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MACE Conference
Img Conference “Online Repositories in Architecture” - International Conference
Venice, Teatro Piccolo at Le Corderie dell’Arsenale. 20 -21 Sept. 2008
Within the context of MACE, a two-day international conference entitled “Online Repositories in Architecture” was organised by EAAE (European Association for Architectural Education) and Collaboratorio in the frame of “La Biennale di Architettura 2008”. It offered the opportunity to make MACE known to a wider public and, mostly, to summon educators, researchers, students, archivists, IT practitioners, and managers of major European architectural portals in order to share knowledge and experience, to convey approaches and research, to promote conceptual and technological tools, to search for common or integrated visions. Conference participants also learned how to tag, classify, find, retrieve, use and make available digital architectural contents, scattered over different websites, databases, and digital archives on the Internet.

Keynote speakers

De Kerckhove

Derrick De Kerckhove, (Canada), Director of the McLuhan Program
Derrick de Kerckhove is the director of the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology and Professor in the Department of French at the University of Toronto. He was an associate of the Centre for Culture and Technology from 1972 to 1980 and worked with Marshall McLuhan for over ten years as translator, assistant and co-author. He wrote “La civilisation vidéo-chrétienne” (1990), “Brainframes: Technology, Mind and Business” (1990), “The skin of Culture” (1995), “Connected Intelligence” (1997), “The Architecture of Intelligence” (2001). A consultant in media, cultural interests, and related policies, he has participated in the preparation and brainstorming sessions for the plans of the Ontario Pavillion at Expo ’92 in Seville, the Canada in “Space exhibit”, and the Toronto Broadcast Centre for the bbc.


Guallart

Vicente Guallart (Spain), Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (Iaac)
Vicente Guallart (Spain) works in the confluence of architecture, nature and new technologies. He spent part of his time with research and educational projects as director of the new Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (Iaac), in Barcelona, that holds an international postgraduate program on architecture and urbanism working in many scales “from Bits to geography” (www.iaacat.com). In 2000 he co-directed with mit’s Media Lab on-line repositories in architecture mace international conference 4 and other research centre, the Media House Project, the prototype of an informational house, based for the first
time in distributed computation. He is co-author of the Metapolis Dictionary of Advanced Architecture (Actar), HiperCatalonia, or Media House Project. The Korean publishing house dd dedicates the monograph “Intelligent realities” to his work. Actar publishing house is preparing his new book “Media, Mountains and Architecture”. He have given lectures in different Universities and Cities around the world as Princeton University, Upen, Architectural Association, ucla, mit, Space (Seoul), Taipei and others.

Sessions

The conference was structured around a series of presentations with selected papers, complemented with roundtable debates, outlined in three sessions on the following themes:

Session 1. “Education: Teaching Architecture in the Digital Age”

To a larger and larger extent learning objects become available via electronic means, in regular teaching environments as well as in learning modes besides and after graduation. Knowledge is out of date in five years time and grows so fast that regular teaching in school can not cope with this knowledge boom in a comprehensive way. Therefore academic teaching evolves into teaching of principles, methods, and attitudes, into a state of mind allowing lifelong learning (LLL). Subjects for LLL are produced by universities, practice, and industry. They are disseminated via conferences, short courses and more and more via e-learning formulas as has been the case in a lot of universities since many years.
Today materials for e-learning -called learning objects- are prepared by specialists, somewhere on earth, disseminated via electronic communication means and shared amongst distant users. E-repositories play a role of growing importance in this context and this session of the conference focuses on the role of e-repositories in LLL in architecture.

The Venice conference offers the opportunity to discuss experiences and research either on the following topics or related ones:
• Teaching and learning architecture using e-learning tools and/or digital resources
• Teaching and learning attitudes triggered by digital environments
• E-repositories for e-learning and life long learning purposes: how to structure their contents
• Tools to navigate e-repositories
• Tools for e-learning purposes
• Use cases on e-learning architectural environment


Chairman: Mario Santana Quintero (Belgium)
Speakers:

Session 2. “Digital Architectural Archives: Preservation, Dissemination and Use”

There are two kinds of digital archives, spontaneous archives, provided by contemporary architectural firms which use computers throughout the whole design process, and the “old” paper archives, which have gradually being transferred to digital media in order to preserve them and to enhance their diffusion. Both archives may provide useful first hand information that has to be improved and opened to a large public of scholars, archivists, and professionals. Yet, spreading these archives to a general public poses some problems. In spontaneous archives, each document (presentation, 2D - 3D drawings, animations, renderings, pictures, videos, texts, etc.) has its own format, and needs a specific program to be opened; information contained in each document is frequently layered, in fact each file can contain texts, images, animations, pictures, hyperlink, etc. at the same time. Paper archives raise the following questions: the dilemma of what file format has to be used when transferring the information contained in the original paper document to the digital one; the problem on how to make the chosen file formats sustainable knowing that each year new ones blossom.
Finally, nowadays, neither of both archives have any standard, or shared recommendation in order to classify and tag documents, nor advanced and powerful search tools capable of guiding users through a great deal of resources and information.

The Venice conference provides the opportunity to discuss either the following topics or related ones:
• Archiving standards
• Navigation tools
• Interoperability
• Multilingual and multicultural approaches
• Dissemination and use of digital archives
• IPR
• Use cases

Chairman: Alberto Giretti (Italy)
Speakers:

Session 3. “An European Network of Architectural Contents”

Websites and portals devoted to architecture and websites of professional architects have a considerable amount of resources (pictures, renderings, 2D-3D drawings, details, texts, videos animations, information) continuously updated and enriched. However this material is often disorganized, poorly structured, not properly tagged, and has no advanced and coherent search systems enabling cross-referencing among the available documents. As a lot of very interesting resources often remain inoperative and useless, lost in the abyss of (sometimes unknown) databases.
Moreover, very often, each website is an isle on the Internet that does not communicate with its brothers and sisters and remains alone with a lot of difficulties to survive, renovate, and update tools and the way contents are provided and organized.

The Venice conference is the first international meeting of architectural portals, summoning directors and/or founders of major European websites, in order to discuss all together either the following topics or related ones:

• Information architecture and knowledge organization of contents
• Which contents for what kind of people and purposes
• Interfaces, searching, and browsing tools
• Architectural portals and their goals
• User communities and web 2.0
• Interoperability
• Multilingual and multicultural approaches
• IPR
• Use cases
• Feasibility, implementations and viability of a super-network of shared e-repositories from different websites
• Implementation of virtual super-networks and impacts on the original repository

Chairman: Furio Barzon (Italy)
Speakers:

Organizing Committee

- Herman Neuckermans ( EAAE - European Association of Architectural Education and Department of Architecture at K.U.Leuven )
- Furio Barzon ( Collaboratorio and www.architecture )

Scientific Committee

- Markus Eisenhauer (Fraunhofer Gesellschaft in Sankt Augustin, Germany)
He has a PhD in cognitive science and is expert on participatory system development, ergonomic evaluation methodology and cognitive experiments. He has experience in managing international multicultural projects including: Etracking, SAiMotion, GiGaMobile (Cooperation with Telematica Insituut), MICA (funded by SAP), PRO-LEARN, MACE, InterMedia and Hydra."
- Alberto Giretti (Università Politecnica delle Marche)
- Erik Duval (ARIADNE foundation, University of Leuven KU Leuven)
- Markus Specht (Open University Netherlands)
- Martin Wolpers (Fraunhofer Gesellschaft in Sankt Augustin, Germany)
He holds a PhD in electrical engineering and information technology from the Leibnitz University Hannover. He is leading the group “Context and Attention for Personalized Learning Environments” at FIT ICON, dealing with trend and user-goal identification from contextualized attention metadata streams. Some of his stronger engagements in research projects are the leadership of the technical implementation team of the EC eContent+ MACE project and project manager of the FP6 IST project NoE PROLEARN. His research focuses on how to use metadata to improve technology enhanced learning scenarios. In detail, he focuses on contextualized attention metadata and knowledge representation in education. His further research interests deal with conceptual modelling, network infrastructures, databases and information extraction
- Herman Neuckermans (EAAE - European Association of Architectural Education) and Department of Architecture at K.U.Leuven)
He isgraduated in 1967 at K.U.Leuven (Belgium) as an engineer architect, where he also obtained his Ph.D. on Design Methods in Architecture in 1976. He has been a practicing self-employed architect from 1967 till 1974. He is a full tenured professor at KU Leuven since 1981, where he teaches design methods and theory including CAAD, architectural design studio, traditional construction. He is founder and chair of the CADLAB where a team of 4 to 9 researchers study the use of computers in the early design stages. Publication list from 1986 : https://lirias.kuleuven.be/simple-search?query=neuckermans&submit=Go

He is actively involved in EAAE ( European Association for Architectural Education) since 1996 and acted as president of this association from 2000 till 2003. Till nowadays he is a council member and treasurer of EAAE and a member of the Joint Working Party between ACE (European Council of Architects) and EAAE and project leader for the EU funded MACE project on behalf of EAAE.
- Ezio Arlati (Faculty of Architecture, Politechnic University of Milan)
His research activity concerns the conception and development of elaboration environment and tools aimed at representing and supporting architectural design process. He is the author of two experimental design support systems developed in METID (Metodi e Tecnologie Innovative per la Didattica): Sysinfo (technical informations & regulations about building products) and Patriarch (hypermedia design process development). Ezio has lead the
Sottogruppo II/3: Il sistema informativo in the research “ Regione Lombardia – CESTEC and was member of the ‘Cultural Heritage Commission’ of Politecnico di Milano and of the Steering Committee of the European Research on Web based Intelligent tutoring System
Design, (2000 / 2002). Ezio was Coordinator for the development of Courses in the Virtual Department of Environment and Building Technology and is Member of IAI Italian Chapter - International Alliance for Interoperability and Technical coordinator in the IAI - IFC International meetings and was a partner of the previous “Promoter Committee”. He is Director of ProTeA Lab - Computer Assisted Component Design Laboratory.
- Mario Santana (EAAE - European Association of Architectural Education) and Department of Architecture at K.U.Leuven)
Architect. He holds PhD in Engineering from the R. Lemaire International Centre for Conservation (University of Leuven). Besides his research experience, he has been responsible for the Integration of digital documentation Techniques in the module IPW of the Master in conservation of historic buildings and towns (R. Lemaire Centre for Conservation, University of Leuven); as well as, developing a curriculum on Photogrammetry, 3D Laser Scanning and 3D modeling at the University of Applied Sciences St Lieven. He is currently the Vice President of the ICOMOS Scientific Committee on Heritage Documentation (CIPA) and executive officer of the Virtual Systems and Multimedia Society.

Important links

Conference Secretariat

Dept. ASRO, KU Leuven
Kasteel van Arenberg 1
B-3001 Leuven
Belgium
Telephone +32 (0)16321694
Fax +32 (0)16321962
E-mail mace(at)asro.kuleuven.be
 
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