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Lawrence Hrubes

Prison Architecture and the Question of Ethics - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...nd-the-question-of-ethics.html

TOK ethics arts architecture death

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 17 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Today, prison design is a civic cause for some architects who specialize in criminal justice and care about humane design. There is a lot of research documenting how the right kinds of design reduce violence inside prisons and even recidivism. Architects can help ensure that prisons don’t succumb to our worst instincts — that they are not about spending the least amount of money to create the most horrendous places possible, in the name of vengeance — but promote rehabilitation and peace.Designing execution chambers is something else. They require their own deathly architecture. If architects refuse to design them, that doesn’t mean that they won’t be built, any more than the refusal by doctors and pharmaceutical companies to participate in executions has stopped executions from happening. But Ms. Dreiling said it herself: “Many, if not most, architects enter this profession because it is a calling. They believe they can make the world a better place, they believe they can enhance the lives of people on a daily basis, where they live, work and play.”
markfrankel18

UBC student writes 52,438 word architecture dissertation with no punctuation - not everyone loved it - 1 views

www.vancouversun.com/...story.html

TOK language indigenous knowledge systems

shared by markfrankel18 on 11 May 15 - No Cached
  • A 61-year-old architect from the Nisga’a First Nation, Stewart explains that he “wanted to make a point” about aboriginal culture, colonialism, and “the blind acceptance of English language conventions in academia.”
Lawrence Hrubes

How Green Could New York Be? - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...how-green-could-new-york-be

imagination environment architecture

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 20 May 15 - No Cached
  • Michael Sorkin, a globe-trotting sixty-six-year-old architect, urban planner, and critic, has published fourteen books and has designed buildings and public spaces from the Rockaways to Abu Dhabi. Currently, one of his biggest projects is a large urban complex in Xi’an, China. Meanwhile, in New York, where Sorkin lives, he runs Terreform, a non-profit devoted to architecture that is both urban and green. Two years ago, Terreform began a project called New York City (Steady) State, which investigates the possibility of “urban self-reliance”; its goal is to figure out what an optimally self-sufficient N.Y.C. might look like. By concretely imagining an ideal city, the thinking goes, you make a better one more likely. How would such a city function? And what would it be like to live on its leafy and fruitful streets?
markfrankel18

Why We Keep Playing the Lottery - Issue 4: The Unlikely - Nautilus - 1 views

nautil.us/...hy-we-keep-playing-the-lottery

ToK Lottery math psychology emotion

shared by markfrankel18 on 23 Nov 13 - Cached
  • Blind to the mathematical odds, we fall to the marketing gods.
  • “People just aren’t able to grasp 1 in 175 million,” Williams says. “It’s just beyond our experience—we have nothing in our evolutionary history that prepares us or primes us, no intellectual architecture, to try and grasp the remoteness of those odds.” And so we continue to play. And play.
  • It may seem easy to understand why we keep playing. As one trademarked lottery slogan goes, “Hey, you never know.” Somebody has to win. But to really understand why hundreds of millions of people play a game they will never win, a game with serious social consequences, you have to suspend logic and consider it through an alternate set of rules—rules written by neuroscientists, social psychologists, and economists. When the odds are so small that they are difficult to conceptualize, the risk we perceive has less to do with outcomes than with how much fear or hope we are feeling when we make a decision, how we “frame” and organize sets of logical facts, and even how we perceive ourselves in relation to others. Once you know the alternate set of rules, plumb the literature, and speak to the experts, the popularity of the lottery suddenly makes a lot more sense. It’s a game where reason and logic are rendered obsolete, and hope and dreams are on sale.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Selling the lottery dream is possible because, paradoxically, the probabilities of winning are so infinitesimal they become irrelevant. Our brains didn’t evolve to calculate complex odds. In our evolutionary past, the ability to distinguish between a region with a 1 percent or 10 percent chance of being attacked by a predator wouldn’t have offered much of an advantage. An intuitive and coarse method of categorization, such as “doesn’t happen,” “happen sometimes,” “happens most of time,” “always happens,” would have sufficed, explains Jane L. Risen, an associate professor of Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago, Booth School of Business, who studies decision-making. Despite our advances in reason and mathematics, she says, we still often rely on crude calculations to make decisions, especially quick decisions like buying a lottery ticket.
  • In the conceptual vacuum created by incomprehensible odds, people are likely to experience magical thinking or superstition, play a hunch, or simply throw reason out the window all together, says George Loewenstein, a professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon. “Most of the weird stuff that you see with decision-making and risk happens with small probabilities,” he says.
  • But even fantasy will drop its hold on us if we always lose—a point Hargrove grasped from the start. Research has shown that positive reinforcement is a key in virtually all of the successful lotteries, notes the University of Lethbridge’s Williams. Lotteries that allow players to choose combinations of four or five numbers from a total of 60 numbers are popular, he says, because many players experience “the near miss,” which creates the illusion that they came close to winning the multi-million dollar jackpot. Most players don’t realize, however, that “near-miss” is an illusion. The odds of winning get worse with each successive match.
markfrankel18

Tuning Out Digital Buzz, for an Intimate Communion With Art - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...timate-communion-with-art.html

TOK arts

shared by markfrankel18 on 19 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • A recent scientific study published in the journal Acta Psychologica suggests that people enjoy art more and remember it longer when they see it “live” in museums, as opposed to online.Continue reading the main story We don’t need science to tell us why this might be. Museums, like churches and libraries, are designed to enhance specific activities — praying, reading, looking — through the manipulation of architecture, lighting, object placement and ritualized behavior. Very different designs — from the processional layout of the Metropolitan Museum to the labyrinthine tangle of the new Fondation Louis Vuitton art center in Paris — can be equally effective. And some don’t work.
  • Cellphone snapshots, the souvenir postcards of the present, are fine, and that they can be widely, even endlessly sent and shared is great. The digital presence of entire museum collections online is a tremendous thing, a gift of pleasure and knowledge to museumgoers, scholars and artists alike.But a snapshot is frozen in time. An archive of reproductions isn’t alive. And the further we distance ourselves from art itself, from being in front of it with all filters gone, life is what we lose — art’s and ours.
markfrankel18

The Suburbs Made Us Fat - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...375888

TOK science architecture cities health

shared by markfrankel18 on 13 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • People in dense cities are thinner and have healthier hearts than people in sprawling subdivisions. New research says the secret is in the patterns of the streets.
markfrankel18

Art All Over - The New Yorker - 2 views

www.newyorker.com/...art-all-over

TOK art

shared by markfrankel18 on 08 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • At what point does a widely shared yen for aesthetic engagement alter the character of that engagement? We’ve reached that point on many days at the Museum of Modern Art, where the crowds experience mainly crowdedness, and the Picassos and Pollocks take on the glazed miens of traumatized warriors. MOMA’s own planned expansion bodes an architecture keyed to crowd management, which explains the logic behind even the cruel demolition of the intimate former American Museum of Folk Art.
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