Historiographie | EPFL Graph Search

vignette|Copie romaine d'un buste grec de Thucydide, historien athénien du L'historiographie désigne généralement l’histoire de la science historique, c'est-à-dire l'étude de la façon d'écrire l'histoire mais peut aussi, selon l'approche choisie, désigner les manières d’écrire l’histoire, « l’art de l’histoire » ou encore l'ensemble des publications traitant du passé et écrites par les historiens. Tout peut être objet d'histoire, par exemple le déroulement des événements, ou les modes de vie de sociétés. L'historien utilise différentes sources : des sources privées comme les témoignages écrits ou oraux ; des sources publiques (presse, archives) et des sources matérielles (objets, monnaie, vestiges archéologiques). Tous les objets, les sources et les méthodes de l'Histoire ont évolué. C'est le rôle de l'historiographie d'illustrer tous ces changements. Définitions Le terme « histoire » est ambigu en français dans la mesure où il peut désigner à la fois le récit et la scien

Conduit, Patio, Waste: Mapping Environmental Relations in Bairro da Malagueira

Bárbara Maçães E Costa

The ongoing ecological crisis is reframing the common binary opposition between architecture and nature and provoking us to ask what kinds of buildings we collectively want to create for the ecosystems that we inhabit. The environment is not a neutral background, a natural scenery, or a container of pre-social resources; and architecture is not a collection of objects floating in a vacuum. Buildings and landscapes constitute each other dialectically. The environmental question in Western architecture had a peak moment during the contextualism debates of the 1950s and 60s, in the UK and Italy. They equated context with ideas such as ecological urbanism and habitat, or preesistenze ambientali and continuita . But by the 1970âs there was a shift from a sort of socio-biological determinism towards a more culturalist approach. Context became synonymous with historical context, and site-specificity was to be achieved less through a dialectical interplay with material reality than through a referential, typo-morphological approach. Gradually, a rift emerged: ecology became a matter of natural fact to be technologically calculated, and context became a matter of cultural identity to be narrated and deconstructed. From this point onwards, and in tandem with the rise of neoliberal commodification and its correlate ideology of postmodernism, Western architecture lost the ability to tackle the environmental question beyond the narrow scope of the individual architectural object. Before this split, the modernist tradition had attempted to address the built environment, and housing projects in particular, as a socio-ecological totality. Backed by large-scale funding initiatives from social-democratic states, human and non-human life could be understood dialectically, with the neighbourhood scale functioning as a mediating unit between the individual and the social. Alvaro Siza's Bairro da Malagueira was one of the last projects of this generation. It emerged from the very particular conditions of the 1974/75 Carnation Revolution and the state-sponsored housing program SAAL, a dual power structure made up of construction technical brigades and neighbourhood committees. During this process, the SAAL-Norte produced a series of projects focused on reinventing the typology of the ilha, and Alvaro Siza wrote a text considering the hypothesis of the proletarian island as basic element of the urban tissue. What was taken from these islands was less their stylistic or typological configuration than the system of environmental relations that they fostered, predicated on a series of threshold spaces and open interiorities. From Bairro da Malagueira, this thesis proposes a method for mapping environmental relations in architecture. It does so by identifying a series of thresholds, namely the conduit, the patio, and the waste, understood as structures that convert space into bounded associations, mediating between inside and outside, foreground and background, architecture and nature. Each threshold acts as a time-space frame with a specific magnitude of approximation, and each internalizes sets of social relations, such as class, gender and race, with corresponding modes of environmental production, namely the hidden backgrounds of territory, domesticity, and wilderness. Bairro da Malagueira hence becomes a template through which this thesis explores a dialectical understanding of architecture as an agent of environmental history.

EPFL2021

Architectural strategies to integrate wellbeing and health effects of daylight into the design of primary schools: a comparative analysis of exemplary case studies

Jean-Denis Bernard Marie Ghislain Thiry

Starting from an architect’s point of view, the aim of this research is to combine the daylight performance of educational spaces with a broader spatial, cultural, and historical approach. Through a rigorous study of school typologies, the geometry of their spaces, and their associated daylighting strategies, this work aims to connect design practitioners with aspects of health and well-being for the pupils, as far as these aspects are related to the quality of daylight. The proposed methodology seeks to analyse a range of outstanding case studies from the masters of modern architecture, embodying architectural strategies specifically designed to ensure adequate illuminance levels in learning areas throughout the day. A selection of some singular primary schools will be established through a historical analysis which emphasizes the impact of hygienists’ principles – legacies of Modernism – on the evolution of plans and volumes of different school typologies in Switzerland and Europe, from 1945 to the present days. An analysis of the selected case studies will be carried out using an innovative representation method of average illuminance received at eye-level and combined with a HLR model – currently under development at LIPID [1, 2] – which assesses the health potential of daylight using a dynamic approach. Through a validation of the simulated results using different in situ measurements and analyses following a specific protocol, we aim to accurately identify architectural criteria and propose strategies for achieving “circadian design”, more specifically those having a positive impact on the health and wellbeing of occupants. We will also carry out a comparative critical assessment of the buildings selected as case studies in the initial phase of this proposed research. The goal is to positively influence decisions related to the design of naturally lit spaces, specifically in schools and according to their impact on health, wellbeing and student productivity. The methodology will be a complementary blend of observations, in situ measurements and qualitative and quantitative analyses, both in a simulated environment and in actual working conditions of the selected case studies.

2015

Last Heir or First Engineer? An Intellectual Portrait of Vincenzio Viviani through his Working Papers

Simon François Dumas Primbault

Self-proclaimed Galileo’s ultimo discepolo, Vincenzio Viviani (1622-1703) strove all his life to become a renowned mathematician. Extolling the supposed purity of Euclid’s geometry, he sought to recover the lost knowledge of the Ancients, and fashioned himself a persona as the last heir of the Euclidean tradition. However, Viviani was not appointed primo matematico before 1666 and spent most of his life working as an engineer for the Tuscan Court, preventing him from devising his geometrical magnum opus as envisioned. Delving into Viviani’s personal archive conserved in Florence with his master’s papers, I will try and paint a different portrait from the one historiography retained.