Academic literature on the topic 'Glasgow Letters on Architecture and Space'

The announcement that American architect Steven Holl had won the competition to design a new building for the Glasgow School of Art opposite Charles Rennie Mackintosh's original (built 1897–1909), and the revelation of his plans to the public, provoked plenty of criticism about the possible relationship between the two buildings. Professor William Curtis first wrote on the topic in the Architects' Journal almost a year from the announcement, and his opinions on the relationship were forthright: ‘Rather than dialogue’, he argued, ‘there is a dumb lack of articulation in construction and material.’ A response came in the following issue of the AJ from David Porter, then Professor at the Mackintosh School of Architecture. He disagreed with Curtis, claiming that the new building will have ‘an extraordinary spatial richness’ and that ‘the original sketch Curtis saw in Glasgow last December has progressed very rapidly’, for it was but an early stage in ‘a design strategy driven forward with a mixture of poetics and ruthless pragmatics: qualities that are singularly appropriate in this context, and developed with artistry and skill’.Curtis subsequently wrote a further open letter to ‘the Governors, the Director, the Faculty, Students, Staff, Alumnae and Alumni’ of Glasgow School of Art, which was published in facsimile in the Architects' Journal on 3 March 2011:What a disappointment then to contemplate Steven Holl's proposed addition. It is horrendously out of scale, it dominates Mackintosh, it does not create a decent urban space, it fails to deal with the context near and far, it is clumsy in form and proportion, it lacks finesse in detail, has no relationship to the human figure, and is a stillborn diagram dressed up in Holl clichés such as ‘iceberg’ glass.

An urban space is a vital stage for social interaction and city life. Measuring the city life is always related to social, economic and cultural conditions of an urban context. Social gathering increases the quality of urban space and improves economic vitality. This paper aims to explore how successful urban spaces could impact the growth and performance of an urban context, not only as a physical urban reality, but also as a generator of social life. Utilising St. Enoch Square as a case study, a multi-layered methodological approach constituted in a series of tools was implemented, including behavioural mapping, visual preference survey, walking tour assessment, contemplating settings, and observing physical traces and by-product of use in order to interpret various forms of experiences that take place. Findings reveal various attributes of St. Enoch Square while highlighting different qualities that promote and support the overall vibrancy of the city life. Conclusions are drawn to emphasise that the physical and spatial characteristics of an urban space are critical factors for maintaining social interaction while creating essential opportunities that support the human experience in the public realm.

This paper discusses three games that are characterized by what I call “epistolary architecture,” showing how the games use their spatial distribution of communicative acts to subvert the common videogame trope of the unseen woman. In his essay “Game Design as Narrative Architecture,” Henry Jenkins outlines how some games distribute narrative progression across space rather than time, so that arrival at a particular location will trigger an event in the game’s story. Gone Home (2013) and Dear Esther (2012) use similar techniques, but to markedly different effect, by distributing subjective accounts of the past (external to the timeframe of the gameplay) around the game space by way of letters, recordings, and other messages. Bientôt L’été (2013) inverts this scenario. In it, a player walks along a seashore, receiving linguistic fragments brought in by the waves, then later rearticulates these into fractured conversations with another player in a remote location. Each of these games, in its own way, problematizes the trope of the unseen woman, which I argue has been a structuring principle in videogames for decades. In general, the unseen woman has been a destination, the endpoint of a quest and thus fundamentally outside the world of the gameplay. The epistolary architecture of Gone Home, Dear Esther, and Beintôt L’été is fundamental to the games’ ability to subvert this principle. Conversely, each game uses the figure of the unseen woman to complicate the player’s relationship to its story and its setting.

The article is devoted to the most famous architectural projects of residential, public and religious buildings of Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928). It is shown that he adhered to the traditions of neo-romanticism, preferred the traditions of Celtic symbolical art, the Scottish folk architecture and the so-called baronial style which make his buildings similar to medieval castles. It is noted that in design solutions and especially organization of internal space of buildings, the architect used the most advanced construction technologies, structures and materials. The article considers six of the most famous architectural projects by Macintosh made in neo-romanticism traditions. Among them, the Lighthouse Tower for the Glasgow Herald (1893–1894), the Glasgow School of Art (1897–1909), Queen's Cross Church in Glasgow (1898–1899), Scotland Street School (1903–1906), the project of the House for an Art lover in Darmstadt (1901), the Нill House in Helensburgh (1902–1904.). The main reasons for the creative crisis of the master on the eve of the I World War are revealed.

Urban open spaces have substantially contributed to the development of cities in terms of image, function, form, and social engagement, and thus have been a central concern of urban researchers for several decades. This paper contributes to the contemporary urban discourse as it relates to the city and its users. It demonstrates a mechanism for characterisation and systematic assessment of key urban open spaces in Glasgow City Centre. The mechanism is implemented in three layers of investigation that involve the development of space profiles through preliminary observations, an examination of functional, social, and perceptual attributes through a walking tour assessment procedure with checklists and a scoring system, and an understanding of how users perceive and comprehend these spaces through a photographic attitude survey. The paper places emphasis on key findings by conveying similarities and differences between the spaces in terms of assessment outcomes and users? perception, while revealing their essential attributes and qualities. Conclusions are offered as reflections on the findings while suggesting possibilities for future research through additional complementary layers of investigation.

After over a decade of reports, designs, and public outreach, the United Nations Plaza in San Francisco was dedicated in 1976. Using historical documents such as government reports, design guidelines, letters, meeting minutes, and newspaper articles from archives, I argue that while the construction of the UN Plaza has failed to completely transform the social and economic life of the area, it succeeds in creating a genuinely public space. The history of the UN Plaza can serve both as a cautionary tale for those interested in changing property values purely through changing design, and as a standard of success in making a space used by a true cross-section of urban society.

In synaesthetes, specific sensory stimuli (e.g. black letters) elicit additional experiences (e.g. colour). Synaesthesia is highly prevalent among individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but the mechanisms of this co-occurrence are not clear. We hypothesized autism and synaesthesia share atypical sensory sensitivity and perception. We assessed autistic traits, sensory sensitivity and visual perception in two synaesthete populations. In Study 1, synaesthetes ( N = 79, of different types) scored higher than non-synaesthetes ( N = 76) on the Attention-to-detail and Social skills subscales of the autism spectrum quotient indexing autistic traits, and on the Glasgow Sensory Questionnaire indexing sensory hypersensitivity and hyposensitivity which frequently occur in autism. Synaesthetes performed two local/global visual tasks because individuals with autism typically show a bias towards detail processing. In synaesthetes, elevated motion coherence thresholds (MCTs) suggested reduced global motion perception, and higher accuracy on an embedded figures task suggested enhanced local perception. In Study 2, sequence-space synaesthetes ( N = 18) completed the same tasks. Questionnaire and embedded figures results qualitatively resembled Study 1 results, but no significant group differences with non-synaesthetes ( N = 20) were obtained. Unexpectedly, sequence-space synaesthetes had reduced MCTs. Altogether, our studies suggest atypical sensory sensitivity and a bias towards detail processing are shared features of synaesthesia and ASD. This article is part of the discussion meeting issue ‘Bridging senses: novel insights from synaesthesia’.

The life of the 5th Duke of Portland is a story about the mental obsession to find a haven of absolute stillness, a worry-free place, and somewhere to feel safe (Pl L1/2/8/3/13: Four letters to Fanny Kemble, 1842–1845. In these letters, the 5th Duke refers to the subsoil as “shelter” and the “only safe place”, found in Manuscripts and Special Collections, Archives Nottingham University). Perhaps it is there, in the space that unfolded away from the visible world, that he found the strength to overcome his difficulties and to understand the scale of space and its intangibility; he was aware of the relationships and interaction between the human body, inhabited space, and the mind, and this information helped him in his hiding process. After his appointment as the heir to his immense estate, a series of investments on an unprecedented scale began almost immediately, which have been considered, both technically and conceptually, to be pioneers of domestic and landscape architecture during the nineteenth century. Welbeck Estate represents the construction of a double city, one that is visible and another that is concealed, but it is also a reflection of how our body and our mind interfere, dialogue, and create an architectural space that is framed in a cognitive process. Space and time were unfolded and folded into themselves in order to build this fascinating scenery, which represents the duke’s life.

The article was written within the framework of a research project “Protestant Church Architecture of the 16th -18th centuries in Europe”, conducted by the Department of the Renaissance and Reformation Art History at the University of Wrocław. It is conceived as a preliminary summary of the project’s outcomes. The project’s principal research objective is to develop a synthesis of Protestant church architecture in the countries which accepted, even temporarily, the Reformation: Austria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Island, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Switzerland, Sweden and The Netherlands. Particular emphasis is placed on the development of spatial and functional solutions (specifically ground plans: longitudinal, transverse rectangular, oval, circular, Latin- and Greek-cross, ground plans similar to the letters “L” and “T”) and the placement of liturgical furnishing elements within the church space (altars, pulpits, baptismal fonts and organs).

On September 3, 1841, George Eliot wrote in a letter to her friend Maria Lewis:I have been revelling in Nichol's Architecture of the heavens and Phenomena of the Solar system, and have been in imagination winging my flight from system to system, from universe to universe, trying to conceive myself in such a position and with such a visual faculty as would enable me to enjoy what Young enumerates among the novelties of the ‘stranger’ man when he burst the shell, toBehold an infinite of floating worldsDivide the crystal waves of ether pure,In endless voyage without port‘Hospitable infinity!’ Nichol beautifully says. (Letters106–07)1Here, Eliot describes an imaginary journey through the systems of the heavens and the unbounded space of the universe. The books she refers to are John Pringle Nichol'sViews of the Architecture of the Heavens. In a Series of Letters to a Lady(1837), andThe Phenomena and Order of the Solar System(1838). InViews of the Architecture of the Heavens, Nichol takes his readers on a tour of the universe with the aim of helping them to “henceforth look at the Heavens” with “something of the emotion which their greatness communicates to the accomplished Astronomer” (vii). Eliot's quote is from Edward Young's poemThe Complaint, or Night Thoughts(1742), where the narrator describes a cosmic voyage he takes in “contemplation's rapid car” stopping at every planet asking for the Deity. From “Saturn's ring,” he takes a more fearless “bolder flight” through the stars with a “bold” cometAmid those sov'reign glories of the skies,Of independent, native lustre, proud;The souls of systems! and the lords of life,Through their wide empires! (276)In Young's scenes of majestic cosmic perspective, the reader, with the narrator, discovers the vastness of space and the existence of other worlds: “On nature's Alps I stand, / And see a thousand firmaments beneath! / A thousand systems! as a thousand grains!” (277). The theme of the cosmic journey enables the reader to explore the universe, often looking back at the earth as they travel through space in their imagination and frequently in a dream. Overcoming the limits of knowledge, the immeasurable distances of the universe and its other worlds become more knowable.

Glasgow fut une ville pionnière en Grande-Bretagne dans la mise en place au début des années quatre-vingt d'une politique de régénération urbaine, sociale et économique basée sur les arts et la culture, exemplifiant le tournant vers une gestion entrepreneuriale de la ville. Les arts et la culture sont ainsi devenus le levier principal de sa reconversion déterminée vers une économie de services et de tourisme. Ce travail de recherche se propose de démontrer que cette politique, qui s'installe de manière irréversible pendant la période de gouvernement conservateur de M. Thatcher, a non seulement engendré des transformations économiques et physiques de grande ampleur mais qu'elle a également très clairement œuvré dans le sens d'une transformation tout aussi radicale de l'identité de la ville. Il apparaît que c'est un processus voulu par les élites travaillistes de la ville et revendiqué, assumé, organisé de façon consciente et méthodique qui puise ses fondements idéologiques dans une vision néolibérale du développement économique et du rôle de la culture. Nous tentons également de démontrer que, en dépit de la mise en place de partenariats public-privés sous la forme de sociétés locales de développement, ce processus n'a guère réussi à inverser une dynamique de relégation en périphérie des populations les plus défavorisées déjà fortement ancrée depuis les décennies précédentes. Enfin, nous montrons que ce processus de régénération urbaine a provoqué diverses formes d'opposition et de résistance qui renvoient indiscutablement au passé de luttes industrielles et de politique radicale de la ville, éléments majeurs de son identité.

This chapter explores the significant role of the press in the cultivation of class-based networks of female readers. The essay takes for its focus the Scottish poet Ellen Johnston’s (c.1830–74) ‘conversations in verse,’ conducted with her working-class correspondents within the letters page of a Glasgow newspaper, the Penny Post (153). Writing under the pseudonym ‘The Factory Girl,’ Johnston was in fact a woman writing in her late twenties and thirties, which once again indicates the malleability of ‘the girl’ as a site of identification for female authors and readers alike. The poetic exchanges between ‘The Factory Girl’ and her working-class female correspondents demonstrate the radical potential of the letters page. As a space co-opted by female readers and writers for the development of ‘their own system of writing and mentoring,’ the letters page is here shown to have destabilised the ‘material and social limitations of class by enabling conversations between marginalised authors that would not have otherwise occurred’ (158-59). These intimate poetic exchanges in the public space of the newspaper are read as a political intervention through which women sought to ‘achieve upward social and cultural–if not economic–mobility’ (154).

Abstract Planning buildings combined two of Washington’s great enthusiasms: his surveyor’s passion for imposing order on space and his lifelong love of the theater, coupled with his sense of life itself as a series of theatrical performances. A well-conceived building was one that both satisfied the mind and set the stage for purposeful, dramatic action. But as important as architecture was to Washington, he never had much to say about it in general terms. Happily, however, his silence was not absolute, for in a series of letters written toward the end of his life, he did hazard several singularly revealing remarks on the subject.

Chapter 3 explores letters and images that situate selves and events in time, developing the themes of literacy and material agency from Chapter 1, and identity-formation from Chapter 2. Jewish and Catholic approaches to time and events past are then discussed, followed by a psychoanalysis and panorama of present-day period-awareness and embodied engagements such as re-enactments. Topics discussed include the following: the impact of conflict on the will to historicize in writing: the cases of the Aspö rune-stone in Sweden, the American Civil War aftermath, and the Greek War of Independence; writing as creation and as self-therapy; activated memory rather than historicizing records, and the weight of names, words, and the Word divine; visual reifications of time in Italian art: the cases of Angelico’s and Caravaggio’s annunciations; space and the absences signalled by art and architecture: the case of Mary’s house divided; present-day receptions, conceptions, and needs revealed: the cases of Gettysburg, Azincourt, and others; and periodization and the self in search of orientation in time: the cases of Pythagoras and Paulinus.

Maddalena Iovene¹, Graciela Fernandéz De Córdova2, Ombretta Romice¹, Sergio Porta¹ ¹Urban Design Studies Unit (UDSU). Department of Architecture. University of Strathclyde. 75 Montrose Street, Glasgow, G11XJ, UK. 2Centro de Investigación de la Arquitectura y la Ciudad (CIAC), Departamento de Arquitectura, PUCP. Av. Universitaria 1801, 32 San Miguel, Lima, Peru. E-mail: maddalena.iovene@strath.ac.uk, gdcfernandez@pucp.edu.pe, ombretta.r.romice@strath.ac.uk, sergioporta@strath.ac.uk Keywords (3-5): Informal Settlement, Peru, Lima, Model of Change, Urban Morphology Conference topics and scale: Reading and Regenerating the Informal City Cities are the largest complex adaptive system in human culture and have always been changing in time according to largely unplanned patterns of development. Though urban morphology has typically addressed studies of form in cities, with emphasis on historical cases, diachronic comparative studies are still relatively rare, especially those based on quantitative analysis. As a result, we are still far from laying the ground for a comprehensive understanding of the urban form’s model of change. However, developing such understanding is extremely relevant as the cross-scale interlink between the spatial and social-economic dynamics in cities are increasingly recognized to play a major role in the complex functioning of urban systems and quality of life. We study the urban form of San Pedro de Ate, an informal settlement in Lima, Peru, along its entire cycle of development over the last seventy years. Our study, conducted through a four-months on-site field research, is based on the idea that informal settlements would change according to patterns similar to those of pre-modern cities, though at a much faster pace of growth, yet giving the opportunity to observe the evolution of an urban organism in a limited time span. To do so we first digitalize aerial photographs of five different time periods (from 1944 to 2013), to then conduct a typo-morphological analysis at five scales: a) unit, b) building, c) plot, d) block, and e) settlement (comprehensive of public spaces and street network). We identify and classify patterns of change in the settlement’s urban structure using recognised literature on pre-modern cities, thus supporting our original hypothesis. We then suggest a unitary model of analysis that we name Temporal Settlement Matrix (TSM). Reference List Caniggia, G., & Maffei, G. L. (2008). Lettura dell’edilizia di base (Vol. 215). Alinea Editrice. Conzen, M. R. G. (1958). The growth and character of Whitby. A Survey of Whitby and the Surrounding Area, 49–89. Hernández, F., Kellett, P. W., & Allen, L. K. (2010). Rethinking the informal city: critical perspectives from Latin America (Vol. 11). Berghahn Books. Kropf, K. (2009). Aspects of urban form. Urban Morphology, 13(2), 105–120. Muratori, S. (1960). Studi per una operante storia urbana di Venezia. Palladio, 1959, 1–113. 22. Porta, S., Romice, O., Maxwell, J. A., Russell, P., & Baird, D. (2014). Alterations in scale: patterns of change in main street networks across time and space. Urban Studies, 51(16), 3383–3400. Watson, V. (2009). “The planned city sweeps the poor away…”: Urban planning and 21st century urbanisation. Progress in Planning, 72(3), 151–193. Whitehand, J. W. R. (2001). Changing suburban landscapes at the microscale. Tijdschrift Voor Economische En Sociale Geografie, 92(2), 164–184.

Committee Mandate Concern for descriptions of the ocean environment, especially with respect to wave, current and wind, in deep and shallow waters, and ice, as a basis for the determination of environmental loads for structural design. Attention shall be given to statistical description of these and other related phenomena relevant to the safe design and operation of ships and offshore structures. The committee is encouraged to cooperate with the corresponding ITTC committee. Introduction and Metocean Forcing Environment Committee of ISSC, by its Mandate, deals with the Metocean environments. “In offshore and coastal engineering, metocean refers to the syllabic abbreviation of meteorology and (physical) oceanography” (Wikipedia). Metocean research covers dynamics of the oceaninterface environments: the air-sea surface, atmospheric boundary layer, upper ocean, the sea bed within the wavelength proximity (~100 m for wind-generated waves), and coastal areas. Metocean disciplines broadly comprise maritime engineering, marine meteorology, wave forecast, operational oceanography, oceanic climate, sediment transport, coastal morphology, and specialised technological disciplines for in-situ and remote sensing observations. Metocean applications incorporate offshore, coastal and Arctic engineering; navigation, shipping and naval architecture; marine search and rescue; environmental instrumentation, among others. Often, both for design and operational purposes the ISSC community is interested in Metocean Extremes which include extreme conditions (such as extreme tropical or extra-tropical cyclones), extreme events (such as rogue waves) and extreme environments (such as Marginal Ice Zone, MIZ). Certain Metocean conditions appear extreme, depending on applications (e.g. swell seas are benign for recreational sailing, but can be dangerous for dredging operations and are extreme for vessels transporting liquids). This report builds on the work of the previous Technical Committees in charge of Environment. The goal continues to be to review scientific and technological developments in the Metocean field from the last report, and to provide context of the developments, in order to give a balanced, accurate and up to date picture about the natural environment as well as data and models which can be used to accurately simulate it. The content of this report also reflects the interests and subject areas of the Committee membership, in accordance with the ISSC I.1 mandate. The Committee has continued cooperation with the Environment Committee of ITTC and with ISSC Committee V.6 Ocean Space Utilization. The Committee consisted of members from academia, research organizations, research laboratories and classification societies. The Committee formally met as a group in person two times before the COVID onset: in Glasgow, Scotland on the 9th of June 2019, before the 38th International Conference on Ocean, Offshore and Arctic Engineering (OMAE 2019) and in Melbourne, Australia on the 10th of November 2019, following the 15th International Workshop on Wave Hindcasting and Forecasting. It’s also held a number of regular teleconferences: two before the face-to-face meetings and seven after, once international travel was stopped by the pandemic. Additionally, Committee members met on an ad-hoc basis during their international travels in 2019. With the wide range of subject areas that this report must cover, and the limited space, this Committee report does not purport to be exhaustive; however, the Committee believes that the reader will be presented a fair and balanced view of the subjects covered, and we recommend this report for the consideration of the ISSC 2022 Congress. The report consists of 11 Sections: two of which include the Introduction and Conclusions, and nine are the main content. The opening Section 1 outlines and defines Metocean Forcings which can affect the offshore design and operations and are the subject of this Review Chapter. The review of publications starts from progress in Analytical Theory in 2018-2021, Section 2. It covers the basic framework of experimental, numerical, remote sensing and all the other methods and approaches in Metocean science and engineering. Numerical Modelling (Section 3) is one of the most rapidly developing research and application environments over the past two decades, it allows us to extend the theory when analytical solutions are not possible, and to complement (or even replace) some of the experimental approaches of the past. Computer simulations will always need verification, validation and calibration of their outcomes through experiments and observations, particularly in engineering applications and offshore Metocean science. Therefore, Section 4 (Measurements and Observations) is the largest in the Chapter. Section 5 is effectively a modern extension of the measurement section – it is dedicated to Remote Sensing. Over the last four decades, the remote sensing has both become a powerful instrumental tool for field observations and remains an active area of engineering research in its own right as we see through growing developments of new capabilities in this space. While the first five chapters are broadly dedicated to direct outcomes of Metocean research, the rest of the chapters focus more on analysis and indirect outputs. With mounting amounts of collected data: numerical, experimental, remote sensing, - Section 6 discusses advances in Data Analysis, and Section 7 in Statistics, its Theory and Analysis. Section 8, on Wave- Coupled Phenomena, reflects one of the most rapidly developing areas in Metocean science, particularly important in our era of numerical modelling. It accommodates various topics of interactions between small-scale phenomena (waves) and large-scale processes in the air-sea environments: wave breaking, wave-current and wave-ice interactions, wave influences in the Atmospheric Boundary Layer (ABL) and in the upper ocean, and complex wave-coupled modelling in the full combined air-sea-ice-wave system. Most essential for offshore engineering, is modelling and understanding of Extreme Events and Conditions, which are the subject of Section 9. Last, but not the least, Section 10 discusses Wind-Wave Climate which is connected to the global climate change. This connection is threaded throughout other sections of the chapter and is of utmost significance in offshore Metocean design and planning.