Parametric Regionalism

Philip Yuan , Founding Director of Shanghai-based firm Archi-Union Architects, applies parametric techniques to his design and research in China. Here he explains how Parametricism can provide a highly adaptive and open approach to architectural knowledge and spatial organisation, accommodating regional variations in culture and environment, through an emphasis on local climate, materials and craft traditions.     

Where to for Brazil's Cities? Citizen Empowerment or Global Marketing?

An awakening interest in public space in Brazilian cities is emphasising the value of existing civic areas. Guilherme Wisnik , a critic, curator and professor at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism of the University of São Paulo, looks at the history and potential future of Brazil's urban spaces. He highlights how despite the introduction of innovative Modernist design in the mid-20th century, which forged ‘a new relationship between architecture, urbanism and landscape design’, more recently the country's cities have been subject to the vicissitudes of market and political forces.     

No More Stopping

The dissolution of the conventional breaking points in the construction and completion phases of a building's delivery has blurred ‘the distinction between the production of design intent and the transmission of information’. Here Richard Garber , Director of the School of Architecture at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), advocates that architects should use this as an opportunity to widen their remit, gaining agency and with it responsibility and the financial rewards to practice. Here he draws from the examples of UNStudio, GLUCK+ and his own New-York based practice, GRO Architects.     

Actualising (Overlooked) Material Capacities

An emphasis on material synthesis is not without its pitfalls and challenges. Here Branko Kolarevic , Professor and Chair in Integrated Design at the University of Calgary Faculty of Environmental Design, alerts us to the dangers of overlooking materials' shifting capacities, which are so often scale dependent, while also disregarding existing materials in favour of the new or novel. As the potential grows for material systems in buildings to become more adaptive and to harness automation, Kolarevic describes some exciting developments that are taking place in dynamic facade design, providing the much-heralded promise of an efficient use of ambient energy.     

El Sur Global: Future Resilient City

Shifting the focus from futuristic visions, Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner with Alexis Kalagas of interdisciplinary design practice Urban-Think Tank urge us to ‘forget about utopia’, for in the most part the urban environment of 2050 is already built. Architects’ sights need to be set on the sometimes grim and unfolding reality of favelas and the world's informal cities.     

Prejudicial Narratives: Building Tomorrow's World Today

Film production requires world building: the power to visualise and bring to life narrative through a film's total environment. This is often entirely speculative, imagining alternative or future worlds. Here, Alex McDowell , acclaimed British production designer, producer and Professor at the University of Southern California (USC) describes his world-building, narrative approach to production design, which he consolidated in the Steven Spielberg film Minority Report (2002) that envisioned Washington DC in the year 2050. The possibilities of this storytelling technique are demonstrated by its transference into real-life projects, such as the immersive model that his production company, 5D GlobalStudio, developed for Al Baydha, a Bedouin village in Saudi Arabia.     

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.     

Design for the Future: Educational Institutions in the Gulf

Despite a distinguished heritage of learning in the Middle East, the expansion of provision for higher education is currently at an unprecedented scale. The Gulf States, in particular, are seeking to keep up with accelerated population growth and a demographic ‘youth bulge’. Guest-Editor Kevin Mitchell describes the architectural approaches employed in the design of institutions in the region from the first universities in Saudi Arabia to Foster + Partners's ground-breaking sustainable design for the Masdar Institute in Abu Dhabi and future projects.