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.     

Initiating Change: Architecturing the Body-Environment with Arakawa and Gins

New York-based artists Shusaku Arakawa (1936–2010) and Madeline Gins (1941–) used architecture in their work in an approach that they have referred to as ‘architecting’. Jondi Keane explains how as artists-turned-architects, Arakawa and Gins have not been particularly interested in innovating architecture, but in approaching architecture as a way to innovate, or change the world'.     

Josep Lluís Mateo/MAP Architects

By focusing on a ‘scientific approach’ that emphasises the importance of cause and effect, Josep Lluís Mateo/MAP has developed a design for the Camp Nou Stadium in Barcelona that is less about spectacle and more about the people it accommodates. Croatian critic and architect Krunoslav Ivanisin admires the structure for the ‘inherent logic of its parts’, but also for its prioritisation of communal life. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.     

Biodiversity Targets as the Basis for Green Design

Mike Wells , the Director of Biodiversity by Design, and Ken Yeang outline the need for biodiversity targets in architecture to provide a more far-reaching basis for green design. Rather than just literally ‘greening’ a building by covering it with foliage, they seek to encourage designers to engage with wider ecological processes and in more specific detail. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

One Space,Many Worlds

‘Cities hold two-thirds of their residents in slums, and the rest in stiflingly limiting, inflexible structures.’ Thus the impoverished parochial Mumbai is one and the same metropolis as the cosmopolitan globalised ‘Bombay’. Ramesh Biswas examines how the speculative housing developments of the aspirational middle classes are creating townships that intensify sprawl and further decentralise cities, squandering the potential for upgrading public space and creating an architecture for the common good. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Performing Elegance

At the level of global culture, the impact of elegant buildings is magnified where there is a seamless integration of complex parts and fabrication expressed through a mastery of techniques and transformative set of features. Hani Rashid of Asymptote explains how, in working at an international scale, the practice is now seeking to propagate innovative design through a ‘developed understanding of the multiple levels of local responses that affect both local and global conditions’. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Augmented Landscapes and Delicate Machinery

Mark Smout and Laura Allen of Smout Allen describe how for them drawing is instrumental, enabling them to pursue preliminary investigations that establish ‘a speculative method with which to examine the dynamic force of environmental and architectural processes’. This is illustrated by their Wet Lands: Architectural Waterscapes and Soft Infrastructures research project for London's Thames Estuary.     

Distinguishing Concepts: Lexicons of Interactive Art and Architecture

Interactive design has come about as a result of the intermingling of disciplines. As a consequence, the language it uses has become blurred - borrowed or stolen with little restraint from elsewhere. Though particular terms have become ubiquitous, the original concepts that lie behind them have been lost. This means that all too frequently they are no longer knowingly used. Usman Haque sorts the wheat from the chaff and brings clarity to bear on the vocabulary and thinking behind interactivity. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Ann Pendleton-Jullian

Ann Pendleton-Jullian practises from Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she also teaches at MIT. This combination of teaching and practice allows her to consider the vital exchange between ideas and architecture that is evident in both her commissioned work and her theoretical projects. Her work has been cited for the manner in which it poeticises the intersection between pragmatic concerns and the ‘ambitions of the imagination’. 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.     

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.     

Recent History - Art In Ruins

Some two decades on, guest-editor Nic Clear returns to the work of Hannah Vowles and Glyn Banks of collaborative art practice Art in Ruins. As cited by Brian Hatton on their behalf in 1989: ‘in the city of the future everything will be historical (ie visited) for fifteen minutes’. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Miesian Grids and the Domain of Ink

What happens when you subvert the standardised repetition of the Modernist grid? In Building the Picture, a series of drawings that architect Elena Manferdini produced for an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago that ran during the spring and summer of 2015, visual effects and colour were applied to counteract Mies's highly uniform and modular mass-producible systems.     

After China: The World? Three Perspectives on a Critical Question

Are China’s cities now poised for global influence? This challenging question initiates a tripartite response from three authors: Kyong Park , Laurence Liauw and Doreen Heng Liu . In order to fully speculate on the potential of Chinese urbanism and architecture beyond its own borders: Park looks at whether China is a fully replicable capitalist model; Liauw outlines recent indicators of urban Sinofication around the world, whether it is the exporting of high-end designer furniture to the West or the injection of Chinese capital into Africa; and Heng Liu examines the dissemination of the Pearl River Delta both as an idea - first proliferated by Rem Koolhaas in the mid-1990s - and in its physical manifestations. Copyright © 2008 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.     

Penang Tropical City,Penang, Malaysia OMA

A mixed-use programme for Penang in Malaysia with the potential to accommodate a resident population of 27,000 required OMA to operate at a planning level, while providing architectural definition. João Bravo da Costa describes how this led to a strategy that focused on types rather than objects, and specifically a typological distribution of programme across the site.     

On the Threshold of Rationalism

No longer a leading architectural trend, Rationalism has fallen out of fashion. At best ‘marginalised’, even its tenets appear questionable. Guest-editors Andrew Peckham, Charles Rattray and Torsten Schmiedeknecht describe what motivated them to uncover and reassess the Rationalist sensibility among current European practices. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Austeria: City of Minimum Consumption

If a new stringency with economic and material resources is to become a new way of life, how should austerity be recast as a positive force rather than a negative imposition? Daliana Suryawinata and Winy Maas look at definitions of austerity and describes the Austeria project at The Why Factory at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) that looked at new models for combating excessive consumption, such as the ‘Zen road to affluence’.     

The Visceral City and the Theatre of Fear

Over the last decade in India, intensive urbanisation, with the aid of the mass media, has unleashed a new culture of fear. Widespread access to TV, text messaging and the Internet have heightened and played upon individuals' anxieties. Ravi Sundaram describes how in Delhi, in particular, the media provided the catalyst for ‘mass hysteria’ and ‘psychosis’ during the summer of 2002. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.