The Agora

This chapter focuses on the Athenian Agora, the civic center and marketplace of the polis. At the heart of this chapter is the issue of when the government buildings and functions shifted from the older Archaic Agora to this new area, and how the new buildings articulated the changed political landscape of the polis. This chapter progresses monument by monument. Three buildings in particular are highlighted—the Old Bouleuterion (Council House), the Stoa Basileios (magistrate’s office), and the Southeast Fountain House—due to their unique forms and decoration, their important functions for the polis as a whole, and their siting within the Agora. This chapter also considers the role of movement and sight lines within and around the Agora.

An Innovative School Building Design in the Town of Montemiletto

Background: This paper presents an innovative design for a school building, awarded in the concourse “Scuole innovative”, published by the italian Ministry of Education, University and Research. The new school building is located in a newly built urban area of Montemiletto (Avellino, Italy), at the south-east of the Leonessa castle and the ancient nucleus of the town. The Comprehensive Institute that includes a kindergarten, a primary school and a secondary school, is proposed as a Civic Center, an “urban place”, characterized by new spaces of relationship and aggregation. Objective: The main idea of the project design is the creation of an innovative school with respect to the architectural, structural and plant system aspects and to the energetic efficiency and characterized by the presence of new environments of learning and openness to the territory. Materials and Methods: The project proposals can be summarized in the different points: a) unit of the morphological-settlement solution and the articulation of the Civic Center, to be identified as new reference point in the city; b) adherence of the characters of the school to the landscape and visual connection with the castle; c) urban and architectural role of the system of the paths and connections, which surround and enter in the intervention area; d) extension and permeation between the natural and artificial environments assigning to the roof the task of increasing open spaces; e) accentuation of the public and multi-functional character of the different spaces, so that the school can be a place for meeting and comparison, in which it is possible to test new ways of teaching; f) use of different types of green open spaces as gardens, flowerbeds, educational vegetable gardens that change with the seasons, sporting fields, cycle-forgave routes among the green. Moreover, with respect to the structural aspects, seismic isolation at the basis of the building is proposed. This paper focuses mainly on the aspects related to energy and environmental sustainability and life cycle cost with reference to the case study design. The goal is to reduce the impact on the ecosystem, trying to make the school building organic to the existing environment. The containment of energy consumption for the air conditioning of the rooms is done through the isolation of the massive walls of the façade, covered with local stone (Irpinia breccia) and polycarbonate. Water-saving is obtained by reusing rainwater for the irrigation of vegetable gardens, vegetation and sanitary use. Results and Conclusion: The use of recycled materials and components is proposed: the Irpinia breccia covering the façade and, with different grain sizes, the external roofing and flooring; the polycarbonate; the polyester insulation; the outdoor furniture in recycled wood. In addition, dry reinforced concrete construction technologies are chosen. Definitively, the main concept is to have “a school in the park”.

Searching for the Center: A New Civic Role for the Central Business District in China

The central business district (CBD) has become the economic powerhouse of contemporary cities. China’s economic transition from world factory to a knowledge-based economy underpinned the development of hundreds of CBDs over the course of less than two decades. The plans promoted land use diversity and the incorporation of service facilities in the support of business function, but a rather different service environment emerged. Taking the Futian CBD of Shenzhen as the prototypical case, we examined the distribution, vitality, uses, and users of these facilities, which are largely built up by the private sector and without governmental support. A questionnaire sent to users and data derived from social media reveal that the vast majority of visitors of these service facilities do not work in the CBD and travel via the reformed mass transport system to this location. The high-quality public spaces and street environment, as well as the numerous service facilities, many of which are at a low economic order, attract people from all over the vast city, which homes over ten million, highlighting a new role for the CBD as a civic center. In contrast with the globalized business sought after by government and business leaders of the CBD, a new populist nexus is emerging and without significant support.

The Monumental Aquascape of Kaminaljuyu

In Chapter 7, Arroyo and Henderson introduce the monumental aquascape of Kaminaljuyu, a site located in the Valley of Guatemala, occupying a strategic position that connected several important cultural regions, including the Pacific Coast, the northern highlands, and the Maya lowlands. In this chapter, the authors outline a new understanding of the complex, multifaceted, and monumental hydraulic landscape of Kaminaljuyu. They argue that previous assumptions related to the footprint and timeline of Lake Miraflores, the body of water around which the site’s first occupants originally settled, need to be reassessed. They also expand the site’s monumental hydraulic landscape to consider the massive, snaking “Montículo de la Culebra” aqueduct, which served to fill Lake Miraflores with water from the nearby Río Pinula. Lastly, in addition to the system of agricultural canals that brought lake water to the site’s southern sector, they describe a recently discovered system of ritualized waterways that channeled water through the site’s civic center, transforming the civic landscape into a complex network of artificial rivers, ponds, and lagoons.