Boston Architectural College

Following the 2016 publication of the Association for College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education, information literacy standards evolved to prioritize conceptual understandings and tangible learning skills that students could apply throughout the research process. With these new goals and focuses in mind, in 2018 the Art Libraries Society of North America began an updated and expanded collection of subject-specific core competencies that incorporate both the ACRL Framework, as well as the ACRL Visual Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education. This article describes the processes used to develop the core competencies for the newest report for historic preservation.

In this expanded second edition of Cognitive Architecture, the authors review new findings in psychology and neuroscience to help architects and planners better understand their clients as the sophisticated mammals they are, arriving in the world with built-in responses to the environment. Discussing key biometric tools to help designers 'see' subliminal human behaviors and suggesting new ways to analyze designs before they are built, this new edition brings readers up-to-date on scientific tools relevant for assessing architecture and the human experience of the built environment. The new edition includes: Over 100 full color photographs and drawings to illustrate key concepts. A new chapter on using biometrics to understand the human experience of place. A conclusion describing how the book's propositions reframe the history of modern architecture. A compelling read for students, professionals, and the general public, Cognitive Architecture takes an inside-out approach to design, arguing that the more we understand human behavior, the better we can design and plan for it.

Recent accounts in Boston highlight tensions among individuals experiencing homelessness, individuals seeking treatment for substance use disorder, service providers, advocates, residents, and business owners in geographies colloquially referred to as “Mass and Cass.” The dynamic frictions of lived experience unfold in public spaces entangled in a field of social, political, economic, and spatial conditions. The Boston Architectural College, mission-driven to “provide excellence in design education emerging from practice and accessible to diverse communities,” sits less than a mile from these geographies. A curriculum in applied learning, where practicing and learning occurs concurrently, distinguishes the BAC’s educational approach from co-op or externship models. Its educational agenda recognizes the vital dialogue between academia and practice and locates teaching and learning directly within these conduits. This research-driven project focuses on the spatial, sociocultural geographies of Mass and Cass and examines the pedagogies of community participation and engagement in design education. The project addresses the nature of interdisciplinary teaching and learning in design settings through examining modes of critical thinking, listening, reflection, and translation as integral to civic spatial practices. Using the tools of spatial designers and conceptual frameworks from other disciplines, students attempt to understand the agents, actors, and forces at play in the conditions of Mass and Cass. Through critical inquiry into the sociocultural contexts that characterize the spatial narratives of Mass and Cass, students (and city agencies as collaborators) seek to identify moments when design or designers have, may have, or could have intervened in these contested territories.

The historical geography of global fishing cultures is the monumental objective of the recent book by Brian Fagan, a well‐known historical archaeologist at the University of California, Santa Barba...

Abstract. Historic sites and the narratives they produce can have a lasting impact on the community through public engagement and education. However, when these sites are neglected and lost over time, opportunities to engage the public with the history of these places is lost with them. The interpretation of heritage that has been lost or forgotten is an emerging trend in humanities studies. This trend, in combination with technological advancements in digital media and representation, presents an innovative opportunity for historic preservation professionals to create new paths for public engagement. This paper discusses applications of photogrammetry, 3D modeling, and digital fabrication in digitally reconstructing interpretive models of the Larz Anderson Estate (now Larz Anderson Park). This site has changed dramatically through its transition from a private estate to a public park and recreation area, with few remnants of the original estate remaining extant. The above stated use of digital strategies aims to create digital and physical models of the estate’s change over time, with the aim of interpreting the site's lost heritage for the public. Combining existing archival research and heritage documentation methods with these digital representation techniques tells the story of a place that no longer exists.

This study examines Zaha Hadid′s design methodology with a chronological assessment of her work and its roots in parametric design. Zaha Hadid and Patrik Schumacher1 pursue Parametricism, and have executed a series of projects that embody it. Her recent work however, does not show building geometry influenced by paintings that can be found in her early work. This study reinterprets the paintings of Malevich, an originator of Suprematism who is believed to inspire her early work from the perspective of Gestalt psychology with parametric observation within the discourse of Parametricism in order to discover consistent design approaches throughout her practice. By investigating her inspiration from Malevich in her early work to her more recent parametric design approach, Zaha Hadid′s consistent design methodology within the evolution of her work is investigated.

  When the music moves you, you dance. The bodily movement that develops in response to music is what is here considered “dance.” Philosophers have long understood music as possessing the power to move us. This paper employs Heinrich Wolfflin’s theory of “sympathetic modeling”—a theory recently validated by neuroscientists’ discovery of mirror neurons in humans—and Antonio Damasio’s neurobiological model of emotion to establish the mediating links between music and the bodily movements made in response. The first “motion” elicited by hearing music is, as Wolfflin suggested, an unconscious “sympathetic modeling,” an internal vocalization of what is heard; this activity involves muscular expansions and contractions. Signals of muscle movement are relayed to the brain by receptor cells imbedded in the muscles. In complex responses, the brain receives patterns of movement from throughout the entire body. When these whole-body kinesthetic sensations are made conscious as perceptions of a unified self, they enter awareness as subjectively felt emotion: the felt response to music. Such patterns of muscular stretching can be abstracted from the sort of external experience that produces emotion in ordinary life experience and reproduced at will. Thus, a dancer, by deliberately reproducing a pattern of muscle stretching, can re-create a chosen specific emotion. This activity constitutes “expressing” emotion in bodily movement. Performed in response to the emotion elicited by music, it is the expressive gesture of dance. One viewing the dance “understands” the emotion expressed by, once again, employing sympathetic modeling to reconstruct the internal pattern of movement associated with that emotion. In popular, social, dancing, dancers model one another’s movements and, together, model the muscle tension patterns of particular rhythms and melodic lines; this situation is easily accounted for by what is now known about mirror neurons. Neuroscience thus explains what happens when the music moves you.   Key words: Emotion, movement, music, dance, aesthetics, neuroscience.

"Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot on and Never Will. By Judith Schalansky. Translated by Christine Lo." Geographical Review, 101(4), pp. 609–610