Shoreditch Roof Apartment

A rooftop apartment in East London is an unlikely setting for a sizable family home. David Littlefield describes how the collaboration between Tonkin Liu and Richard Rogers has led to a two-storey addition to an east London warehouse that is thoughtful and sensuous in its spatial planning and detailing, combining bedrooms for four children with unrivalled views. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Visualising Ecological Literacy

For over two decades, ecological literacy has sought to integrate foundational premises for addressing environmental problems. Here Jody Boehnert of EcoLabs explains how she has developed graphics resources and tools for designers in order for them to understand the perceptual shifts that are necessary to learn the causality and complexity of ecology and how it is embedded in human relations.     

The Unified Project

Albert Pope argues that a unified architectural and urban project is not possible without addressing the conceptual divide that exists between building and infrastructure. It is a split that was first set in motion by the breakdown of Modernism in the 1960s and was reaffirmed by the rise of Postmodernism. Since then, architectural form and urban infrastructure have not only remained disjointed, but have been overtly celebrated by the collages and juxtapositions of the contemporary and the historic in our cities.     

The Global Architectural Influences on London

London today has become ‘a laboratory and testing ground’ for neoliberal capitalism, attracting investment from the Middle East, Russia, India, the Far East and Australasia as well as the US. Murray Fraser describes the urban impact of economic globalisation in the capital, while exploring ways that it might potentially be countered. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Recombinant Landscapes in the American City

How are urban actors, such as landscape designers, community groups, developers and local politicians, actively restructuring their environments to meet the challenges of the American city in the new global context? Grahame Shane outlines the approaches to landscape that have been emerging since the mid-20th century and are set to recombine urban assemblages whether they are located in historic city centres, postindustrial waterfronts or suburban sprawl. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Unified design: collaborative working at Arup Associates

Global telecommunication networks and the emergence of a new digital tool base have informed the reshaping of design practice worldwide. As discussed in detail in the next issue of AD, Collective Intelligence in Design (no 5, vol 76, 2006), ever-evolving groups of designers, engineers, material scientists, manufacturers, contractors and even financiers are now working together across time zones and organisations. Though these current shifts have certainly facilitated a greater fluidity of exchange between disciplines, working across the professional setting is not a wholly new phenomenon. For over four decades, London-based Arup Associates have collaborated in design as a team of architects and engineers, sitting within the greater corporate framework of the Arup Group. Declan O'Carroll, a principal at Arup Associates, tells Helen Castle how Arup Associates are now launching the Unified Design Unit that is set to recast Ove Arup's ethos of totality in design for the 21st century. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Freud,Fabric, Fetish

Abstract

“Frreud, Fabric, Fetish” explores the nature of the relation between women and cloth in everyday life, visual culture and psychoanalytic theory. The article proposes that the sensory connection that we all (both male and female) have to cloth cannot be adequately expressed in language. This, it is argued in psychoanalytic terms, is because the unique “language” of fabric straddles the pre-linguistic or Imaginary and the social/linguistic codes that make up the Symbolic order. Fabric is, further, shown to complicate assumptions about sexual difference because it is inevitably caught up in the persistent undecidability of the fetishistic fantasy. This uncertainty in the fabric-as-fetish becomes evident in selected examples from film and the visual arts.