Tangible symmetry elements and space-group models to guide from molecular to solid-state composition

The ability to imagine symmetry and the spatial arrangement of atoms and molecules is crucial in chemistry in general. Teaching and understanding crystallography and the composition of the solid state therefore require understanding of symmetry elements and their relationships. To foster the student's spatial imagination, models representing a range of concepts from individual rotation axes to complete space groups have been designed and built. These models are robust and large enough to be presented and operated in a lecture hall, and they enable students to translate conventional 2D notations into 3D objects and vice versa. Tackling them hands-on means understanding them.

Conceptualizing In-Text “Kshetra”: Postcolonial Allahabad’s Cultural Geography in Neelum Saran Gour’s Allahabad Aria and Invisible Ink

Literary renditions of cities have always gravitated towards the spatial imagination and its ethical counterpart outside the textual space. This paper explores the multicultural geography of the North Indian city Allahabad (recently renamed Prayagraj) observed through Neelum Saran Gour’s postcolonial narratives Allahabad Aria and Invisible Ink, projecting the narrative alignment of spatial aesthetics and cultural ethics. Interrogating the spatial dimensions of a “narrative world” within narrative theory (Ryan) and its interdisciplinary crossover with cultural geography (Sauer; Mitchell; Anderson et al.), the article seeks to examine Gour’s literary city not simply as an objective homogeneous representation, but as a “kshetra” of spatio-cultural cosmos of lived traditions, memories, experiences and collective attitudes of its people, in the context of E. V. Ramakrishnan’s theoretical reflections. The article proposes new possibilities of adapting the Indian concept “kshetra” to spatial literary studies; its aim is also to suggest a new source of knowledge about the city of Allahabad through a community introspection of “doing culture” in the texts, bringing into view people’s shared experiences, beliefs, religious practices and traditions as offshoots of the postcolonial ethos. The article aims to re-contextualize the city’s longstanding multicultural ethics in the contemporary times of crisis, which may affect a shift in the city’s relevance: from regional concern to large-scale significance within ethnically diverse South Asian countries and beyond.

THE EFFECT OF 3D TECHNOLOGIES IN STEREOMETRY TRAINING

The software proposed in the report can be used as a technological tool in the teaching and learning of the discipline of stereometry. The aim is to improve the learning process by supporting the development of students’ creativity and spatial imagination, qualities needed in the study of spatial geometric bodies. A new boundary method is used in the generation of geometric objects. This new method uses elements of the Cavalieri Indivisible method and Isaac Newton's boundary method, thus achieving higher accuracy with respect to generated objects compared to 3D systems that use the rules of trigonometry in the construction of geometric bodies. This article performs a comparative analysis between a traditional and a new method for generating 3D geometric objects according to certain parameters and criteria. The new method involved in the analysis was proposed by the author of the report. While the traditional one is based on trigonometry. Two parameters were studied, one for accuracy in generating objects, and the second determining speed. In order to generate cylindrical bodies, are used the quadratic Bézier curve and the 3D modeling technique known as an extrusion, which transforms two-dimensional objects into three-dimensional ones.. One way to generate a prism and pyramid is by extruding polygons. This report presents a new way of constructing edged bodies. The considered technique for 3D modeling participates in the analysis of the studied methods.

Paris Was Not Built in a Day… Three-Dimensional Puzzles and Architectural Blocks as a Universal Tool Supporting the Process of Aesthetic Education

This article proposes the use of knowledge of space studies in the school educational practice. It allows for implementation of obligatory content and skills indicated in the core curriculum for general education. Shaping the spatial imagination and aesthetic sensitivity is accompanied by the development of both social and manual skills, while the construction of miniature buildings by students is a convenient starting point for a discussion on social and cultural changes.

APPLICATION OF VIRTUAL REALITY IN THE DESIGN OF PRODUCTION SYSTEMS AND TEACHING

The content of the contribution is a description of the virtual reality use in the design of production processes and in the teaching process. The aim of the article is to describe the methodology for 3D virtual design of production systems as well as a description of the creation of interconnectors for simulation tools Siemens Tecnomatix, Simio, AutoCAD and Dassalut systems by using the moreViz tool. The use in the design of production systems lies precisely in the ability to realize the projected space on a scale of 1:1, which will allow maximum use of space and its orientation. The effect in teaching lies in a better understanding of the elements that can be displayed in fully immersive virtual reality, which helps to teach faster and engage spatial imagination.

The Tacit Dimension

In architecture, tacit knowledge plays a substantial role in both the design process and its reception. The essays in this book explore the tacit dimension of architecture in its aesthetic, material, cultural, design-based, and reflexive understanding of what we build. Tacit knowledge, described in 1966 by Michael Polanyi as what we ‘can know but cannot tell’, often denotes knowledge that escapes quantifiable dimensions of research. Much of architecture’s knowledge resides beneath the surface, in nonverbal instruments such as drawings and models that articulate the spatial imagination of the design process. Awareness of the tacit dimension helps to understand the many facets of the spaces we inhabit, from the ideas of the architect to the more hidden assumptions of our cultures. Beginning in the studio, where students are guided into becoming architects, the book follows a path through the tacit knowledge present in materials, conceptual structures, and the design process, revealing how the tacit dimension leads to craftsmanship and the situated knowledge of architecture-in-the-world.

The Tacit Dimension

Within architecture, tacit knowledge plays a substantial role both within the design process and its reception. This book explores the tacit dimension of architecture in its aesthetic, material, cultural, design-based, and reflexive understanding of what we build. Much of architecture’s knowledge resides beneath the surface, in nonverbal instruments such as drawings and models that articulate the spatial imagination of the design process. Tacit knowledge, described in 1966 by Michael Polanyi as what we ‘can know but cannot tell’, often denotes knowledge that escapes quantifiable dimensions of research. Beginning in the studio, where students are guided into becoming architects, the book follows a path through the tacit knowledge present in models, materials, conceptual structures, and the design process, revealing how the tacit dimension leads to craftsmanship and the situated knowledge of architecture-in-the-world. Awareness of the tacit dimension helps to understand the many facets of the spaces we inhabit, from the ideas of the architect to the more hidden assumptions of our cultures.

From Lazarus to the Petrashevtsy: Imagining Siberia in the Allegorical Novel Citizens of the Forest by Nikolai Akhsharumov

The article examines the phenomenon of spatial imagination in the plot and composition of the allegorical story by the critic and writer, member of the Petrashevsky Circle Nikolai Dmitrievich Akhsharumov. Turning to the most generalized Siberian topos and ignoring the numerous ethnographic information accumulated both in periodicals and in special studies, the writer constructs a dystopian plot, drawing on the novels by N.G. Chernyshevsky and F.M. Dostoevsky. Special attention should be paid to the polemic of Akhsharumov with the novel Crime and Punishment, which began in a critical article and continued beyond its borders, in a literary text. Akhsharumov begins his work from the point and coordinates where Crime and Punishment actually ends. When in a Siberian settlement, a gold digger and hunter, a former convict Lazar implements an educational project: he gives animals a language (according to the method of Robertson and Wundt) and law, teaches them the social principles of community and creates a kind of phalanstery. The social experiment gets out of control and ends in failure: “citizens of the forest” begin to worship the personified symbol of animal primal fear – the Great Fly totem. An uprising flares up to defeat a forcibly cultivated democracy, which yields to authoritarianism and totemism. By choosing the totem of the Great Fly, the forest dwellers finally lose their civic consciousness, appearing in their natural form and at the same time showing that there is no place for people, whoever they are, in their world (neither for life, nor, especially, for resurrection ). Like most dystopias, Citizens of the Forest demonstrates several phases of a social project: the formation of a civil society, its heyday and fall. Akhsharumov shows how the harmony of the animal world flings itself on mercy of one person and the word given to him; how the mass instinct (instincts of survival, reproduction, etc.) prevails over the needs of each individual (cattle or creature, as follows from the text). Citizens of the Forest creates an alternative value architectonics, due to which the life path of the protagonist, largely corresponding to the Old Testament, personifies the non-possibility of the resurrection miracle. The article attempts to describe not only intertextual links to political literature, utopias of Fourier, Cabet and Owen, dystopias in the spirit of Hobbes’ Leviathan, but also biographical lines associated with portraits of the writer’s brother, Fourierist Dmitry Akhsharumov, and M.V. Butashevich- Petrashevsky. Akhsharumov created space from scratch. Turning to the most primitive model of the Siberian text, and starting from strong texts (most likely, Voinarovsky and Crime and Punishment), Akhsharumov intuitively determined its two limits: a short novel, which begins as a story of the New World, ends with a descent into the kingdom of the dead. Siberia, which became a part of an ideological project and showed opportunities for a utopian perception, turned out to be reversible and easily transposed into a dystopia. Thus, despite the low aesthetic quality and numerous formal flaws, Citizens of the Forest remains one of the most significant evidences of spatial imagination, allowing to see in the choice of topos both ideological (from Icaria to Phalanstery) and conditionally biographical equestrianism (from family legends to political jokes). Siberia, as a space of imagination becomes the topos of an experiment continued by the writer in his fantastic story “Wanzamia”, directly replicating Cabet’s “Icaria”.