Renaissance | EPFL Graph Search

vignette|LHomme de Vitruve de Léonard de Vinci est pour beaucoup le symbole de l'évolution de la civilisation occidentale durant la Renaissance artistique. La Renaissance est un mouvement de l'histoire européenne associé à la remise à l'honneur de la littérature, de la philosophie et des arts de l'Antiquité gréco-romaine. Ce mouvement a pour point de départ l'Italie, et se situe chronologiquement à cheval entre le Moyen Âge tardif et l'époque moderne. Une Pré-Renaissance se produit dans plusieurs villes d'Italie dès le (Trecento). La Renaissance s'exprime au dans la plus grande partie de l'Italie, et quelques autres pays européens, sous la forme de ce que l'on appelle la Première Renaissance (Quattrocento). La Renaissance concerne presque toute l'Europe au (Cinquecento). On parle de Renaissance artistique au sens où les œuvres de cette époque s'inspirent davantage de l'art gréco-romain, et moins de l'époque médiévale. Selon l'historien britannique Peter Burke, la Renaissance se

AiiDA: automated interactive infrastructure and database for computational science

Andrea Cepellotti, Boris Kozinsky, Nicola Marzari, Giovanni Pizzi, Riccardo Sabatini

Computational science has seen in the last decades a spectacular rise in the scope, breadth, and depth of its efforts. Notwithstanding this prevalence and impact, it is often still performed using the renaissance model of individual artisans gathered in a workshop, under the guidance of an established practitioner. Great benefits could follow instead from adopting concepts and tools coming from computer science to manage, preserve, and share these computational efforts. We illustrate here our paradigm sustaining such vision, based around the four pillars of Automation, Data, Environment, and Sharing. We then discuss its implementation in the open-source AiiDA platform (http://www.aiida.net), that has been tuned first to the demands of computational materials science. AiiDA's design is based on directed acyclic graphs to track the provenance of data and calculations, and ensure preservation and searchability. Remote computational resources are managed transparently, and automation is coupled with data storage to ensure reproducibility. Last, complex sequences of calculations can be encoded into scientific workflows. We believe that AiiDA's design and its sharing capabilities will encourage the creation of social ecosystems to disseminate codes, data, and scientific workflows. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Elsevier Science Bv2016

Ingenious Architecture: Usage and knowledge in Furetière’s Lexicography

Caroline Dionne

For 17th century lexicographer and writer Antoine Furetière, the terms pertaining to all arts and sciences are the mortar that holds together the edifice of language. In that sense, Furetière’s language is founded in large part upon the words used to describe architecture, as well as all technical and artistic trades. He saw these words as testimonies of our ability to shape our environment and to produce knowledge and science. The acts of building and inhabiting spaces are in that sense tied to the formation of language and the production of meaning. Furetière posits usage—of places and words—as crucial to the experience and transmission of architecture. The effectiveness of this transmission, addressed also in Furetière’s literary production, remains grounded in the concept of ingenuity. Ingenuity involves, as Ramelli’s 1588 “book-wheel” already illustrates, not only craft and artistry, but more importantly cunning and wit. In the late Renaissance context, the formalization of language proposed by Furetière’s lexicon can be seen as a hinge: still grounded in the Humanist tradition, his view of language also announces the Enlightenment’s encyclopedic strive. On the one hand, Furetière defends rhetorical tropes as a crucial means of unveiling truth. On the other, he contributes to giving a more prominent place to the bourgeoisie, thus anticipating 18th century values. Within a historiographical and critical perspective, the study of changing language theories at work in our architectural tradition allows for a better understanding of the epistemological foundations proper to the disciplinary field. In turn, this interdisciplinary angle of research opens up new ways to think about the relationship of users to the built environment that acknowledge the polysemy of language and the semantically creative power of usage.

2014

"Använd dina ögon". Ragnar Östberg's Italian travel. February 1897- March 1898

Chiara Monterumisi

Ragnar Östberg’s "stipendieresian" (Eng. research travel,1896-1899) coincided with a transition from the traditional 18th-century aristocratic Grand Tour to a more contemporary style of bourgeois travel. One significant change is captured by E. Cornell's injunction quoted in the headline. (Eng. "use your eyes" in "Ragnar Östberg. Svensk Arkitekt, 1965). Virtually retracing Clason’s steps, he left Stockholm in the early months of 1896 and included some pioneering and unconventional itineraries which broadened his interest in other architectural ages: Renaissance buildings and their continuity with Latin and Greek works of architecture, mediaeval town-halls and churches. Architecture without architects figures foremost among Östberg’s travelogues and sketchbooks. He succeeded in overlapping often a personal taste to academic studies. As he travelled from South to North, at first glance he found the classical temples and theatres inaccessible with their timeless principles and values (L. Ortelli, 1999). In Latium, Umbria, Tuscany, Emilia Romagna, Venetia and Lombardy he paid particular attention to Medieval city-halls and noble palaces and their relation with urban dynamics. He noted down certain Renaissance features, especially how an entrance façade tended to divide into three, and how the entrance itself was designed. Östberg’s sketches convey his interest in sculpture: he would sketch details or entire mausoleums. Travelling through Latium and Umbria, he made evocative foreshortenings in which he inserted a human figure – the implication being that architecture is a human creation built for people. In Bologna, Ferrara, Faenza, Imola, Cesena he became fascinated with the brickwork, the skillfully crafted cornices and arches, as he previously studied on the L. Runge's handbook. His "resenskissen" (Eng. sketches) contain comparative analytical drawings (jämförelserna) featuring various cities, his attention caught by works of architecture as a whole and by the smallest detail. Coming from a country where nature plays an important role in the design process, Östberg explored not only Italian architecture, but its relation to nature. One notes how he cycled round some regions of Italy in order to have closer contact with architecture and nature. Östberg did not draw entire buildings in the manner of Prix d’ Émulation drawings using orthogonal projection, but carefully selected whatever features particularly struck him. His selection process seems to have been dictated by four reading approaches: typological, technical, material and aesthetic. Following this personal point of view, he would decide how to depict the detail, ground plan, façade and landscape. One also observes how many disparate sketching styles he employed, from outlined ink sketches to watercolours, from crayon to charcoal. He drew on separate sheets of paper, tracing-paper or sketchbooks. On his return to Stockholm he was able to synthesize this whole travel input into a personal idiom that embodied a Swedish character. Östberg’s aim was to refound Swedish architecture against the cosmopolitan background that had arisen in Sweden during the 19th century. He must stand as a key figure at that Swedish architectural turning-point.

2012

"Använd dina ögon". Ragnar Östberg's Italian travel. February 1897- March 1898

Chiara Monterumisi

2012