Deus Ex Machina: From Semiology to the Elegance of Aesthetics

Architecture's ability to realise large-scale effects permits its emphasis to shift aesthetics on a project-by-project basis. Elegance unleashes a specific visual intelligence that can be achieved by refinement and precision of surface. Here, Mark Foster Gage investigates how elegance can be designed into a project. This requires a ‘visual and formal expertise’ combined with a careful curation of mutation and awareness of ‘extreme differentiation’. Elegance often only reveals itself partially, acquired, in the design stage, through ‘isolated views and expertly calibrated moments’ and perceived fleetingly in built work. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

An Architectural Chemistry

Protocell technology has a precedent in the innovative use of plastic in the 1960s, when chemistry first came up with an innovative new material that could be applied to architecture, interiors and product design. Omar Khan describes how at the Center for Architecture and Situated Technologies at the University at Buffalo in New York, he is developing a line of research that builds on the legacy of the 1960s and 1970s for soft materials and the capabilities of an elastic responsive architecture. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

RETHINKING INDIAN MODERNITY FROM THE MARGINS: ARCHITECTURAL POLITICS IN THIRUVANANTHAPURAM IN THE 1970s

This paper interprets the context and implications of a little-known but consequential ideological feud that emerged between rival “regionalist” and “modernist” camps of architectural practitioners in the south Indian state of Kerala in the 1970s. Beginning with a comparative analysis of the private residences of the key protagonists—the expatriate British Gandhian, Laurie Baker, and J. C. Alexander, an influential modernist and doyen of the architectural profession in post-independence Kerala—the paper explores the contrasting views of both camps as they debated the idea of the modern house. Turning to the architectural historiography of modern India, the over-representation of one camp and the relative invisibility of the other is then examined in the context of the radical cultural and political climate of the 1970s in Kerala. The paper considers how Baker’s rise to wider recognition and impact by the end of the 1970s can be understood only by understanding the “author function” that Baker satisfied in Kerala society. The paper concludes that the complex network of influences and actors that appear in this specific case study, drawn from the assumed margins of India’s modern architectural history, makes the case for a flatter ontology of history, rejecting the existing “diffusion” model and enabling buildings and context to speak in equal measure.     

Animating Architecture: Coupling High-Definition Sensing with High-Definition Actuation

Ruairi Glynn , lecturer on interactive architecture at the Bartlett School ofArchitecture, University College London (UCL), puts the pressing question: ‘What does a world of hyper-connective, high-definition sensing offer architectural design?’ Despite the pervasiveness of ubiquitous computing – the Internet of Things (IoT) – and students' ability to speculate, build and test responsive lifesize installations, could practice itself be in danger of getting left behind?     

Old Dispersions and Scenes for the Production of Public Space The Constructive Margins of Secondarity

The density of development in Belgium is such that the entire country has become an open city, with little sense of where one metropolitan area begins and another ends. Bruno De Meulder describes the underlying logic of this unbroken urbanscape, and the opportunity it affords for re-editing and reinserting informal social spaces in areas of wasted land. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Low-Tech Transgression: The Interventional Work of EXYZT

Alex Romer and Naïm Aït-Sidhoum define EXYZT's practice as one characterised by ‘transgressive forms’ and ‘construction devices’. They explain how this has come about through the studio's penchant for the loose conditions of leftover spaces – derelict urban sites or marginal spaces by the sides of roads and railway lines – which require the building of temporary structures in tight timetables on limited budgets.     

‘Happy Meals’: Finding Happiness with Hans Becker and the Humanitas Care Model

Hans Becker , originally a professor at the Erasmus School of Economics in Rotterdam, is a seemingly unlikely guru for elderly care. In 1992 he was appointed Chair of the Rotterdam-based housing association Humanitas with the task of overturning the outmoded and failing commercial model of its nursing homes. He set about replacing them with ‘apartments for life’ that promoted independent living. In order to understand more about the successful Humanitas model, David Birkbeck , Chief Executive of Design for Homes in the UK, interviewed Becker and found out how the move to a new housing type was enabled by a philosophical shift that placed an emphasis on the engendering of happiness among its residents – with food and the creation of convivial on-site restaurant facilities proving a critical tool.     

Works In/On//Around///Behind Progress

Artist Hilary Powell describes how her work in film, food and the pop-up book offers playful critiques of regeneration and place making. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Architecture + Textiles = Architextiles

A hybrid term, ‘architextiles’ encompasses a wide range of projects and ways of thinking that unite architecture and textiles. By way of introduction to this issue, guest-editor Mark Garcia highlights the significant rise of interest in this confluence by theorists, architects, engineers, textile designers, materials scientists and artists. He also explains how, as a hybrid mode of design and practice, architextiles is better able to respond to society's fast-changing cultural and consumer demands, enabling the production of more dynamic, flexible, interactive, event and process-based spaces. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

After After Geometry

Michael Meredith of MOS Architects examines his own practice's preoccupation with physics and the particle-oriented world, and the persistent problem of meaning and meaninglessness against the backdrop of the architecture of a previous era: a period that spanned the Deconstruction movement of the late 1980s and closed with Greg Lynn's seminal 1997 Architecture After Geometry edition of AD.     

Illuminating Embodiment: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's Relational Architectures

Art and architecture have a strong tradition of humanism in which man and the human body are the centre and measure of all things. Maria Fernández describes the work of artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer whose work transgresses and challenges these preconceptions through performance, seeking to expose the body and society's receptivity to instability, fluctuation and re-imagining. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Crisis! What Crisis? Retooling for Mass Markets in the 21st Century

From his base in Southeast Asia, Tom Verebes , Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture at the University of Hong Kong (HKU), asks what the hardcore realities are for robotics in architecture in this new ‘Asian Century’. At a time when China strives to accommodate 10 million new urban citizens each year by rolling out high-rise residential blocks with standardised serial production techniques, what hope is there that the homogeneous Chinese city will apply robotic tools of mass customisation for the construction of distinctive, rather than generic structures?     

从一组早期校舍作品解读圣约翰大学建筑系的设计思想

上海圣约翰大学建筑系是中国近代时期最早全面引进现代建筑思想的教学机构。文章研究了该系师生设计的一组早期校舍作品——原山东省中等技术学校校舍(1951年建成),分析建筑所蕴藏的现代特点,指出设计者在注重功能、结构等现代建筑的基本特征之外,采用"流动空间"的处理、"风格派"的造型、多种材质的精心搭配等多重现代设计方法。文章进一步揭示了这些手法源自于西方现代建筑运动中的多条探索路线,包括密斯的空间处理、"风格派"的建筑形态操作方式、格罗比乌斯和包豪斯的教育中对材质的关注等。同时文章分析了中国传统园林空间对该系师生探索现代建筑的重要影响,阐述了他们在建筑创作中融合传统文化的独特方式。     

A/B Architecture: Publicly Augmented Design

Architects are sometimes criticised for prioritising aesthetics over functionality; but attempts to involve end users in building design all too often encounter apathy. Is a successful participatory design process possible? Carlo Ratti and Matthew Claudel of MIT's Senseable City Lab have been researching ways to make it so. Their solutions include an adaptation of the A/B testing method used in software development, together with means from questionnaires to immersive virtual systems that can draw both conscious and unconscious public feedback while maintaining architects' central role.     

Designing for a Lifetime in New York and Other US Cities

In the next 30 years, the number of senior citizens in the US will increase to become larger than any other single age group. How are cities starting to prepare for this huge expansion in the numbers of over-65s? Jerry Maltz and Christine Hunter of the Design for Aging Committee of the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIANY), aided by Eric Cohen and Susan Wright , describe how New York and other US cities are laying the necessary groundwork through the World Health Organization's Age-Friendly Cities programme, while also setting up innovative centres for senior citizens, making much-needed modifications to the physical environment and developing new approaches to affordable housing.     

The AADRL: Design,Collaboration and Convergence

Brett Steele, former director of the Architectural Association's Design Research Laboratory (AADRL) and now director of the Architectural Association, reflects upon the DRL as a laboratory for the production of a different kind of student and teacher, and ultimately as a new model for architectural education. His ‘screenshots’ offer an informal image/text-based window through which to browse the general atmosphere of that research endeavour. The DRL was also very active in employing outside specialists from a variety of disciplines including computer programming and robotics. These interests were situated within the DRL's much larger ambition of rethinking the very definition of research itself, not isolated in the purely reflective interests of history and criticism but based on the projective desires of innovation. Moreover, the organisation of these new laboratories of design life begin to resemble their objects of study. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

An Interview with Giorgio Grassi

In January 2007, Lucia Tozzi visited Giorgio Grassi's office in Milan. Their conversation touched on Grassi's recent work on Leon Battista Alberti, which is examined here in the context of Grassi's obliquely expressed views on contemporary architecture and the cult of personality. As perhaps the most intellectually rigorous and formally consistent Rationalist architect of his generation, Grassi's work and thinking retain a hermetic aspect, but one notable for its philosophical self-questioning and underlying political commitment. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

‘Never Mind All That Environmental Rubbish,Get On With Your Architecture’

Could the primacy of green architecture in recent years be eroding the discipline? Is it reducing architecture to a mere ‘environmental techno-science’? Penelope Dean argues for a revised environmental agenda that is driven by ideas and concepts rather than subservient technologies. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

London Calling

An ethnic mix has always been an essential part of London's character, with areas such as Spitalfields home to successive waves of immigrants - from Huguenots in the 18th century to a diverse Jewish population in the mid-20th century, and a sizable Bangladeshi community today. Jeremy Melvin explains how, through its dynamic sense of the multicultural, ‘London taught other cities how to become metropolises’. How, though, does an urban mix, such a natural phenomenon in areas such as Old Compton Street (left), Brick Lane (centre) and Electric Avenue (right), translate into current architectural form? Here Melvin looks at the work of three London-based practices that have all worked on community schemes that engender notions of inclusiveness. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.