The True Counterfeits of Banksy: Radical Walls of Complicity and Subversion

Tattoo or consummate object of consumption? Banksy's artwork has an uneasy status. It simultaneously has the power to subvert, questioning the conventions of the art world while potentially colluding with it. Eva Branscome explores the paradox of Banksy in the light of Post-Modernism. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Role of the Estates: From Agriculture to Urbiculture

Large swathes of London's West End remain under the ownership of the Great Estates, with the Grosvenor Estate (Duke of Westminster) owning much of Mayfair and the Cadogan family (Earl of Cadogan) much of Chelsea. Terry Farrell looks at how this long-term custodianship has impacted on the development of the fabric of the city and its strong sense of place. He explains how it is a model that he has tried to draw from in his own Earl's Court masterplan. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Back to the Future: The Everyday Built Environment in a Phase of Transition

Time is a crucial dimension in architecture, yet architectural education ignores it. While historical environments were able to evolve over centuries, the purist spirit that has prevailed since the advent of Modernism is at odds with the social dynamics of normal human life. John Habraken – a renowned architectural educator and writer both in the Netherlands and the US – examines the issues and argues for a more effective distribution of design control, showcasing recent projects in the Netherlands and Denmark that have achieved this.     

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.     

A Two-Speed Landscape: The Reforestation of the Thames Estuary

Tom Noonan describes how, for this award-winning project, he took up the pen and developed a hybrid drawing technique that exploited the benefits of both the analogue and the digital - characterised by the tactility of the hand and the precision of the computer. He explains that a preoccupation with representation was further ‘reflected and supported by the programme, narrative and language of the architecture’.     

The Living: Surface Tensions

‘Our work begins with the premise of a dynamic world. Political and cultural conditions change: what if the walls and windows morphed in response?’ New York-based team The Living, led by David Benjamin and Soo-in Yang, have developed a practice of deep, open-source interfaces of participation. Jordan Geiger describes how for The Living their home city and its environs is a site of evolving forms of public space whether on land, air or water. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Reading the Wind and Weather: The Meteorological Architecture of Studio Mumbai

Architectural writer and educator Kazi Ashraf likens the work of Studio Mumbai to that of a tree, in which landscape and architecture converge. As he explains, such a position is realised by a profound commitment to the act of building in which native materials are condensed into temporary structures. This requires due attention to the process of making, reflected in a workshop practice that incorporates craftsmen and artisans, and by necessity has to stand outside the conventional expectations for construction and economies of time.     

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.     

Diving into the Depth-Scape: Exuberance and Personalities

Exuberance is about more than appearance. Yael Reisner argues that it engenders an emotional response. It provides a whole ‘depth-scape’ of expression by offering extensive qualities that go beyond the merely practical or the required. Exuberance proffers a full emotional range from the horrific to the sublime, which requires complexity but also the presence of creative personalities who lend personal interpretation to the design process. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Taxonomy of Contemporary Chinese Cities (We Make Cities): A Sampling

Rem Koolhaas famously highlighted the uniformity of Chinese cities with his identification of ‘the generic city’ in the Pearl River Delta in the 1990s. Here Jiang Jun , Editor-in-Chief of Urban China magazine, and Kuang Xiaoming highlight the ‘unified diversity’ and complexity of contemporary urbanism through his own system of classification. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Pastoral Manoeuvres: Ecologies of City,Nature and Practice

In the 21st century, the greening of public open spaces has proved one of the most compelling marketing teasers, but also one of the biggest ‘elephants in the room’. Architect, educator and urban designer Duncan Berntsen describes how students within the School of Architecture, Design and Construction at the University of Greenwich were encouraged to tackle this by developing ‘measurable innovative disruptions’ that could contribute positively to an urban sense of place.     

The Persistence of the Pastoral

Architect, animator and educator Nic Clear challenges the contemporary notion of the pastoral to go beyond the simplistic binary opposites of the untainted rural idyll and the industrialised city. He explores how the narratives of the pastoral have provided a mainstay for science fiction and how this can be used to re-imagine nature itself with the aid of advanced biotechnologies to create new architectures for the 21st century.     

Architecture + Textiles = Architextiles

A hybrid term, ‘architextiles’ encompasses a wide range of projects and ways of thinking that unite architecture and textiles. By way of introduction to this issue, guest-editor Mark Garcia highlights the significant rise of interest in this confluence by theorists, architects, engineers, textile designers, materials scientists and artists. He also explains how, as a hybrid mode of design and practice, architextiles is better able to respond to society's fast-changing cultural and consumer demands, enabling the production of more dynamic, flexible, interactive, event and process-based spaces. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

London Short Stories: Drawing Narratives

Professor at the Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL) and a successful practitioner, CJ Lim has won international awards for his exquisite drawings, including the esteemed Royal Academy of Arts Grand Architecture Prize. Here CJ extols the virtue of narrative and signified meaning in buildings and describes his project London Short Stories that employs ‘real and imaginary sites as springboards for the imagination’. Often ‘immoral, licentious, anarchical and unscientific’, the short stories, which are three-dimensional creations constructed out of paper, are from ‘an aesthetic point of view, glorious, ravishing and a pleasure to behold’.     

Landschaft: Revisiting The Journey and Drive-In House

For visionary architect and founding member of Archigram Michael Webb , high definition has become a lifetime's pursuit. It represents the distillation and layering of material and meaning in ongoing works that explore the same theme over space and time. Here he discusses two projects – The Journey and the Drive-In House – which he commenced in 1977 and 1987, respectively, and that he continues to the present day; they express his essential preoccupations with his home landscape and the perfect contour of the car.     

Concrete Constructs: The Limits of Rationalism in Swiss Architecture

Ákos Moravánszky explains why for him ‘the traces of Mediterranean Rationalism in the new Swiss-German architecture are like the imitation stitching on the moulded plastic dashboard of a new car’. It is an influence which, despite the undeniable impact of Aldo Rossi and the Ticino School at ETH Zurich in the 1970s, remains skin-deep, sharing little with the present in terms of ideology or the interpretation of the historic past. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Ethics of the Imperative

The bald desire to innovate is not sufficient in itself. To go beyond mere technical invention and make a positive difference, innovation requires an engagement with overall ethical intent. Here, Guest-Editor Pia Ednie-Brown espouses a design ethos that values an open-ended approach to architectural innovation. She illustrates the ethical impact of implementing new technologies with two opposing paradigms – one dark and one affirmative – as exemplified by two classic films from 1968: 2001: A Space Odyssey and Barbarella.     

Cities and Grids: In Search of New Paradigms

The wider global influences of expanded populations, new technologies and economies in both Europe and the Far East are having a direct impact on the pattern and planning of urban form. Joan Busquets , the principal of B Arquitectura I Urbanisme (BAU) in Barcelona, and Professor in Practice of Urban Planning and Design at Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), describes how the urban grid is continuing to evolve with these changes, becoming ‘a matrix for innovation within urban development, allowing the creation of sustainable and compact cities’, enabling the forming of ‘new networks and innovative city systems’.     

CJ Lim/Studio 8 Architects: Through the Looking Glass

CJ Lim is one of architecture’s greatest illustrators, visualising through his beautiful and delicate drawings and models an enchanted world inspired by Lewis Carroll, William Heath Robinson and Chinese fables. Howard Watson describes how Lim is now breaking through the visionary’s glass ceiling with his realisation of a tunnel installation for the Victoria & Albert Museum in London and a project at an altogether different scale for an eco-city in China. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.