The Public and the V2

The London Blitz has come to epitomise the golden age of urban togetherness and bonhomie when the public was bound by a common enemy threat. Through his reading of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, literary critic Bruce Robbins questions the archetypal view of the Second World War as a watershed after which the ideal intact city and its community were ultimately destroyed. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.     

The Atmosphere of Interior Urbanism: OMA at ITT

Charles Rice explores interior atmosphere in a site challenged by existing infrastructure among a generally deteriorating urban scene. Crediting the Office for Metropolitan Architecture's IIT building in Chicago with refiguring the field via the deployment of complex spatial planning, integration of the building with the elevated train rail and a highly differentiated illumination scheme, he ultimately defines the nature of interior urbanism, an urbanity and atmosphere beyond the limits of the building envelope. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Living with Freud

Lilian Chee introduces several art installations displayed at the Freud Museum in north London. While each individually opens up further critique of Freud's practice and its cultural impact, collectively they measure the ability of objects to charge interior atmospheres with provocations of gender, modernity, ethnicity, objectivity and domesticity. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Cross the River by Touching the Stones: Chinese Architecture and Political Economy in the Reform Era: 1978-2008

China's Open Door Policy and economic development set in motion in 1978 can be regarded as the triumph of pragmatism over theory - specifically Chairman Mao's brand of Marxist theory. Tao Zhu traces the progress of reform over the last 30 years, and its impact on Chinese architectural culture. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

It's All Inside My Head

The physical manifestations of built architecture are often discussed in terms of a single architect's inspiration, overemphasising and romanticising the intellectual contribution of the signature architect. Here Neil Spiller describes the extraordinary departure that Marcos Novak is undertaking at the University of California's Santa Barbara campus, where Novak's own scanned brain becomes a literal, reflexive generating force in the formation of a spatial environment. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Between Pragmatism and Theory

For the last three decades, Italian architecture has been characterised by an extreme polarisation. At one end of the spectrum have been the neo-conservators, who are subsumed by Italy's history, and at the other end the avant-garde for whom innovation is the Holy Grail and the present is a clean slate. Francesco Proto outlines the current potential for steering a middle course that will afford a greater eclecticism, enabling a natural balance between pragmatism and theory. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Eat Me… Drink Me…

Sean Lally of WEATHERS lets out a rallying cry to all architects. He calls on them to make environmental conditions the subject of design rather than regarding them as a standardised part of a building's services. Here he highlights the potential of material systems, which are usually applied to conditioning the interiors of buildings, in the generation of new forms and activities; whether it is in the honing of the performance aspect of a building's function, as in the Water Cube at Beijing (2008), or in the seasonal planning that underpins the concept behind WEATHERS' Wanderings project (2008-9). Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Domestic Afterlives: Rachel Whiteread's Ghost

Long associated with uncanny atmosphere, ghosts suggest a lingering presence of something past. Rachel Carley's examination of Rachel Whiteread's Ghost belies the role that the plaster-casting process makes towards visualising the invisible. In turn, the vestigial traces of a room's surface are refigured as a solid volume capable of depleting light and heat from the space of the museum. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Strength in Numbers

David Salomon examines the history of the original World Trade Center (WTC) competition of 1962 and the more recent 2003 competition, finding interesting parallels in terms of how commercial and bureaucratic, as well as progressive, forces of innovation intersect over larger debates about control, power and questions of collaborative identity and practice within the city as a political machine, and which figure 9/11 in implicitly provocative ways. The 1962 competition featured another progressive architectural collaboration: Walter Gropius's The Architect's Collaborative (TAC). Not unlike the 2003 competition in which United Architects (UA) and other collaborative practices lost to the more stable, individual celebrity identity, TAC lost to Minoru Yamasaki. Salomon also argues that the organisational and structural qualities of UA's WTC proposal sought to embed collective operations of multiplicity rather than mere duplication of the previous WTC Twin Towers within the form of the design itself. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Pedro and Inês Bridge,Coimbra, Portugal

Jeremy Melvin describes how Cecil Balmond of Arup and Antonio Adao da Fonseca have created ‘the first bridge that does not meet in the middle’ for Portugal's oldest university town. The bridge's dislocated apex provides not only a focus for a formal investigation into dynamic symmetry, but also a layered narrative that makes sense of its historical setting. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Hertzian Space: Material Response to Spatial Presence

Mark Taylor describes how an interest in the possibilities of generating spaces that fully respond to people's presence and their activities led him and Mark Burry to undertake a project with students at Victoria University Wellington, New Zealand, that spatialises the dynamics of a full body massage. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

La Perla – 100 years of informal architecture in San Juan,Puerto Rico

La Perla, Puerto Rico's most famous informal settlement, developed since the early 1900s outside the fortifications of San Juan's colonial Old Town, the country's main tourist attraction. In the mid-twentieth century, La Perla was a symbol of the poverty and deprivation that development and scientifically informed planning attempted to remove. Since the 1970s, La Perla has been a subject of various improvement plans by the local authority with varying degrees of inhabitant participation. Thus, La Perla is connected with the great hopes and fears of the twentieth century: the promise of modernization and progress and the ensuing disappointments, the limitations of top-down decision-making and expert planning, the distress of poverty and marginalization, the opportunities of self-organization and informality, and the threat of forced relocation imposed by gentrification cycles. Based on previously unpublished archival materials, this article presents an architectural and planning history of La Perla. It compares building types, ownership structures, and municipal policies throughout the 100 years of La Perla's existence. The article challenges the distinction that legitimizes formal housing as the rule and informal abodes as an environment that is fundamentally different from the formal city. In La Perla, formal and informal did not constitute polar opposites, but have to be regarded as two aspects of the same urbanization process. In this sense, La Perla is an intrinsic part of San Juan's architectural heritage.     

Biochemistry Department,University of Oxford

Howard Watson describes how Hawkins\Brown's new Biochemistry Department for the University of Oxford represents an innovative new model for scientific research institutes. Spatially, its interior not only positively embraces and encourages social interaction and the fertilisation of ideas, but also brings art, architecture and science together under a single roof. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Urban Wash

Sean Lally of WEATHERS urges designers to realise the performative capabilities of the ambient effects of the urban wash – the artificial light given off by cities at night. Taking up this principle of a wash within his designs for the Museum of the Second World War in Gdansk, he demonstrates how a ‘climatic wash’ could create an artificial microclimate that extends the seasonal activities of the museum's programmes.     

Urbana

Based in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and originally formed by Kashef Mahboob Chowdhury and Marina Tabassum, the work of Urbana displays a heightened sense of material crafting within an invigorated Modernist ethos that has earned awards for the practice and been featured in many international publications. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Parallel Processing: Design /Practice

In the late 1990s servo emerged as a young design collaborative embracing new forms of distributed practice as enabled by the advent of telecommunications technologies. In this section, David Erdman, Marcelyn Gow, Ulrika Karlsson and Chris Perry write about how these organisational principles are at work not only in the context of their practice, but in the design work itself, which stretches across a variety of design disciplines to incorporate areas of expertise particular to information and interaction design, as well as a number of manufacturing and fabrication technologies. Many of servo's projects have focused on small-scale interior infrastructures, typically in the form of gallery installations, furniture systems and exhibition designs. This particular scale has allowed the group to focus on the development of full-scale prototypes, exploring a wide range of potential innovations at the point of integration between various technological and material systems. 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.     

Urbanisation in Contemporary China Observed: Dramatic Changes and Disruptions

Shenzhen is one of the fastest-growing cities in China, having leapt from fishing village to a global city in a matter of a couple of decades. Here Huang Weiwen , the Deputy Director of the Urban and Architecture Department at Shenzhen Municipal Planning Bureau, provides the background to China's unrivalled urbanisation, which is unmatched in terms of both its speed and intensity. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.