in order to attract tourists (A.Santarossa, 2012) or exploited, in the second example, as the pretext to invent an ideal future (N.Srnicek, A.Williams, 2018), within a progressive process of mixing entertainment space and conflict dystopian settings