Architecture Takes Time

Though condensed between the stages of design and completion, the conventional process of designing a building is time consuming, involving various stakeholders, planning processes and a wide team of consultants and contractors. What happens, though, if the time period of an architect's involvement is expanded? How might a more process-orientated approach shift the role of the architect? Tobias Armborst, Daniel D'Oca and Georgeen Theodore , principals of Interboro Partners in New York, describe how they have developed projects that have sought opportunities in expanding the timescale and remit of traditional practice.     

Drawing in Time: Processes of Design and Fabrication

Drawing embeds time within itself, notating changes in space and duration. For Babak Bryan and Henry Grosman , founding partners of BanG studio in Long Island City, New York: ‘The drawing is a result of process, but it also describes process.’ It is only through this temporal practice that an essential connection is developed between drawing and building. With the widespread adoption of building information modelling (BIM), linear graphic representation finds itself in crisis, challenged by the static inertia of the model. As Bryan and Grosman describe, the well-crafted drawing remains essential to their studio's approach informing the method of ‘making and remaking’.     

Fabrication Agency: Landesgartenschau Exhibition Hall

Advances in computation challenge established design approaches in architecture through a much deeper integration of form generation and materialisation. Tobias Schwinn , Research Associate at the Institute for Computational Design (ICD), University of Stuttgart, and Guest-Editor Achim Menges , Director of the ICD, introduce how the potentials and constraints of robotic fabrication can now be explored as generative drivers in agent-based design. This enables architectural innovation in unison with fabricability, structural capacity and spatial performance, as demonstrated by the Landesgartenschau Exhibition Hall in Schwäbisch Gmu"nd, Germany, the world's first building with a robotically fabricated segmented timber shell as its primary structure.     

In the Pursuit of Pleasure: The Not so Fleeting Life of the Pavilion and its Ilk

Author and architecture critic for the London Evening Standard, Robert Bevan reflects on the enduring appeal of the temporary structure, speaking ‘to a latent desire for freedom and movement’ as a hangover of our nomadic past in a sedentary ‘civilised’ society. He highlights the type's historical apex in Henry VIII's palatial pop-up on the Field of the Cloth of Gold, questioning the purpose and purposelessness of more recent examples.     

Renzo Piano: Poet of Technology

The architecture of the Renzo Piano Building Workshop (RPBW) is renowned internationally for the formal refinement of its components and detailing as well as for its sensitive responses to context, both in terms of its physical surroundings and local construction traditions. But, as architectural author and Piano specialist Peter Buchanan reminds us, the central concern of the practice remains focused on the original core impetus of expandingthe bounds of what technology and materials can achieve.     

大事件中的小建筑 解读2010年上海世博会英国馆

2010年上海世博会英国馆,作为大事件之下的小建筑,以"小"而获得了功能分化、技术简化、形式纯化以及建筑展品同构化等特征,并进一步催生相应的场地、表皮、图像以及概念,使它们紧密联系。建筑各部分,从形态到细部,从方案到施工都统一在连续的线索中。英国馆对于"小"的关注,实是对建筑自身问题的关注,这为中国大量且快速的建筑实践提供了启示。     

Iannis Xenakis:Architect of Light and Sound

Alessandra Capanna summarizes the life and work of Iannis Xenakis, who passed away on 4 February 2001.He was a musician, but above all he was a theorist and pure researcher who used mathematical thought as a basis for of his compositions. Because of this, his way of working more closely resembles that of a philosopher of science than that of an artist, whose instinctive creations are sometimes controlled only by aesthetical aims. he was also an architect. In 1956 Le Corbusier entrusted his sketches for the Philips Pavilion for the Brussels World’s Fair to Xenakis, who was charged to “translate them through mathematics”.     

文渊阁与四库全书

《四库全书》是清朝乾隆年间编纂的一部大型丛书。“文渊阁”为《四库全书》藏书处，规制最为壮观。文渊阁位于文华殿以北，阁前有一长方形水池。阁制面阔六间，前后出廊造。阁虽采用六间建制，但作为楼梯间的西梢间面阔仅一廊步深，其余五间仍明间坐中（见“文渊阁地盘图”）。这种变通形式在清代建筑中较为奇特。阁采用歇山式琉璃瓦顶，黑心绿剪边做法。文渊阁外观两层，内实三层。阁之梁架结构大体以《工程做法·九檩楼房大木》为准。但改硬山顶为歇山顶，于腰檐部位增设暗层，上檐金柱改为落地通柱。