Domo Geodesico

This paper revisits Nicholas Grimshaw’s Eden Project in Cornwall, UK to interrogate architecture’s relation to neoliberalism. It looks to this project as a means to open a speculative approach for architectural scholarship to engage neoliberal society beyond familiar critiques thereof. Eden, I argue, coordinates its spaces, technologies and objects to project a temporality that seems to lack both past and future in favour of presenting time as continuous, homogeneous, bound to the perpetual management of the present – what I call ‘ecological time’. This project shows that, in the theatre of neoliberal governmentality, the present is the object of design, and ‘design’ becomes indistinguishable from the technological management of the world.

This paper addresses the task of time-separated aerial image registration. The ability to solve this problem accurately and reliably is important for a variety of subsequent image understanding applications. The principal challenge lies in the extent and nature of transient appearance variation that a land area can undergo, such as that caused by the change in illumination conditions, seasonal variations, or the occlusion by non-persistent objects (people, cars). Our work introduces several major novelties: (i) unlike previous work on aerial image registration, we approach the problem using a set-based paradigm; (ii) we show how image space local, pair-wise constraints can be used to enforce a globally good registration using a constraints graph structure; (iii) we show how a simple holistic representation derived from raw aerial images can be used as a basic building block of the constraints graph in a manner which achieves both high registration accuracy and speed; (iv) lastly, we introduce a new and, to the best of our knowledge, the only data corpus suitable for the evaluation of set-based aerial image registration algorithms. Using this data set, we demonstrate: (i) that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art for pair-wise registration already, achieving greater accuracy and reliability, while at the same time reducing the computational cost of the task; and (ii) that the increase in the number of available images in a set consistently reduces the average registration error, with a major difference already for a single additional image.

How To Make a dome trata de mostrar el proceso de trabajo detrás de algunas de las piezas que Antonio R. Montesinos viene desarrollando durante los últimos años bajo el nombre genérico de Inopias, que consiste en una serie de maquetas realizadas de forma casual que representan ciudades imaginarias realizadas con materiales pobres como papel, cintas adhesivas, luces, etc. Estas maquetas pretenden retomar ciertos modelos utópicos para reinterpretarlos, alejándolos de un modelo centralizado y acercándolos a la figura del ciudadano: persona no especializada, pero interesada en mejorar su entorno.

En este caso se toma como ejemplo la cúpula geodésica desarrollado por Buckminster Fuller y como este modelo pasó de protagonizar la arquitectura oficial en los años 60, como la cúpula de Union Tank Car (1958) o el pabellón de EE.UU. en Montreal 68, a convertirse en los 70 en sinónimo de las comunidades back-to-the-land, como el asentamiento hippie Drop City.

El proyecto expositivo de completa con la serie de fotograbados titulada 2.682.235 29, una instalación de fotograbado y gif animado titulada White 3V y Bucky C60 una de las fotografías de la serie Inopias.

The article probes the social background to the controversial ‘Kitchen Debate’ between the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and the US vice-president Richard Nixon, which occured at the American trade exhibition in Moscow during summer 1959.  Political histories narrowly focus on diplomatic point-scoring between the two leaders, leaving largely untouched the purpose of the landmark exhibition, and its expression of America's ‘suburban’ values.  This discussion traces a broad arc exploring:

- The exchange between Khrushchev and Nixon, especially their discussion of housing
- What was shown in the Moscow exhibition (detailing the display kitchen that prompted Khrushchev’s indignation), and the US State Department’s broad aims.
- The expansion of suburbia in post-war America (census figures quoted), and changes in property development including the emergence of commuter suburbs.
- The influential Levittown model for mass home construction & instant suburbs, and the impact of its highly publicised estates on Long Island, Connecticutt and New Jersey.
- Nature and extent of suburban conformism, including pointed criticisms made by urban planning commentators, the sociologist William Whyte, and the Feminist Betty Friedan.
- Mounting distress of women who did not feel fulfilled as homemakers, and their main grievances.
- Segregation, and enforced racial exclusion at the Levittowns.
- Portrayal of suburban values in the key literary works, ‘The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit’ (1955), ‘Revolutionary Road’ (1961), ‘The Stepford Wives’ (1972)
- Efforts to raise the quality of home and suburb design in California, prompted by the magazine ‘Arts and Architecture’
- The pioneering Case Study House project.
- Role of the Los Angeles firm Eames Office in post-war domestic design.
- Contribution of Eames Office to the Moscow exhibition.
9pp.